The 5 Minute Rule

You may be thinking, what exactly is the five-minute rule? Five minutes for yourself? Five minutes away from work? Five minutes of thinking about emotional intelligence? Not quite, the five-minute rule comes into play when faced with a challenge. Let's begin by transporting ourselves to an imaginary office with a very work-heavy environment. As an example, you walk into your office to be greeted by a 50 page paper on your desk. Attached to the top is a sticky note and a letter from your boss requesting that you read and edit the paper by 3 p.m. You arrived at the office at 10 a.m. which gives you approximately five hours to do so. You’re stressed. Overwhelmed by the great amounts of work, procrastination slips your mind. You think of the other tasks you can complete which do not have deadlines but are significantly easier. Perhaps you go out to buy your coworkers coffee and designate some time for yourself before you start. Considering this challenging situation the five-minute rule comes into play. You make the right decision and turn to this tip to help assist you. The five-minute rule requires you to set a timer for 5 minutes. What you do during these 300 seconds, is force yourself to work on your task for 5 minutes straight allowing yourself to quit after those five minutes are over. Considering the short period of time, your brain will shift all of its focus to the designated task. Knowing that you can quit right after will motivate you to get as much done in the time frame. What usually happens once those five minutes are over is you build a consistent working streak motivating yourself to continue making progress. This trick can not only help you get started, which may be one of the most challenging hurdles to cross but also influence you to continue to work on your task and avoid procrastination.