five more minutes

The alarm clock goes off, signaling a day of busyness that's about to begin. In your grogginess, you reach for the offending machine, hit the snooze button and enjoy five more minutes of escaping reality.

Today, I thought about what would happen if we changed our "five more minutes" snooze mentality. Instead of something that will feed our laziness, maybe we can think about 5 More Minutes as a test of our resolve and as a tool towards single-mindedness and hopefully improved productivity. This is a habit that many successful ones already have, but like many others, I struggle with it. Hence, this effort at a little shift in perspective. I hope it helps :)

Thanks to the brownie test, I've become quite addicted to testing my determination. The latest episode happened at work during a relatively light day. I was tempted to go on Facebook quite frequently. One time, I glanced upon the clock and instantly thought, "Wait, I'll test myself. I'll go on Facebook in 30 minutes." After 30 minutes, I got on the site but thought to myself, "No, five more minutes". And I've been giving myself five more minutes, and yet even five more minutes. After giving so many five minute sets, it started to seem silly to not go full throttle and just give it 30 more minutes, or (gasp!) an hour. In the process, I was freeing up time for myself to do work and little errands for myself. Bonus: I wasn't thinking about Facebook that frequently anymore, and I wasn't cluttering up my friends' feeds!
 
I couldn't help but think that maybe redefining the "five more minutes" snooze mentality to 5 More Minutes of hitting the snooze button on the unimportant is the way to go. It's like a strength-building exercise. Imagine yourself hitting a snooze button every time you're tempted or distracted, the 5 More Minutes won't hurt. Try it and let's build our anti-distraction muscle together!