You Are 5 Minutes From Success

I hate having a cluttered office. In order to keep my desk a distraction free environment, I try to get things off it as quickly as possible. So naturally, this is where my kids deposit every random item they find in the house. At this very moment, the assorted piles threatening to bury my keyboard and hide my monitor include, among other things: stacks of unopened mail, at least three screwdriver sets, old photographs of the sort that materialize at the bottom of every junk drawer, books (never mind that there is a bookcase 6 inches from my desk), a receipt for a surprisingly expensive bike lock, and the ugliest stuffed gorilla I have ever seen, whom I have affectionately named, “Dr Zaius.”

I have allowed these things to accumulate here, however, for precisely the same reason my family dumped them there to begin with: I don’t want to take the time to make a place for them. I don’t want to bother with filing receipts or gathering photos and sticking them in my ever growing “need-to-digitize” box. And I certainly don’t have time to call Jane Goodall to arrange a habitat for Dr Zaius.

So, I did the only reasonable thing I could think to do; I hung a condemned sign on the door and retreated to the basement, far enough out of the way where it would be way too much trouble for the kids to dump stuff on the little table I was using as a workspace.

While this did solve the problem in the short-term, it did not address the fundamental issue. And the longer I let it languish, the higher the piles got until they were threatening to topple over and burry someone alive…. Namely, me. And the higher the piles got, the less I wanted to deal with it.

I tried putting up a screen, so I could ignore the mess, only occasionally glancing around the divider to see if the elves had come during the night and cleaned it up for me, but even they would not touch it. I finally accepted that if I was going to ever see my desk again, I was going to have to tackle it myself. Either that or wait for the stack to get high enough that I can plant a flag on the top, like Edmund Hillary summiting Everest for the first time. “I claim his mountain for Procrastination.”

The problem was it was too overwhelming a task. While I wanted the result of accomplishing the task, I didn’t actually want to do it; I wanted it to be done. So, I resolved on a strategy, and this is the point. Rather than summoning all my resources to tackle this momentous task, I simply set a timer for 5 minutes and dug in. And if after five minutes, I want to keep going, great. But if not, then I am free to stop and return for another 5-minute round later.

So, I waded in, distraction free for five minutes. I threw away a bunch of trash, started to reassemble the screwdriver sets, and perched Dr Zaius on the top of my monitor where he glowers down at me with a disapproving frown.

When the timer went off, I stopped. And even though it was only five minutes, it was an honest, focused five minutes. And I went to bed feeling like I had accomplished something. And I will repeat the process tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, until it is done. And little by little, I will whittle away at this overwhelming task.

I hope you can see where I’m going with this. I was able to then apply this exact some principle to a scene in The Knights Reborn. I had re-written half the scene, and then pasted in the version from an earlier draft, and the two no longer matched up, but there were things about it I liked and hoped to preserve. The problem is that it’s often harder to make two versions of the same scene mesh smoothly than to rewrite it from scratch. As a result, I had been putting off working on the revision entirely because I didn’t want to deal with that scene.

But, just like the mess on my desk, I set a timer and attacked it, and a crazy thing happened: because I knew that I only had 5 minutes to make something meaningful, all the naysaying voices in my head receded, and I was able to just work. But unlike the disaster on my desk, when this timer went off, I did not want to stop, because I was making good progress, and it was energizing rather than discouraging.

5 minutes is all it takes. You cannot write an entire book all at once; nobody can. But what you can do is simply write what’s in front of you for 5 minutes, and then 5 minutes more, and then 5 minutes after that until you accomplish what you set out to do.

So get to it! Take that thing you have been putting off, set a timer, and dig in. Forget your writer’s block. Forget your fear. Forget that little voice that’s telling you that you’re not good enough or that your story has gone off the rails. Sit down at the keyboard, close the browser, silence your phone, and just work for 5 minutes! You can do anything for five minutes.

Try it now and see what you find. You might just find yourself.

Now get to work!