5 Minute Timer

About the 5 minute timer

Five minutes is the most requested length there is, and it is not because five is a round number. It is the length of a break that does not become a different activity, the length of a warm up, the length of a pasta that says four to six on the packet, and the length teachers give a class to finish a task without anyone starting something new.

It is also the standard first step out of procrastination. The bargain is that you work for five minutes and are then allowed to stop, and the reason it works is that starting was the hard part. Start the timer, do the thing badly, and see whether you still want to stop when it goes off.

Press start and the ring drains once around the face. At zero you get three rising notes. The speaker button silences them, and the screen stays awake while the timer runs, so a phone propped on a counter does not go dark thirty seconds in.

Switching tabs does not stop it. The countdown is worked out from a deadline on the system clock rather than accumulated from ticks, so a hidden tab, a throttled timer or a browser that decided to save battery all end up at the same answer. The tab title also carries the remaining time, so five minutes from now you can find the right tab without clicking through them.

If five is not it, the presets cover one, three, ten, fifteen and twenty five minutes, and the box takes anything typed as 7:30, 90s or 1h15m.

The five minute rule has a mechanism worth knowing. The friction in a task is nearly all at the start, in the deciding and the setting up, and almost none of it in the doing. Committing to five minutes removes the decision, which is the expensive part, and by the time the timer goes off you have already paid that cost. You are allowed to stop. Most people do not.

In cooking, five minutes is the interval that separates most stages worth separating: how long a pan needs to come up to heat, how long onions want before garlic joins them, how long a steak rests per centimetre of thickness. In meetings it is the lightning talk, and in a stand up it is the whole meeting. It is short enough that nobody argues about spending it, which is exactly why it works as a wedge into things that would otherwise never get started.

The five minute rule has a mechanism worth knowing. The friction in a task is nearly all at the start, in the deciding and the setting up, and almost none of it in the doing. Committing to five minutes removes the decision, which is the expensive part, and by the time the timer goes off you have already paid that cost. You are allowed to stop. Most people do not.

In cooking, five minutes is the interval that separates most stages worth separating: how long a pan needs to come up to heat, how long onions want before garlic joins them, how long a steak rests per centimetre of thickness. In meetings it is the lightning talk, and in a stand up it is the whole meeting. It is short enough that nobody argues about spending it, which is exactly why it works as a wedge into things that would otherwise never get started.

Other lengths

• 1 Minute Timer
• 3 Minute Timer
• 10 Minute Timer
• 15 Minute Timer
• 20 Minute Timer
• 30 Minute Timer
• 1 Hour Timer