The Five Minute Rule 🏛️

A little idea I’m workshopping around

When I was brainstorming topics for this newsletter a year ago, I wrote down an idea called “the five-minute rule.” 

At the time, I wrote that if it takes you more than five minutes to write down a process, then you’d benefit from breaking it down into smaller tasks.

I’m not sure what I meant when I wrote that down, and a year later, I’m not sure if I recommend the five-minute rule anymore. 

Why is that? 

Well, because the system I have in place now is lightyears ahead of what I had in place a year ago.

Ever since merging with Mercer to form our new business, and implementing the OPS system we use behind the scenes, my perspective has changed.

Adding a large number of granular tasks to a project sounds good in theory, but it will ultimately create more complexity in your business. 

The more individual tasks in place, the more to manage. The more notifications, the more digital noise, and the less signal you’ll see.

Eventually, you stop listening to the system, because the system becomes noisy and not useful. 

Think about it like the transition from film cameras to digital cameras. 

With film cameras, you need to be precise. Say you get 24 photos per roll. They all need to have meaning. 

With a digital camera, one memory card can produce tens of thousands of images. But most of them never see the light of day. 

There are numerous benefits to going digital, but one thing we always need to mitigate is the sheer amount of useless data it creates. 

Similar to how many companies create SOPs that collect dust and go to die on Google Drive as soon as they are “completed.”

The thing I’ve learned from working closely with Mercer is that systems are never complete. 

Once you view a system as complete, it means it is no longer open to feedback. 

And a system that is no longer open to feedback is like a lead brick that keeps you grounded. 

So the five-minute rule from a year ago has been replaced by another five-minute rule today.

Spend five minutes keeping your system up to date and using the system to make incremental improvements.

Use the system to improve the system. 

This is what we are teaching to our first group of ProfitSchool “Pioneers” starting in June. 

If you want to implement a better system into your business, and you have a team of less than 20, you might be a good fit. 

You can apply here.