My coworker's 5-minute rule saved my whole Tuesday afternoon

I was drowning in a project that kept breaking and my lunch break got eaten by a conference call. Then my coworker Dana said, "Set a timer for 5 minutes and just fix one tiny thing, then stop." I did that between meetings and it turned out the whole issue was one bad formula hiding in a spreadsheet cell. After I fixed it, the rest of my tasks fell into place and I actually left on time. Has anyone else tried a mini-timer trick to break out of a stuck feeling at work?

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ray_carr26d agoTop Commenter

It reminds me of how people say you should just clean one drawer when the whole house feels like a mess. Once you get that one small win, your brain stops feeling so heavy and the next step doesn't look so scary. The trick is that the tiny task is never really about the task itself, it's about breaking the spell of being overwhelmed. Dana probably didn't invent anything new, but she handed you a way to trick your own mind into moving again. Most of the time that first tiny move is the hardest part of any job.