Changing my world, five minutes at a time

Life is becoming more complicated by the minute. More often than not, life gets in the way of living life, if that makes sense at all. I have a full-time job, a part-time job, a family, and a long-ago abandoned list of hobbies. Sometimes I feel as if I’m running in circles. There are mornings that I’m lucky to leave the house with my hair combed.

I’ve got a list of things that I want to do, but I can’t get to them for one reason or another. Cleaning my oven, reorganizing my closet, finishing my daughter’s baby book. So I’ve decided to tackle these things, one project at a time, five minutes at a time.

Five minutes? I know, it might sound crazy, but sometimes five minutes is all I’ve got. Plus, I’m a little like a crocodile (or is it an alligator?). I have short bursts of focused energy, and if I put them to good use, I think I could get a lot done.

To keep me honest, I’m going to try to revive my blog and document my progress. I hope you’ll follow along.

Oh – I almost forgot – I gave myself a few rules.

1. Five minutes only. For the first few weeks, I’m going to time myself when I start a task, just to see how much I get done in the alloted time. I don’t want to write about how I cleaned my refrigerator in no time when it was really an hour and a half.

2. Multiple fives are allowed. I might try to do a couple of things a day, but I’ll limit each task to five minutes.

3. Five-minute blog. The writing should take five minutes too. The purpose of this is for me to get organized and feel like I have some time back – I can’t spend the whole night writing a blog. To help with that, I did invest $2.99 in BlogPress for my iPhone. I won’t be able to spend more than five minutes typing on that little keyboard.

So, wish me luck, and I’ll stay in touch.

15 thoughts on “Changing my world, five minutes at a time”

Reblogged this on DivaScript and commented:

Happy Thursday! Today, I’m revisiting a post from a few years back. I was overwhelmed, buried under a demanding job, family needs, and undone chores. This was my pledge to take control. It helped. A lot. I think I’ll be revisiting this idea during the summer. Shifting camp schedules, vacations, and a promotion (heck yeah!) could be a recipe for overload.

what a great idea! i have an 8 month old and so i KNOW what it's like to try and cram things into short increments of time. yikes! 😉

I want to follow you just to see how this turns out! Congrats on your SITS Day 🙂

Hmm… that's not a bad idea at all! I might have to give it a try myself.

I love this technique, especially with tasks I've been avoiding.

Really great plan. How is it going? I would love to know!!!

OK, now this is good! I am going to check out your progress 5-minutes posts, but I can tell this is something I need to implement in my life beyond exercise. That's how I started exercising – 5 minutes at a time so I could at least be doing something!

This is one of the ways I'm trying to implement to help defeat procrastination. I find if I actually sit down and start, I'll often just keep going!

This sounds like such a great idea – I love it!

This is very inspirational and might I add as a writer this would make a great book (including the title). I'm sure many mums in particular would buy it!Happy SITS day again 🙂

Sounds like a good plan. Sometimes I make little deals with myself – for example, if I spend 15 minutes cleaning then I get to sit down and read a book or spend some time on the computer. Or, I'll set the timer for 10-15 minutes and the kids and I will race around doing as much tidying up as we can before the timer goes off.Found my way over from SITS – nice to meet you!

This sounds like a plan that we could all use. My daughter has 3 young ones and so many things that she would love to do also. I will be telling her about your idea and sending her your link.Thanks for sharing your plan and allowing us to follow along.

remember to take a few minutes to just breath. Sometimes that is what we really need to do to keep our head straight.Good luck with the blog!

I do something simliar! I realized how much I could REALLY actually get done in 30 min with the "focused energy" (and napping babies- let's be real). My problem is, having crazy bad ADD, I get way side tracked by more interesting things mid cleaning. Or even just things I feel like I NEED to do before I forget. So now I set the timer for thirty minutes and won't stop cleaning until it beeps. I also don't allow myself to do anything BUT clean… period. And if I feel like I need to do something I just right it down and do it after the timer. I can get done in that 30 minutes what takes me normally all day!