Today’s been one of those days where the thought of any more effort makes me cringe. I slept poorly, if at all, last night. At dawn, I walked our dog through the neighborhood, and once she and I returned home, I spent the next 2 or so hours watering the extensive garden beds while it was still cool and overcast. After nearly a month of sunny heat without rain, our vegetables and flowers insist on their weekly refreshments; though I was tired, I obliged.
My body tells me I am done. Done with work, done with effort. My mind scoffs. I have an article to write, another to edit. A letter to reply to. A canvas to paint.
Today, my reluctance to begin — anything — is due mainly to this exhaustion. Yet, on other days, there are sometimes projects I’m just as loath to spearhead, but for different reasons: the task is monotonous; the workload is overbearing; I’d rather be fill-in-the-blank.
Do you ever feel that way when you should be writing?
I do, now and then. And about revising, or editing. These are activities I want and need to pursue with interest and excitement. There are times, though, when thoughts of sitting at my keyboard to type, or gripping a pen on blank notebook paper (or even assembling water, paints, and brushes at my studio worktable) fill me with a crawling dread.
But look— here I am, writing to you, my dear readers. How did I do it? The 5-minute Fix!
When you're feeling too lethargic, irritated, frazzled, frustrated, tired, bored, overwhelmed, or even just lazy, but there’s something you know you must get done, anyway, you must understand that overcoming the block just requires you to get started.
But I don’t WANT to! I can hear you whining.
Right. But the reason you don’t want to is because you’re probably looking at the “bigger picture” and then becoming daunted by that overview. You do, of course, need to see where the map leads, but once you’ve got the aerial outlook of a project or task, it’s more helpful to zoom back in to the starting point and designate a short-distance goal.
5 minutes. Head off from the/a starting point with the promise to yourself that you’ll go as far as 5 minutes takes you, and no more — unless you decide when you get there that you want to go another 5 minutes. You can stop any time after you’ve accomplished 5-minutes-worth of the work before you.
You can accomplish a lot in 5 minutes; you can write a paragraph or 2. You can revise a stanza. You can read through a couple of poems. You can prime a small canvas, or paint a flower. You can sew a sleeve, whip up some ranch dip, weed a couple square feet of garden plot, answer a homework question (or 3), wash up a small batch of dishes, or nail a few boards together. All kinds of chores can be tackled with a 5-minute fix.
If you really must escape after your “fix” is up, go ahead. You have permission. Go do something else, and then come back to your unfinished task knowing you can set another 5-minute fix. And another. After several of these sessions, you’ll be a lot farther ahead than you were when you were moaning and resisting getting started at all.
But here’s the best part of the 5-minute fix:
Very often, once you’ve begun, when you get past the first 5 minutes, you will either feel encouraged to work another 5, 10, 15 or more minutes before stopping, or else you will become immersed in your activity and forget to stop. You may even finish your task in that session, perhaps in a short time, and wonder why it was so hard to get started or why you dreaded it so.
I use this “fix” whenever I need a kickstart. I used it today to write this blogpost. As it turns out, I did not stop after 5 minutes and instead wrote the first draft all the way through, before taking a break to review and revise.
My brother, Mike — a smart guy, that one — gave this 5-minute-fix tip, over 30 years ago, to one of my art-school buddies, who was having trouble getting her homework done. She tried his advice and was able to raise her grades after that. The moment I heard his advice to her, I knew it was a great motivational technique, and that I would try it out, too. I’ve never forgotten Mike’s tip and its power to encourage and inspire. Now, I’m passing it along to you.