Nothing on your to-do list should take more than 5 minutes!

There are lots of things that I’ve done that I’ve wanted to put on the internet so that the next person who searches for it can save some time.  These updates would take less than 5 minutes, but I never had the site set up.  I’ve had the gangstead.com domain for a few years, mostly so that I could have my sweet @gangstead.com email.  I’ve also used it for a wedding page and my wife’s teacher page that serves as an introduction to her philosophy on education and a resume.

So I’ve set up blogs before and the word press blogs aren’t hard to do, thanks to their Famous 5-Minute Install.  Everyone has their mental hang ups, those things that would be easy to do but you wait around way too long to do them.  I was inspired to finally start the blog I’ve been thinking about for more than a year by a pile of T-Shirts.  They’ve been washed and laid out in a nice stack on the living room floor for 5 days now.  If anyone had come over I would have been embarrassed.  I finally put them away and it too less than 5 minutes and I was trying to figure out why I waited so long.  I’ve been working a lot of hours this week, and I’m tired when I come home, but I wasn’t in bed 5 minutes later.  Everyone wastes more than 5 minutes every day, we all waste hours.  Don’t lie to yourself, there are hours of stuff you did yesterday that you shouldn’t have done/ didn’t need to do/ have nothing to show for.

So I put away the shirts.  I did the 5 minute install.  I don’t know where to start the timer to get those exact 5 minutes, but it’s brief nonetheless.  Now I can go out and do stuff to put on the blog and be part of web 2.0. If something takes less than 5 minutes don’t write it down, don’t try to ignore it away, don’t worry about who should be doing it.  Just get it over with and never worry about it again.

On a related note, don’t have anything on your Amazon wish list that costs less than $5.  I’ve had this book on my list for almost a year.  It’s only going to be an average book, but I’ve read the 3 before that and I want to finish out the series.  I don’t know who I expected to get me a $2.50 book for a gift.  I bought it just now because I’m not going to dawdle on 5-minute tasks or $5-purchases any more.  I’m going to get on to bigger tasks and more expensive things and dawdle on them instead.