It’ll Only Take Five Minutes
Why do days filled with quick, easy tasks leave us feeling as though we've achieved nothing? In this episode, we explore the psychology of the "five-minute job": the seemingly trivial administrative tasks that can consume entire days.
Starting with Nick's frustration at Mondays disappearing into emails, shopping, backups and life admin, the discussion uncovers why knowledge work is uniquely vulnerable to interruption, why context switching is so mentally expensive, and why maintenance work rarely feels satisfying, even when it's essential.
Along the way, we discuss cognitive psychology, productivity research, organisational behaviour and personal working styles, and ask whether we can ever learn to stop worrying and love the five-minute task.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast brought to you by Aleph Insights and produced by me, Fraser McGruer. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. On this podcast we look at a wide range of topics from an analytical viewpoint.
And today we're discussing Five Minute jobs. Nick, what's on your mind?
Speaker B:Yeah, well, I've got a bit of a problem with Mondays and I'm just going to moan about Mondays.
Speaker A:Okay?
Speaker B:And it's this. It's this paradoxical statement that I can never get anything done on Mondays because I have so much to do.
And let me get ready for some riveting content. I'm going to tell you what I did on Monday.
Speaker A:Oh, brilliant.
Speaker B:Right? It's really.
So I cleared my personal work email inboxes, which are slightly inflated by the weekend, snooze things that I wasn't going to deal with now replied to a load of emails. Check my spam folders. I do that every Monday to find out if there's anything in there that isn't actually spam.
I've been away at the weekend and was too tired to unpack the night before, so I unpacked my bag. I emptied the dishwasher. I made tea and coffee several times. I had to check ebay in case there were any messages about stuff that I was selling.
I managed to read one chapter of a book that I've been trying to read, which is online and if I don't set aside time, it'll never happen. I checked that my daily backups are working properly, which is something I do once a month.
I also had to make a shopping list, go shopping and cook dinner for the family. I scanned a letter from a distant relative and emailed it to my mum. I transferred some data about my weight from a piece of paper into a spreadsheet.
I did the ironing. I cleared my physical in tray of stuff that needed dealing with.
We had a weekly directors meeting and our look ahead meeting assigned a couple of forms. I arranged some meetings and basically that was it.
That's all I did all day was things that I needed to get out of the way so I could get on with stuff. And so the whole day was five minute jobs and lo and behold, at the end of it I was knackered and there was no way I was going to get anything done.
And you might say, but it sounds like you did loads, but no, I didn't because I'm. No, I feel at the end of that that I'm no, further forward.
And that the only way you can actually get anything actually done is to not stop doing things. You've got to stop doing five minute tasks.
But the problem is if you do that for 10 minutes, suddenly there's a load more of the bloody things by the time you get back. So there you go. That's the, that's the Monday problem, is the five. The tyranny of the five minute task.
I'll just get this out of the way and then I can get on with something meaningful. But you never do, right. You never get to that point.
Speaker A:A few things seem are occurring to me here. First of all, it strikes me. Yeah.
That when you add five minutes to another five minutes and more five minutes before, lo and behold, it's not five minutes anymore. You know, math comes into play. Right?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah. And a lot of these.
Speaker B:Yeah. If you multiply five minutes by some number, it gets into a lot. Big number.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker A:And the other thing is that five times bigger number.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker A:It turn. It sounds like a lot of these five minute tasks. It's about getting stuff done that kind of needs to be done.
But is it really the thing that needs to be done? Right. And I feel some frustration now. I sensing frustration.
But the third thing is from my personal perspective, I think you should be writing books about productivity. From what you've just said, I mean, I don't get this stuff done in a year and you're getting it done every Monday. And I'm not joking.
It really is like that.
Speaker B:I could not. I just couldn't. I couldn't. My life would fall apart if I didn't keep doing that kind of thing. That's the problem.
Speaker A:And I guess it goes back down to this like Sisyphean sort of stuff. Like it's never gonna stop. And even when you do the stuff that it generates more stuff.
