In a recent Psychology Today article, Andrea Bonier outlined what she calls the 5 minute rule.
It says that people who procrastinate (in fact everyone) should start a project they have been putting off for 5 minutes then stop.
As Andrea explains:
‘What can you get done in five minutes?
Five minutes’ more work than you would have done otherwise—and often the hardest part of all.
Yes, the central magic of the five-minute rule comes from the fact that often, for procrastinators, starting is the hardest part.
We’re scared of the big, amorphous blob of a task precisely because it is so big and ill-defined, and because we worry that it will take two hours or two days to get to the bottom of it. And so we wallow.
We don’t even open the envelope holding that bill we know we have to negotiate.
We don’t even unzip that suitcase we have to unpack.
We don’t even take two minutes to assess the piles we have to organize and figure out how many categories to sort them into.
But it’s those small openings and unzippings that in many ways are the biggest psychological barriers of all.
If you conquer them—and it’s probably doable in just a couple of minutes—and then force yourself to stop after just that incremental progress, your energy and momentum will have started to flow.
You might not even want to stop.
And—here is another reason the rule is so great—it will make you much more likely to come back to that task when you’re ready to give it another five minutes (or perhaps 10 or 20) in the next day or so.’
I agree — the 5 minute rule is a wonderful way to overcome the problem of just starting.
But there is another benefit.
In the Ideas Blitz process the first one is actually called Start.
And we start by trying to generate 9 ideas in 2 minutes.
I have found that not only does starting help overcome procrastination but it also unleashed your creativity.
Because people are so focussed on getting to 9 ideas in 2 minutes they do not listen to their (often) negative internal voice that filters and judges their ideas.
In this way they overcome what i believe is the biggest (initial) barrier to creativity — themselves.
So whether it is 5 minutes or 2 the message is the same.
If you want to make progress or create then you have to start.
and there is no time like the next few minutes!