STOP Using The 5 Minute Rule!
The 5 minute rule is a really popular productivity tip to help with procrastination and resistance. The rule is actually counterproductive however, and by the end of this video you'll know why and more importantly, what to try instead.
Watch the video below or read on for the full transcript.
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Helping my clients navigate the sea of productivity hacks is one of my most important jobs as a coach. Now it's your turn, so let's get started.
So first of all, what is the 5 minute rule? The 5 minute rule is simply telling yourself, "I'm just going to do five minutes." You set a timer for five minutes. You start the task you've been dreading, resisting, or procrastinating on, and you can stop after five minutes.
The catch, however, is that the theory behind this is that you will want to keep going after five minutes. You say you can just do five minutes. You tell yourself, "I'll just do five minutes," but secretly, you're hoping and expecting yourself to do more than five minutes (and I bet much more than five minutes).
Many of the proponents of the 5 minute rule will tell you that it's really important to let yourself stop after five minutes if you don't wanna keep going. The trouble is that's not how it gets used in practice. So let's dive into why exactly the 5 minute rule can be so counterproductive, if not downright harmful.
The reason why the 5 minute rule (in the way it tends to get practiced), is so bad is because it's a form of self-manipulation. You're telling yourself you'll do one thing, "Work for five minutes. Just five minutes." But secretly, you're expecting yourself to do much more than five minutes, and that's where the self-manipulation comes in.
You could even take it a step further and say that this type of self-manipulation is a form of gaslighting yourself. I talked a lot more about what gaslighting is and what it looks like in this post, so definitely check that out next. But long story short, gaslighting is a disconnect between your actual lived and felt experience and the things you or others tell you your lived and felt experience is. So for example, if you're outside and it's freezing and you're really cold, but someone tells you, "No, you're not cold. It's really hot out," that's gaslighting. No bueno.
So in the case of the 5 minute rule, telling yourself, "I'll just do five minutes," is a form of gaslighting because that's not true. You are imposing that on yourself, when in reality, you are expecting and wanting yourself to do more than five minutes, if not much more than five minutes.
Unfortunately, for those of us with a history of trauma, with a history of abuse in our lives, especially trauma and abuse that happened in our childhoods, we have a tendency to treat ourselves in adulthood the way the adults around us treated us when we were children. So if we come back around to the 5 minute rule itself, when it's used as a trick to get us to do more work than just five minutes, that is manipulative and abusive.
We are hurting ourselves when we do that.
And not only is that of itself an awful thing to do to ourselves, but over the long-term, it really degrades our ability to trust ourselves, to believe ourselves, to see our lived and felt experience for what it is without any sort of judgment or gaslighting on top of it.
One of the biggest why's behind the coaching that I do is to help my clients develop unconditional self-trust. So they can not only really feel and understand what they're experiencing and what they want versus what they don't want, but then they can have the confidence to make decisions based on those lived and felt experiences.
It's my theory that a lot of procrastination (because it is an emotional thing, procrastination and resistance), it's my theory that most people's procrastination and resistance is wrapped up in some form of this self-manipulation and gaslighting. No matter who you've talked to, procrastination and resistance, when it's not an executive dysfunction problem like for those with ADHD, most people agree that it's based in emotions. There is a fear of doing things wrong. There could be a fear of success. Long story short, it tends to be fear of not living up to expectations, fear of not being able to do the thing. There's a lot of fear and anxiety wrapped up in procrastination and resistance.
And if you have a history of being told to do one thing, and yet the unspoken rule is that you're supposed to do something else, of course, you're going to be afraid and anxious of the things you or other people are asking you to do. There's a constant fear or hypervigilance of, "When's the other shoe gonna drop?" And it's one thing to try to learn and heal from that in relationship with others. But when you yourself are the person who is manipulating you, who is gaslighting you, we're not aware of it. It is subconscious programming. That doesn't make it any less harmful.
It's not easy to fix this. This takes time and effort, and often support from a trusted friend or mentor, but it's so worth it. So if you're one of the people who just thinks you're too smart for productivity tricks or hacks or that kind of stuff 'cause you outthink it, it's not that you're outthinking it. It is likely that there is a disconnect between your lived and felt experience, what you want to expect of yourself, from what you actually subconsciously expect of yourself. And that self-manipulative gaslighting disconnect is what causes a lot of problems.
If this is your first time learning about self-manipulation in productivity tips and it made you have an aha moment about how you've been treating yourself, drop an "OOF" in the comments below.
So now that you understand why the 5 minute rule can be really harmful, what the root of that problem is, what do you do about it?
The first thing is to start transitioning and focusing on not manipulating or gaslighting yourself. Instead of the arbitrary five minutes, you just want to aim for a period of time to start the thing that you've been avoiding, resisting, or procrastinating, an amount of time that feels like a gentle and doable challenge.
Now that will be a different amount of time for everybody. For some people, it will be an hour just because their muscle to trust themselves is stronger. I recommend starting at 30 minutes and then knocking it back 5 minutes until you feel your body just kind of sigh. Because your body's like, "That's doable. That is possible. That is okay." And often, for myself and for my clients, it's either 15 minutes, 10 minutes, or 5 minutes. One of those three tends to be a sweet spot for most people.
But again, the point is to pick an amount of time that is a gentle and doable challenge that your body and nervous system viscerally goes, "That's doable."
Your brain might have the thought, "That's not enough to be worth anything," but that's often a sign that you have landed on the right amount of time to start.