Speaker B:Yeah. I mean, I think I. I don't know that part of me feels, well, what if I did stop doing it? Would it stop happening?
And I think I look at people like you and in some ways enviously, because it's like people who don't bother clearing their email inbox. I mean, I'm an inbox zero guy, but some people aren't. And it's like, well, you know, at some point you just, you can ignore stuff.
Speaker C:It's like you need to cultivate a lack of conscientiousness. That's right.
Speaker B:Stop caring about what other people think of you. You stop caring. Yeah. No, I mean, I think there's a lot of those things, we're probably going.
Speaker A:To go, yeah, absolutely. I absolutely. Peter, weigh in. What do you got?
Speaker C:Yeah, well, so, you know, the five minute task is a bit of an.
Speaker A:Athenism and sorry, Peter, before you go on, where are we going to? Like, we've sort of set something up saying, hey, there's this thing. What we trying to do in this discussion?
Speaker C:Yeah, well, I think it's interesting to analyze a five minute task as a phenomenon a little bit. So why it never actually is five minutes and why, even if it is five minutes, why that's a problem? The psychology of that being a problem.
So, yeah, five minute tasks are never just five minutes. Nick is very often accusing me of saying, oh, I got a five minute computer task that ends up taking an hour. And that's. That's the planning fallacy.
Plus Hofstedler's Law. Really, it's, you know, I've done something before and it took five minutes, or I think, I seem to think it takes five.
Speaker B:It occupies five minutes of perception.
Speaker C:Yeah, it takes five minutes of perception in my brain, but when I come to do it again, there's some blocker that ends up meaning it takes a lot longer.
Speaker B:Yes. You've got to download that other thing first and then that doesn't work. So you have to. So, yeah, so this Update your drivers.
Speaker C:It's a very strong bias is this planning fallacy. But I think a nicer formulation of that is Hofstrader's Law.
Speaker A:What's that?
Speaker C:So everything takes longer. The law is everything takes longer than you expect. Even when taking into account Hofstadter's Law, it's nice to be self referential.
There's also Parkinson's Law that says that work doesn't just take longer than you think, it actively expands to consume whatever time is available.
Speaker B:Yeah. The frustrating thing that cannot be true, but it bloody feels like it's true.
Speaker C:Yeah. So why is task switching bad for it? Just like you think I could just rack and stack these five minute jobs, you can get loads of them done a day.
Doesn't work like that. And why doesn't it work like that? Because your brain is not a computer. Context switching has a cost.
Speaker B:So this explains why I feel too exhausted to do anything meaningful after you've cleared the day. Once I've done all that. Yeah, go on.
Speaker C:Yeah. So you got so a quick five minute job, if you were a computer, you just line them up.
But actually, research has showed that it can take as much as 23 minutes on average between jobs. To fully regain your focus. So if you're in the flow in a task, that could take three hours, but somebody says, oh, could you do five minutes for me?
It would take you another 23 minutes to get back into the flow. So there's this sort of all this like time that's lost due to inefficiency.
But not only that, when you back in the flow, that job, that five minute job is still occupying space in your head, sometimes called the attention residue, that it's just sort of, it's hanging around inside your brain and it's occupying kind of space. Compute power.
Speaker B:Like a memory leak.
Speaker C:Yeah, like a memory. Yeah, yeah. And especially if that task is even worse if the task is unfinished.
So if we, if you gave me five minutes, we didn't complete the task in five minutes and then you have to go back to what you were doing. That's extremely damaging.
Speaker B:I'm really stressed out actually about thinking about. I'm just thinking about what would it be like if I did half the ironing and then, and then had to go and do something else.
Yeah, that would drive me nuts.
Speaker C:Yeah, that's, that's, that's a nick effect, I think. Yeah. Zeigarnik effect. So, yeah, these unfinished tasks nag at you. They're cognitively draining even though you're not actively draining.
