The Five-Minute Workday
There’s different levels of procrastination. There’s your ordinary “I’ll do my taxes on April 14th” procrastination. Then there’s the more advanced stuff: you move to Montana, build yourself a hay-bale shack, and pray the IRS gives up on finding you after a few decades of not filing your taxes.
If you are edging towards the latter extreme, I need to share with you my best trick for breaking through the malaise. And this won’t be a long article. It can’t be! I don’t want to contribute to your procrastination, after all.
Step 1 — Identify the single most important task you need to complete. It will probably be something ghastly that involves Microsoft Excel or animal husbandry.
Step 2 — Agree with yourself that you will work on that task for five minutes. After those five excruciating minutes have elapsed, you give yourself permission to take the rest of the day off. “But I can’t take the rest of the day off,” you protest, “I’m at work!” Okay, okay, we’ll come back to that.
Step 3 — Do the five minutes of work. And then keep working as long as you feel like working after that, knowing that you have already earned a delightful, guilt-free escape from work you can take whenever you feel like.
You will probably keep working much longer than five minutes. You just needed that initial starting motion. That…
