5 minutes
Is 5 minutes the most misunderstood unit of time in the world?
When I thought that I could write my first blog post in less than 5 minutes I joined (again) the masses of people who think that you can cram ‘that task’ into the black hole of time units “5 minutes”. And is it irony that what I wanted to write about was that very same unit of time?
If you want to do something and you don’t have the time for it, you tell yourself you can do it in 5 minutes…. and it ends up taking 2 hours.
If your car breaks down and you take it to the mechanic, you tell yourself that the mechanic can fix it in 5 minutes … it ends up taking 2 weeks and costing $1950.
If you are having a good time, 5 minutes feels like seconds, doing something you hate… 5 minutes is an eternity.
So if your involved in estimating work either for a client or as part of a production team or for managing the tasks in your own day, I reckon understanding what can be done in 5 minutes is the “learning to walk the rice paper” of the working world.
Understand what can be squeezed into 5 minutes and you’re on your way to planning nirvana.
So here’s a game to try out that will give yourself a better understanding of “5 minutes”
- Pick 3 tasks that you have to do today that you think will take 5 minutes
- Do the tasks and time how long they actually took
- You have 30 points to start with
- for each task that took longer than 5 minutes subtract 2 points per minute from your original 30 points.
- For each task that took less than 5 minutes subtract 1 point
- if you still have 30 points – you are the kung fu master of time, 20-30 nice one! 0-20 not too bad huh! Into the minuses… hey practice estimating more, it can’t hurt!
Feel free to post your scores as comments on this post.