Speaker B:Yeah, that's, that's the thing, I think, which, where they looked at waiters and discovered that waiters could tell you what people had ordered perfectly until the order was delivered and then it was just completely deleted from their brain. So, yeah, if you haven't finished something, then it, then it sits there nagging at you. Yeah.
Speaker C:So that's worth pointing out that this is particularly. These effects are particularly damaging or costly in knowledge work, unlike physical labor. So physical labor is often repetitive.
Carry this, pick up another one, carry.
Speaker B:This, take that barge, lift that bale.
Speaker C:Yeah. Hit this hammer, Hit this nail. Hit this nail, hit this nail. These tasks can be. These tasks are one psychological effect.
They're sort of largely outsourced to parts of your brain which are very good at doing automatic work.
Another effect is that they are repetitive so that there are natural breakpoints in them that you can just sort of stop hammering that nail, do a five minute task, go back to hammering the nail. Whereas knowledge work requires you to build a model of what it is you are doing in order to be, to effectively get into the task.
And that needs to be reconstructed every single time you start the task or pick the task up again. You can you do a Lot of reading. You think about it, you build a model and then you start being effective at the task.
You can't then save that model like a computer might and just then recall it again when you need to start the task again. When you stop doing the task, that model disappears and then you need to rebuild it when you start doing the task again. Does that make sense?
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, we're talking about this in the context of task, but when I think about other things like, you know, playing a sort of complex strategy game, like playing a board game or something, it would be almost impossible, I think, to put down a complicated board game and pick it up again without there being quite a costly remembering process, you know, sort of re uploading it. So I feel, yeah, any kind of process that's reasonably complex is going to suffer from that.
And there's an economy of scale to sitting down and doing all of it at once. You know, we either we're going to do this for three or four hours or there's no point.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:And I think that's, that's probably, you know, an accurate diagnosis of the Monday problem.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:Is, is that basically I should, that's what I should do is just Monday stuff.
Five minute jobs should all happen on Monday because there's no point in trying to sprinkle 5 minute jobs into the middle of complicated cognitive tasks.
Speaker C:I think that's, I think that's right. There are two different distinct types of work really. There's work that requires flow and that's things like, that's sort of creative work.
So things that, you know, you're writing something, you're writing a report, you're developing something, you're coding something, you're painting something, something that requires you to get into a particular flow. And that flow, once in it is a nice, comfortable and productive base.
And you can live in there for hours, but is completely broken if somebody drops a five minute task in. Another kind of work is the answering email. So if email takes five minutes, you can just bang out a load of them one after the other.
Kind of a different kind of flow, but that is much more interruptible because it's much more discreet. Little bits of.
Speaker B:Yeah, definitely. That feels plausible to me.
I mean, it feels like actually, even though each email is different, once I've got into the idea that, okay, I've got about four emails I need to respond to once I get the first one done, I think, okay, great, well let's crack on and get the other ones.
Speaker C:Yeah, I'm on a roll now to get into that flow state takes 15, 20 minutes, depending on the kind of task it is and how complex it is. So interruptions to it is extremely dangerous. Yeah.
So there's a bit of psychology about task switching and why it's damaging knowledge work distinct from. From other kinds of work.
Speaker B:I think there's another distinction as well, which, which is.
Feels subjectively useful to me between the kinds of things that I'm doing on a Monday, the five minute tasks and the kind of work that I consider to be real work. Right. Because obviously people are going to say, but you. You very productive on a Monday. You get loads done. And so.
But I have this feeling that, well, I haven't really done anything. And I think that the distinction here is between maintenance tasks and progress. Right. Progress tasks and maintenance tasks.
And actually, I think this feels like an explanation as to where my sense of progress comes from.
Speaker A:I think something we need to be clear about is it feels like we're framing this as a problem. Right. It's framing this as, as Buddhists will tell you, unhappiness stems from how things are and how you would like things to be. Right. And just.
