FIVE MINUTES WILL MAKE YOU HUNGRY FOR MORE

On a recent Escape Pod call, we got talking about resisting the all of nothing approach to doing a thing.

Specifically, if you’re burning out at work, you don’t need to rage quit. Instead, rest for five minutes. That small dose of rest won’t fix everything, but as my guest brought up, if you do it for five minutes, you’ll want more.

Once we start down the road of “hey, this feels nice,” we start to make time for the thing that feels nice.

When I’m frustrated with something on the computer, I go for a five minute walk. And that five minutes usually turns into ten, which is ten good minutes away from the screen. Those ten minutes won’t get me to a 10 mile run, but they’re 10 minutes that’ll get me there eventually.

Think about how you could spend five (or 10) minutes on the thing you’d rather be doing. Again, it might not be the final version of the big thing you’d rather be doing, but what are the smaller bits and pieces you could do instead? What actions, even for just five minutes, help build the foundation of the thing you want?