You have to wait five minutes for your wife or a friend to get ready to leave for dinner. What do you do?

You can check your latest tweets or read the news or zap through a few TV channels. Or you can just enter some minutes of flow mode and create cool stuff: Edit some photos, skribble some sketches, jot down an outline for your next essay, write a haiku.

Do you really need the whole day to get creative? Paul Graham’s observation of the difference between maker’s and manager’s schedules may be true, but instead of whining about it, you may as well give micro productivity a try. If it doesn’t work for your creative endeavors, you could still use that time to clean your desk…

Why should you care?
Here’s why: Your old buddy procrastination has no chance to hit, if all you got are five minutes. And who knows, maybe your wife or friend will need even some minutes longer, and you get an effortless 20 minutes of action, without even having to struggle.

The Idle Musings are short posts of 300 words maximum. They are published on The Friendly Anarchist every other Tuesday. Grab the RSS feed to get them right into your reader.