I know that I'm slightly repeating what we said at the beginning, but the frustration from you is you want, you know, you want to be making progress, but you're just maintaining stuff all the time. And what we're trying to do, what are we. So what we. I mean, we're kind of still defining it, but ultimately at the end we're looking for happiness.
We want to have. I mean.
Speaker B:Yes, now, precisely. And, and why do I not feel a sense of satisfaction from maintenance?
And so, so there's a really good phrase, you know the film Munich, there's this, they have this discussion at the end. I can't remember the name. I think Ephraim or something, the Mossad handler.
And the main character says, well, you know, every time we, we go and kill a terrorist, it just creates more terrorists. What's the point of this? And he says, why cut your fingernails? They'll only grow back. And I think that's like fingernail cutting just feels annoying.
Right? And I think it feels like.
But in fact, a lot of the most important activities that we do are not actually about solving problems, you know, so like maintenance is important. You do have to cut your fingernails. But eating doesn't make hunger go away, but it doesn't stop it being important and fun.
And, you know, there's the sort of, the, this issue of holding back the second law of thermodynamics. Of kind of preventing entropy. You know, the idea of institutions weakening unless you actively maintain them and keep the barbarians at bay.
You know, rooms don't tidy themselves up, they only mess themselves up. And so it sort of feels like, well, this is all obviously these five minute tasks, which all I think often fall into that maintenance category.
They've got to be done. They do have to be done, but they just feel annoying.
It would be nice to make them go away versus progress work where you are creating new capabilities or creating opportunities. You know, the distinction between maintenance tasks feel reactive. They feel like you, you know, you can't avoid them.
Whereas, you know, creative progress work feels generative.
Speaker A:I mean it's just kind of working in the business. What's the phrase? Working in the business and working on the business, two different things.
Speaker B:Sort of exploring versus exploiting. Yeah, that kind of distinction. And completion criteria is another thing.
It's still very characteristic of a five minute job that you know when it's done. And there's, and there's, there is pleasure in that. There really is. I love having done the ironing, you know, and I.
But, but I think the thing is about progress tasks is they're never finished.
I mean, I feel like all of the side projects I work on, even if I do get into the state where I'm spending, you know, six hours working on, you know, a side project, there's always things on the Kanban board at the end, I think, oh God,.
Speaker C:This yet that's about. So that's, that's a driver for the work expanding to.
Speaker B:So those are the kinds of things that expand.
Speaker C:If you sort of have a undefined end state for say you say you're painting a picture, an oil painting, you could.
Speaker B:Peter, Peter, what's it of?
Speaker C:I don't know.
Speaker A:A boat.
Speaker C:Of a boat.
Speaker B:It's a boat.
Speaker C:So you're painting. You could, once you get to a point that somebody would go, that's pretty good. You could stop there and say, hey, call it done.
Speaker B:We're not gonna stop, are we, Peter?
Speaker C:You could endlessly fettle with it and just make it more and more and more exquisite.
Speaker B:Most people or like Turner, you just slap a boy on with a splodge.
Speaker C:Of red paint so you can just keep going at it and layer on more and more and more paint and take things a different, more different directions. So it's like, when do you stop?
Speaker A:I mean, personally I don't have a problem these unending progress activities. I have a problem with the five minute ones.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Which is I cross them off. I cross them off and cross them off. But then sometimes you get what some you can cross off but. But some you cross off like the first action.
But there's more stuff that's gonna result from that.
Speaker B:Oh yeah, what do you mean? Give us an example.
Speaker A:Well, so for example, let's say I've got a note like let's oh, I must contact the insurer about this. Okay. And so I contact them and go right now I've done that. But then it's not actually the objective is not finished.
Cause actually maybe I've got the objective done wrong. Cause it's like, oh, and make sure you actually do insure something or get the price. But there's actually follow up activities to it.
Speaker C:But I think I've got one of those as well. I've got in my to do list I've got birthday card and present for Ros.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker C:And that's actually about 50 different five minute tasks underneath. One was kind of like think about it.
