Becoming more productive is a major goal for most information workers. For this purpose, many methods have been proposed by productivity “gurus”. These methods include the well known GTD.

The reason why many of these methods don’t work is that they impose a lot of structure that helps, but that also can make life even more boring.

I think that many of these methods are overkill, so I use a simple technique that I believe is more effective. It is what I call the 5 min technique.

The first step is to classify tasks in order of importance. Your most important projects should come first. However, you shouldn’t spend too much time doing this, as you will see.

The core of the technique is to allot five minutes to work on one of your most important projects, while trying to do the most amount of work during that period.

While some people will think that the intervals of five minutes are insufficient to achieve anything useful, there are several advantages of doing this:

• Anyone can take five minutes of their time to do something. It is the same time it take to get a cup of coffee of use the restroom. However, if you use this time to do something of importance, if will add up.
• It gives you a starting point. If you started with five minutes, you could just as well work for more 10 or 30 minutes. It depends on your current schedule. Even if you can’t continue, you did something of high priority.

Using the 5 min technique is easy, and is addictive. With time, you will be continuously thinking about how to spend your next five minutes, and that is a good frame of mind. And if you don’t have a list of priorities, then you can just start now, by taking five minutes to list your most important projects and tasks.

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