Beating procrastination with the ‘5 minutes first’ rule

For those of us lucky enough to be in the comforts of our own home during this pandemic, we might have thought initially that ‘finally, I’ll have time to do everything I wanted to do’ only to be met with the greatest enemy of that aspiration: procrastination. In this short post I’m going to share with you one non-BS technique I’ve realised has worked wonders for me.

The problem

First, let’s describe the problem. You have your critical task — it might be starting on your side business or completing your uni work, and you’ve written it in your todo app. You’ve freed up time in your calendar. But when it’s time, you realise that you needed to reply to some emails. Then, you realised that there’s another small task you just want to get out of the way first. Before you know it, 4 hours have passed and you haven’t spent a single second on your critical task. By this time, you’re tired. You say to yourself ‘tomorrow, I’ll do it. today was me tying up some loose ends to clear my plate. But come tomorrow, the same story repeats. Bam, you are now in the land of procrastination. How can you escape?

The solution — the ‘5 minutes first’ rule

The technique is simple and non-obtrusive. No, you don’t need to do a reflection of your life principles and…