In Five Minutes, It’s Possible
Last week, old friends were in town for Thanksgiving. Dan Kully, now a partner at Seattle-based KMM Strategies, and his wife Maritza Rivera, a member of the Seattle City Council, were nearby. Dan and I go back 30 years to Senator Bob Kerrey’s office. We wanted to see each other. Schedules did not align. The perfect plan for a long dinner or lunch was not going to happen.
So I tried something different.
“Come over to our house for five minutes,” I said. “Just so we can be together and say hello.”
They did. At 10:15pm. And five minutes became ten. There were laughs, storytelling, a few hugs, and one selfie. It was simple, brief, and exactly what we wanted.
After they left, I found myself thinking about what is actually possible in five minutes. And how often we convince ourselves it is not.
There is a name for what we do to ourselves when we believe something must be done perfectly or not at all. Psychologists call it all-or-nothing thinking. It is the assumption that if the ideal version cannot happen, the effort is not worth making.
In behavioral economics, there is a related idea called satisficing versus maximizing. Maximizers hold out for the best possible option. Satisficers choose what is sufficient to meet the real need.
With my friends, five minutes worked because it rejected the false choice between “perfect” and “nothing.” How often are these two theories at play in our work lives?
We are good at imagining every potential obstacle. We inflate complexity. We wait for an ideal block of time that rarely arrives. Then we quietly postpone the whole thing. Not because the task is impossible. But because our projection of it has become unrealistic.
The result is familiar to most of us. Important emails sit unsent. Hard conversations linger. Drafts stay trapped in folders. Interesting ideas go unshared. Connections wait for a “better time.” We tell ourselves we need an hour. Or an afternoon. Or a clean calendar. What we often need is five minutes.
At Clarity Channels Communications, one of our guiding philosophies is simple: Good and done is better than perfect and on the planning board.
Five minutes lives squarely inside that philosophy. It requires no elaborate setup. It does not ask for flawless execution. It only asks for movement. Five minutes forces something real to happen. You do not need to solve the entire project. You only need to begin.
And once you begin, something interesting happens. Momentum appears. Fear quiets. The task starts to shrink to a workable size. Often, five minutes becomes ten. Ten becomes enough.
Not always, but often enough to matter.
What surprised me most about that Thanksgiving visit was not how quickly the time passed. It was how complete it felt. We did not need a dinner reservation to connect or a long evening to laugh. We just needed presence. Five minutes created that, and the absence of pressure made it better.
That moment mirrored what I see daily in leadership, communications, and decision-making. We assume meaningful progress requires large windows of time. In reality, it often requires small windows of “why not?”
Make sure the crisis communications plan has been updated.
Gather the evidence of impact from your work.
Outline the messy first paragraph of the speech.
Schedule lunch with your favorite former colleague.
Register for the conference (and submit your presentation.)
All-or-nothing thinking tells us these things must be exhausting or perfectly timed. Experience usually proves otherwise.
Sometimes, of course, you do need the long meeting, the full afternoon, the complete strategy session. But far more often than we admit, what you really need is a small start that tells your brain, this is manageable.
The irony is that waiting for perfect conditions often delays the very clarity we are seeking. Five minutes is not a promise to finish. It is a decision to engage.
Good and done beats perfect and pending, almost every time.