The Five-Minute Things We Carry for Weeks

There is probably something in your life right now that would take less than five minutes to deal with.

I know this because there is definitely something in mine.

Maybe it's the return sitting by the door. The appointment you need to make. The form you need to fill out. The drawer you keep opening, getting annoyed by, and closing again. Or the thing that needs to be donated, cancelled, scheduled, moved, thrown away or finally decided upon.

None of these things are particularly difficult. And yet somehow, these tiny things can follow us around for weeks.

We tend to think it's the big things that overwhelm us. And, of course, sometimes it is. But I've been thinking about how much of our everyday mental exhaustion actually comes from the accumulation of small, unfinished things.

Every time you walk past the bag that needs to be donated, your brain registers it. Every time you see the email you haven't answered, you remember it. Every time you open the cupboard you've been meaning to sort out, there's that tiny Oh yeah, I still need to do that before you close it again and move on.

Except you haven't really moved on. You've just carried it forward.

That's the strange thing about putting something off. Later feels free. I'll do it later. I'll figure that out later. I'll decide later. But sometimes we're postponing a five-minute task and then paying interest on it for three weeks.

Not financial interest. Mental interest.

We remember it, avoid it, feel guilty about it, move it somewhere else, add it to another list, talk about needing to do it—and occasionally buy a container to put it in.

I've certainly done this.

Here's the part I've become more interested in: when the same little frustrations keep showing up, perhaps the answer isn't simply to get better at dealing with them.

Maybe the better question is: Why does this keep becoming a problem in the first place?

Why do the shoes always end up there? Why do we repeatedly run out of the same thing? Why does this task always get forgotten? Why am I making the same decision every single week? Why does everyone in the house need to ask one person where something is?

Sometimes you simply need to do the five-minute thing. But other times, you need to fix whatever keeps creating the five-minute thing.

That's a distinction I've spent a lot of my professional life thinking about in a completely different context. In organizations, when the same problem occurs over and over again, eventually you have to stop treating each occurrence as an isolated problem. You look upstream. You look at the process. You ask why the friction exists at all.

I'm increasingly convinced that the same thinking applies to our everyday lives.

There's another lesson from my professional life that I've come to appreciate: there is enormous value in expertise.

We sometimes resist asking an expert for help because we think, I should be able to do this myself.

And maybe technically we can.

You can probably organize your own garage. You can learn to build your own website. You can spend hours researching your finances, troubleshooting a business problem or figuring out why a process isn't working.

But being capable of doing something yourself doesn't necessarily mean doing it yourself is the best use of your time.

An expert brings something different. They've seen the problem before. They recognize patterns you don't. They know which questions to ask, which things don't matter, and where people typically get stuck. Sometimes the greatest value isn't that they do the work for you; it's that they help you see the problem differently.

And I think there's something freeing about that.

We don't have to be experts in every part of our lives.

Sometimes the thing we're avoiding isn't really about efficiency at all.

The clothes aren't difficult to donate. Admitting that season of your life is over might be.

The pile of children's things isn't hard to sort. Realizing your kids don't need them anymore might be.

Throwing something away takes seconds. Giving yourself permission to stop being the person who was eventually going to use it can take considerably longer.

That's where our physical spaces and our internal lives start getting tangled together. We aren't just surrounded by stuff. We're surrounded by decisions—some practical, some emotional, and some we've been quietly postponing for years.

And sometimes having someone standing beside you who isn't emotionally attached to the decision can make all the difference.

So I'm not going to suggest that you organize your house this week. Don't buy a stack of containers or create an elaborate new system.

Instead, find one five-minute thing you've been carrying around in your head and finish it.

Make the appointment. Return the package. Throw the thing away. Send the email. Donate the bag. Make the decision.

Then ask yourself one more question:

Was this actually a one-off task—or is there something in my life that keeps creating it?

Because if it's the latter, perhaps the five-minute task isn't the problem at all. Perhaps it's just evidence of a problem you haven't solved yet, or a system we haven't put in place yet.

And maybe that's where we need to become a little more comfortable asking for help—whether that's from a partner, a colleague, a friend, or someone who has built their expertise around solving exactly the problem we're struggling with.

Because the goal isn't to become exceptionally good at keeping up with everything.

It's to stop carrying things that don't need to be carried at all.

This week's conversation fits beautifully with what I've been thinking about.

I sat down with Nathalie Courtney, owner of N Organized Life, a professional organizer whose work goes well beyond making a pantry look good. Nathalie works with busy individuals and families to create spaces that actually function for the lives they're living.

We talked about organization, but the conversation became about much more than that: mental load, shame, ADHD, family life, the things we hold onto, why seemingly tiny tasks become enormous in our heads, and what happens when you invite someone with an entirely different perspective into a problem you've been staring at for months.

One idea from Nathalie particularly stayed with me:

The goal is to get your life in order so you can get on with your life.

Her business actually uses a version of that idea as its guiding philosophy—and after our conversation, I understood why.

The full conversation drops Thursday.

Until then, go find your five-minute thing.

— Nikki

The Wider Measure

P.S. What's your five-minute thing? The tiny task you've been carrying around for an embarrassingly long time? Hit reply and tell me. No judgment—I have mine too.