One was buy it, one was write the card, one is wrap the present, one is stuff in there and the next one, the final one is kind of give them to her. There's like loads of little subtasks and every time I think oh, I've done one, I've done something to this. Can I tick, can I? No, I can't tick it.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:I think that is characteristic of what I mean by the sort of maintenance jobs. And that's absolutely like I had a big, I discovered last year, going back to the daily backups that my daily backups would stop working. Right. So.
So I then had an annoying, let's say three or four hour job setting them all up because they're moderately complex. I'm backing up different subsets of my hard drive, you know, so now that, now that great. And it feels like, well that's real progress now.
Now I've got this thing that's working and it's doing something in the background. I don't to worry about it anymore. But no, because what it now means is I now have discovered that you know, they hadn't been backing up. Yeah.
And now I have to have this little task that pops up, you know, check the backups are working. Literally a five minute job.
Speaker A:But you know, what if they're not?
Speaker B:What if they're not then and how. You know, and then. And I think all of those. Every time you think well great, I've really.
No, because actually then there's a new reminder you have to put in you know, there'll be some new thing. Oh, I. And I have. I'd say probably one in five of my reminders are, have you heard back from that person about this?
You know, because I've like the civil service pensions, the whole civil service pension system is in total chaos and I just wanted my pension statement and so I sent them an email, didn't hear back.
Speaker A:This is what I'm talking about.
Speaker B:It's like, yeah, right. And so now I have a little note that says, have you heard back from the pensions people?
And I'm like, well, at some point that's going to pop up and I'll go, no. And I can't be bothered to pursue it now. Snooze it till next week or I'll send them another email and then I'll have to add another reminder.
And that is the maintenance. It's like we believe we can make it go away, we can't. And we have to learn to live with that.
Speaker A:So we have to.
Speaker B:I somehow we have to accept that it is not going to get. You're not going to make it where that actually the flow, the cutting your fingernails is the job.
The job isn't to make the job go away, the job is to do the job and it's just going to be there and there's an irreducible amount of it and you just have to.
Speaker C:And some.
Speaker B:And some do it on Mondays so that it doesn't get in the way of what you're trying to do on a chain.
Speaker C:And these ballooning then when the tasks balloon like this, I think the, the sort of mature. The maturity in working often is just knowing which to.
Just to forget about and not worry about being courageous enough to do that and accepting the risk that somebody might come back to you and say, oh, did you. Did you do that sub, sub, sub, sub, sub task for me, like. No, because I had loads of other shit to do.
Speaker A:Well, look this.
Cause I've got something I want to introduce to the discussion, but I don't want to do that and actually does come off what you've just said there quite nicely, I think. However, I don't want to interrupt if you've got something you're going to finish.
Speaker B:Off there or I think this distinction between. Now I think it's not quite the best term I could have come up with, but what I'm calling maintenance versus progress is.
Feels to me it captures most of the kinds of things we're talking about. It's not quite right. It's not always Just maintenance. But that's sort of what it feels like.
This is just what I need to get everything else back up to where it was before, and then we can make progress beyond the frontier. It's like we've got to get the thing tidied up. We've got to tidy up our room before we can start painting it.
It sort of feels like that, but I think that it's interesting to think about when there's a mismatch between sort of. When you. When you're in a. When you're in a progress context, but you have. You have maintenance mode tasks to do and vice versa. Because I. I've seen.
I think this is something that I've seen talked about. It's something I've certainly been conscious of for, you know, my entire life.
But what people call waiting mode, which is where you sort of have a big job you need to do, but there's some sort of maintenance schedule up ahead. Like, you've got. You've got to have a meeting with someone or you've got to go out to get something and post. Post a letter or something.
And it's like, that's in the afternoon and you feel like you cannot get started on the big thing that you're trying to do. And it's like we, you know, that that bit of maintenance disrupts your, you know, your, Your attempt to do progress. And I think that it's almost.
