You need just 5 minutes to stop putting off your biggest, scariest goals. If you tell yourself you’re going to do something hard for “only five minutes,” your brain doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on. Nobody can argue with five minutes, including your brain, so it lets you have it. Of course, what then usually happens is at about the five-minute mark of your task, you start to get into it. You realise it isn’t as hard as you had pegged it to be, and you start to get a taste for it, a taste which will then lead you to wanting to continue with the task.