Some time ago, I used to use a 15 minutes in the morning ritual to start the day with a partner. The first 15 minutes were a sacred commitment to make progress on Big Hairy Projects; if we couldn't carve a mere 15 minutes for ourselves, who were we kidding? We might as well give up on our dreams. This was often enough of a kick in the pants to commit.
Lately, I've been doing something even shorter: Five Minute Sprints in my coworking Discord. When I'm feeling particularly listless in the early afternoon, I'll announce that I'll be hosting in our Noisy Workalong chat room and invite others to join me. The commitment is similar but even lower commitment than the 15-minute version. They've been very helpful to me rebuilding my blogging infrastructure after dumping Wordpress.
So why do five minute sprints work?
I think it's a combination of not being alone (a form of body doubling) and shared commitment to do something...really ANYTHING...to just get a bit of momentum. The tiny scope makes it a lot easier to imagine, and the five minute time limit doesn't feel like a daunting amount of time. When looking at a Big Hairy Project, it's easy to fall into spiraling confusion about what to do first and what is most important. That doesn't matter for a five minute sprint.
I think a prerequisite is that there has to be at least one friendly person who's experienced in emergent process discovery, the experimental attitutde that I try to cultivate in the Discord community. This person can suggest how to approach things by declaring what tiny five-minute thing they want to do. A few good easy ones are:
- find something you need
- read the first paragraph of something
- make a pile or organize a pile
- write a sentence
While it's easy to imagine the big deliverable of a Big Hairy Project, it's much harder to see the steps at the very beginning. For people who are used to seeking a pre-existing recipe to follow or ladder to climb, the experience of taking a step, then seeing what else you can see is often new. It's easy to find recipes for small problems, but when pursuing a Big Hairy Project there is often no recipe that is uniquely tuned to yourself. Experimentation and scouting is necessary! Perhaps the Five Minute Sprint is a nice way to ease people nto that kind of thinking.
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