There's probably another mode which is the inverse of that, which is when you sort of should be doing maintenance tasks, but you're actually doing progress tasks. And I. That's another thing that I find myself doing is I'm.
I wake up with a burning desire to, you know, to do this, some kind of creative task, and I get stuck into it and I start doing it. And the emails are piling up slightly.
Speaker C:Tainted by an anxiety because you're not. Result. You're not responding to that email exactly right.
Speaker B:And so it's like, well, I don't think I'm gonna be happy either way. But those two, Those two both feel like opposite failure modes. There's.
I can't do anything because there's this flipping half an hour meeting in the afternoon versus I really should be doing those things on my checklist. But instead I just have this burning desire to solve some abstract problem.
Speaker A:Okay, so anyway, there we are. Yeah, okay. So you're getting close to, you know, we're hovering around and nibbling at what I feel is at the heart of all this.
Speaker B:Go.
Speaker A:And you'll Be pleased to know that I've been scribbling away and I've come up with a new. I don't know if I'm not gonna.
Speaker B:Is it a two by two matrix?
Speaker A:I'm trying to get it to a new two by two matrix but it's not. It's not fully formed yet. But you might be able to help me that.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Okay. I've abbreviated it helpfully. The following. It's called my. I'm gonna call it an index for the moment. It's not really an index.
Speaker B:Yeah, go on.
Speaker A:Like it. It's A, N, C, C, D, T,.
Speaker B:C. A Good, nice and memorable.
Speaker C:Rolls off the top.
Speaker A:It does, doesn't it? And so what this is. It's the administrative negative consequence. Cognitive discomfort tolerance.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker A:It's.
Speaker B:If you can't even say it when you're looking at the words, I'm not sure this is going to be.
Speaker A:Go easy on me because this is new. It's new. It's like soon.
Speaker B:Needs a bit of polishing.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah. Oh wait, it's not finished though. So I'm gonna start again. So the administrative negative consequence.
Cognitive discomfort tolerance and compartmentalization ability index. Index. Yes. What I'm trying to say is that, like I said, we've been nibbling at this a little bit.
There are many things in my life, certainly on the administrative side of things, maintenance tasks, that would horrify many, many, many people. Okay.
Speaker B:The tasks or the fact that you're not doing them?
Speaker A:The fact that I'm not doing.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:And they sort of horrify me a bit if I think about it for more than a minute.
Speaker B:Is your strategy to not do that?
Speaker A:And my strategy, it's not so much my strategy. Is it an affliction or is it a gift? Is that I'm quite good at not worrying it.
So the negative consequences of not doing some of these admin tasks, whether it's ironing, insurance, whatever. I've got quite a high tolerance for them. Right. I've got quite high. I've got quite a high appetite for living with them.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:And they definitely have a negative practical life consequence. I'm kind of okay with it. I'd rather not. But that balance.
Speaker B:No, I had. I am in awe of people like you and.
And it's a bit like the who say, you know, because I'm an inbox zero guy and I look at people with 10,000 unread emails and I'm like, well, what if one of those is important and they always say something like, oh, if it was really important, they, you know, they'd remind me. And I think, but what if they have reminded me?
Speaker C:What if you missed a reminder?
Speaker B:What if 25 of those emails are reminders? And, but, you know, but they actually, their attitude is, well, you know, actually it probably is important.
If I'm getting through life without knowing that this thing I'm supposed to have done needed doing, then maybe I didn't need to be done at all, right?
Speaker A:And it's kind of that. And I'm at the stage now where it's not even, oh, if it's that important, they'll let me know. Because they don't.
And important stuff happens, they just don't. And I just kind of.
Speaker C:Somebody else does it for you.
Speaker A:You'll be pleased to know I've come to a sort of state of Zen, like acceptance of these sorts of things.
Now don't get me wrong, every now and again I go, there's a moment, you know, waking up at, you know, sort of five o' clock in the morning going, ah, with all this stuff. And yet, you know, I somehow kind of am okay with it. And actually, to put it another way, a mate of ours, friend of the podcast, Andres.
