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On Five Minutes

· 3 min read
Gabriele Bruno Franco

I've always struggled with procrastination. I perform at my best when there's clear deadlines and clear consequences for missing them. I also find it much easier to do anything for someone that's not myself.

  • Help my flatmate run some errands? Easy
  • Clean up my room? Hard
  • Help a friend spin up a personal website? Easy
  • Write a blog post for my own website? Hard
  • We need to update prod by tomorrow? Easy (hopefully)
  • I need to complete this task within three months? Hard

I don't think that a silver bullet that deals with every task that I would categorize as 'Hard' exists. I do think though, that I found a decent enough way of dealing with the "annoying without big consequences" category.

The five minute rule(s)​

Nowadays whenever someone talks about the "Five Minutes Rule", usually what they mean is a technique to get over the inertia of not doing something annoying/boring:

Do something for 5 minutes, if it's that horrible stop, otherwise keep going

I think this is a fine way of getting yourself to start an activity, but what I refer to whenever I talk about the "Five Minutes Rule" is the computer science rule of thumb about memory and disk storage:

Data referenced every five minutes should be memory resident

I apply this technique multiple times a week, in two different ways. The obvious one is "write to storage" (which generally means put in Google Calendar) what shouldn't be in memory. The other one is "compute" immediately whatever takes less than five minutes, in order to free my memory and avoid writing it to storage at the same time.

  • Need to fix the oven handle? It will probably take more than 5 minutes. Storage
  • Call the restaurant for next monday? It's probably less than 2 or 3 minutes total. Compute
  • Next week is my friend's birthday, I should really wish her a happy birthday at least. Storage

In this way I do very small/annoying things frequently, avoiding the need to remember them. At the same time bigger things are scheduled whenever I decide to put them in my storage and thanks to this I generally avoid postponing them indefinitely. This rule probably won't transform your life, but I do believe that many times the effort of having to remember to do some particular activity for a long period of time is greater than the effort do that very thing.