The next thing you do is decide that you will do up to two of those chunks of time. That's it. So those of you that are familiar with the Pomodoro method, you basically take your gentle doable challenge of time and then you add a five minute break after that, and then you repeat that double chunk again. So for example, if your gentle doable challenge is 15 minutes, you would do 15 minutes, the timer would go off, you would take a 5 minute break, and then you would do 15 minutes again and take another 5 minute break.
The key when using this tool set that I'm talking about to help you overcome resistance and procrastination, you need to be really clear with yourself how many of those Pomodoros you want to aim for. I often say the more resistance you're struggling with you say, "Okay, I will allow up to two Pomodoros. No more."
The key, however, is that after you do the first Pomodoro (so again, we'll use the example of 15 minutes of working, 5 minute break), after your first 15 minutes of working, during your 5 minute break, you reevaluate, "Was that too much for me? Am I willing to tolerate going again? Or would that be too much for me right now?" You genuinely lean into what your lived and felt experience is. Because sometimes the first 15 minutes was not only enough, but enough that you can't go again and that's okay. Other times, we'll be like, "Yeah, I think it's okay. It feels safe. It feels doable for me to go again."
But then here's the key, either after that first Pomodoro (if you've discovered that that's enough for you for today), or when you finish the second one, you stop. You do not keep going. You need to abide by the boundaries you set beforehand.
Boundaries aren't just important in relationship with other people. They are crucial in relationship with yourself. Because if you aren't capable of establishing and enforcing boundaries with yourself, you're definitely not gonna be able to have boundaries with other people, but you're also gonna struggle with self-trust, self-esteem, self-confidence, all of those things. Boundaries with yourself are crucial.
And making sure that you are setting up a really clearly defined boundary for this exercise is crucial to help you start building that self-trust, so you no longer have to trick or hack your way, or manipulate and gaslight yourself into doing things that you've been avoiding.
So to repeat that, you pick a chunk of time that feels a hundred percent doable for you. For most people, that's either 5, 10, or 15 minutes. Your body will tell you if it's doable because your brain will probably say, "That's not enough." That's your key that it's the perfect amount of time. And then to practice boundary setting, you say, "Okay, I will allow up to two Pomodoros of that timeframe. But if after the first I don't have the capacity to continue, I will stop. And if I am able to continue into a second, I will stop no matter what."
It's going to feel counterintuitive to be emphasizing stopping early just as much as you are trying to get yourself to start in the first place, but I cannot communicate to you strongly enough how much both of those are equally important. You're trying to build a muscle to start, but you also need to build that trust with yourself that you will stop.
Because if you don't have that stopping muscle, starting is going to feel like you have to do everything, everything, and there is no end in sight, and that's only gonna increase your resistance.
Now you know why the 5 minute rule is not only counterproductive, but harmful as well and what to do instead. For those of you who have been around awhile, you know this is usually the part where I recommend people sign up for my free masterclass to help you kick procrastination and resistance to the curb. While that's still available and can be found at this link, I am excited to share that my new course will be starting mid-January and I'm now accepting applications!
This 8-week life course is designed to have all of the tools, support, and structure spoonies need in order to spend their precious time and energy the way they would like to, so they can finally achieve their potential and thrive. I wanna give you a quick tour of kind of who I help and the transformation that I want this course to provide for everyone. So let's take a look at flow chart, shall we?
I help spoonies. So that's anyone who has reduced ability, energy, capacity and/or usable hours each day due to things such as chronic illness, chronic pain, disability, invisible disability, mental health issues, trauma, and/or neurodivergence. So basically if you're not able-bodied and you're not neurotypical or perfectly mentally healthy, you qualify as a spoonie in my book.
And the people who tend to be drawn to me and the people I feel driven to help the most have a lot going on. They're afraid of living an empty life. They're afraid of being a burden. They're afraid of having a painful life and they feel hopeless. And, you know, they're afraid of not having control; of being at the mercy of everything else in their life, particularly their chronic issues (whatever they happen to be).
And I relate to this on such a deep level because that's where I was about five years ago. And like I talked about in this post, getting myself out of that on my own was so, so hard. And I don't want anybody to have to do that on their own, let alone take so long to climb out of it. That's why I'm here. That's why I do everything that I do. So with my coaching, but particularly with my course, I want to give my clients the tools, support, and structure that they need to finally start having some control over themselves and their behaviors, the ability to count on themselves unconditionally. I want them to be able to be seen and understood without having to explain themselves or defend themselves. And I want them to transition to a life of ease.
So while they may still be struggling with whatever their chronic issues are, they have a level of control and management over it and how they react to those things, so that way they can live their life purposefully.
Which brings me to the dream, right? I want the people who I help to finally achieve their potential in life, help them achieve their goals, help them thrive (not just survive or get by). They can do what they're meant to do with their precious time on this planet. They can help people. They can serve. They can contribute.
And I cannot tell you how meaningful it has been for me over the past five years to transition from someone who constantly feels like a burden, who is worthless, and deserves nothing good in their life, to someone who... I get to help people. And I can't tell you how meaningful it is every time I get a comment or a message or an email from someone who says, "I feel seen and you have helped me so much." And I want to help spoonies get to that place for themselves.
And if you're worried at all about how much the course will cost you, please don't, because I've got a sliding scale for it. It is really important to me that my course be as accessible as possible.
I can't wait to read your applications. And for those of you who have been supporting me, thank you so, so much. I couldn't do this without you.
Check out this post next to learn more about gaslighting.
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I'll be back next week with another video. You heard that right. See you next Tuesday! Bye.