Okay, Andres Tagsir.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker A:Who was our guest once, My mate from Argentina, he's been our guest twice actually.
Speaker B:Has he spoke about his.
Speaker A:Yes, he once showed me his calendar and I think I've seen your calendars, your electronic calendars.
And I look at it and I've tried to have calendars, right, digital calendars, where it's all sort of organized and it's all sort of, you know, and I look at them and they just make me feel really scared and unhappy, right. And I just look at, I just feel really claustrophobic. I've tried to keep to them, we.
Speaker C:Get that same feeling, but it's better than the alternative, which is to be completely ignorant of what you're supposed to be doing.
Speaker A:And this is my point.
Speaker B:I'd rather know the barbarians are at the gates than just protect.
Speaker A:Yeah, for me it's like, yeah, there may or may not be barbarians and I'm kind of can live with that. But I recognise it's not good for me.
Speaker B:I suspect that I've been traumatized by some ball dropping incident from my youth because I think, you know, my need to check that there isn't something I'm supposed to be doing is just lurks behind me. It's like a design being followed by a dog.
And I, and I cannot get away from it and I suspect at some point in the past I forgot to do something really important and the consequences were terrible and.
Speaker A:Right.
And so just to finish this off and let's see if we can go somewhere productive with this, which is this compartmentalization element of my new system.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:Which is. I've always been quite good at compartmentalizing when I've had, like, stuff that's terribly worrying can be very important.
And I know that, you know, sometimes it's real life stuff and I do do something about it, but I'm quite good at shutting that off and getting on with other things. Okay. Maybe too good at that sometimes. Okay.
And this is the bit where, I mean, we don't need to do this now, you know, but if we have some sort of, you know, matrix and like XY stuff and, you know, we.
Speaker B:Don't need to do this now, Fraser, is what got you into this position. Let's come on, let's give it a go.
Speaker C:Let's do it now.
Speaker A:Oh, you want to do it now?
Speaker B:Well, I mean. Well, I mean, it depends what it is really.
Speaker A:I mean, I don't think it'd be that fruitful, but I was thinking an X axis of like, oh, this is definitely real life.
Speaker B:Not good.
Speaker A:1, 2, 3, 4, Up to 10, whatever.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker A:And badness if ignored. Yeah, badness ignored. And the other axis, Y axis is, you know, my tolerance for it. But I don't know if that's the right.
Maybe we define the tolerance of.
Speaker C:Tolerance of the badness because that feels like you can rub that into the bad.
Speaker A:I'm not quite figured it out.
Speaker B:I think I am picking up what you're putting down and I think this is about making sure that your, your tolerance for not doing stuff if you like, or let's, let's.
I mean, I think which is the same as the amount of effort you invest in doing that stuff should be a sort of, let's say a 45 degree line, you know, that actually there's an appropriate level of stress and appropriate level of effort that you put into those things.
And so I think that, you know, getting this right is about making sure you're stressed out about the things that are really stressful and which if you don't do them, will really be costly and suitably unstressed out and are willing to ignore things that don't really need to be done now and can be done next week.
Speaker A:Week.
Speaker B:And I think. But I mean, let's say that you're sort of the two failure modes then is Having a curve that's too small.
So in other words, where you're either, you know, obsessed. Yeah, I guess that's it. Like having a curve that doesn't slope in the right way.
So you're either treating everything as super ultra important and I absolutely must get this thing done. And that's something, you know, I think I possibly have a tendency to do is like, I really.
I can't get working on anything until I've made sure my email inbox is clear, you know, which it never is. That's. That's one failure mode. But the other is the, perhaps the Fraser strategy of ignore it and it'll go away, because sometimes it doesn't.
But you should be ignoring those things in the, on the, on the left. Things that don't matter, you should ignore them. And I think what you might have reinvented is, is sometimes called the Eisenhower matrix, isn't it?
It's like the, you know, it's that distinction between urgent and important. And, you know, things that are important but not urgent, you can do those later.
Things that are urgent but not important, you can delegate that sort of thing. So, yeah, if they're urgently important, you should do that now and then things which aren't either, don't do them at all. Just forget about them.
Speaker A:I think it's a further iteration of it.
Speaker B:It's a refinement of that.
Speaker A:There we go, refinement. So where do we. So the McGrewer refinement. Where do we go from here?
Speaker B:I mean, I think we've done.
Speaker C:I'd like to offer a defense of the five minute task.
Speaker B:Go on, Peter. It's right. The five minute task has been in the dock and it's been given a good grilling. So it's time for someone to.
Speaker C:Yeah, so it's not all bad, right? So it might be cognitively annoying and draining and interrupt your flow, but there is good reason for some of these five minute tasks.
So this phenomenon you may have noticed working in big companies is the shadow organization. So any given deep state, any given company or government body or department or whatever, there's two distinct structures.
There's the official one written down in org charts, but there's the actual one that gets stuff done. And the unit of work in that unofficial structure is the five minute task.
It's the going over to somebody's desk and saying, hey, I understand you're the person who does this in this. In the, in the. In the company. Could you just do a thing for me quickly? That is what causes this out of.
Out of official communication channels is what actually gets a lot.
Speaker B:Five minute task is the coin of the shadow realm.
Speaker C:It is, yeah. So it's been described as sort of the weak ties in organizations.
is a paper by gran von Netter:Opposed to strong ties, which are the people you work directly with in your team or you know, personally within a business. The weak ties are very, very important. It's also, it's kind of like the currency of social capital within a company as well.
It's like the, you know, the quid quo pro. I do that. Oh, you. I'll. I'll help you find that form if you then help me fix my computer.
Kind of little five minute tasks that go between people in a company. So it's not only the medium for work, it's also the medium for social capital.
So therefore quite important, I think you get this generalized reciprocity between this sort of kudos that accumulates between people in a company and then tells you who people are worth doing favors for because they're likely to do favors for you. I'd argue it's also the realm of the water cooler effect, the serendipity definitely.
Because the water cooler conversations, the five minute little chats are often the places where you find people who have a problem or a solution to your problem. And that's where the serendipity comes in. If five minute tasks weren't a thing at all, then a lot of these conversations wouldn't happen.
So it's not the five minute. It's not. The five minute job is bad. It's the. Where you do the five minute jobs as we talked about. It's the. And how you do them.
It's the interruption a bit that's the problem. Five minute tasks should live. It's the. Is where. How you would choose to go.
Speaker B:Well, I mean, I'm just going to keep them. I'm going to try and put all of them into Monday and just accept that I'm never going to get anything done on Monday other than those.
Speaker A:Maybe, yeah, I like this. But also, yeah, I like what you said there, Peter, because actually I've realized that I thought I was terrible at 5 minute tasks.
I'm actually brilliant at them, but they just need to be done in a certain way. So if I can find a way of making all my admin tasks water cooler stuff, right, and maybe I can.
Speaker B:Do this virtually, Peter. I think what he's hearing is I'm going to go and ask loads of other people to do stuff.
Speaker C:He's going to hang around in the office kitchen drinking coffee and hoping that.
Speaker B:He can get other people to do his five minutes.
Speaker A:And also, I hear what you're saying loud and clear. I need to take up smoking again.
Because you know, the stuff that, as we all know, if you've ever been a smoker, the conversation stuff gets done when you smoke. It's brilliant.
Speaker B:Yeah. And if you consider smoking a cigarette as a five minute task, well, that's 20 things a day you can just tick off success.
Speaker A:Okay, let's stop there. You've been listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast brought to you by Aleph Insights and produced by me, Fraser McGruer.
If you haven't already, please like, like and subscribe. We aim to release an episode every week or two.
If there are any topics you'd like us to cover, please email us at podcast@alephinsights.com thanks as always for listening. Until next time, goodbye.
