COVID Work From Home Life Hack: The Magical Five Minutes

I want to tell you a story. A story about a magical place in the space-time continuum.

In a land far, far away… nudged between this Zoom meeting and the next one… 

…there exists an extraordinary place beyond your wildest workday dreams.

This is a space where you can go, to rest your weary hands. Where you can take a breather and refresh. A space where you can feel like a person again, instead of a talking head in a video conference grid.

Where is this magical place, you ask? Well, it’s not exactly a physical place.

It is the space between :55 and :00 - the five minutes before the start of the hour.

In it, exists five minutes of pure freedom. 

Five minutes of infinite possibilities. 

Five minutes of stretching.

Five minutes of drinking your 8th cup of Nespresso (you know, they really shouldn’t make it so easy to conjure coffee out of thin air). 

So where am I going with this?

This new culture of online meetings has created some interesting routines and tendencies. And now that we have no limitations on geography, we are free to get on each other’s calendars anytime - one on one, in groups, with the dog and babies in the background.

Pre-COVID, video chats were reserved for low-stakes client meetings and those times you were too sick to come into the office but not sick enough to take the day off, so you worked from home. Now that it’s the only means for communication during COVID times, we have a different relationship with video conference calls.

One of the challenges of a new routine is that we have a hard time imagining the cumulative impact of our decisions over time. One meeting, starting and ending on the hour, is harmless. But what happens when they stack up over the day? And then over the week? 

Zoom meetings begin to feel like binge-watching TV shows.

You go through one hour and then another and before you know it, it’s been six hours in a row and you haven’t moved from your desk or closed your Zoom app once. 

It may take a while to sort out online meeting culture. But in the meantime, I want to advocate for a life hack that was taught to me.

Recently, I was on a project with a fantastic project manager. As she scheduled our reoccurring team calls, I noticed she was booking them for 55 minutes, instead of one hour. At first, I had a knee jerk reaction based on typical conditioning.

Why wouldn’t we use that last five minutes and squeeze every ounce of meeting?

Even if we had other calls immediately after, it’s not like we had to go from one office to another, thus saving time and justifying the back-to-back.

Then I did the cumulative math of my meetings and humbly remembered all those days where meetings inevitably stacked up back to back. Think about it - would you sit in a conference room for 6 hours, without taking a physical - or mental - break? In person, it was cause for burn-out. Digitally, it’s not much different. 

Also, I suspect this back-to-back meeting culture is the cause of all those horror stories of people taking their zoom calls into the bathroom and forgetting to click the mute button. 

This is especially important because we still need to take a break and stretch every hour, even if we’re not typing and “only” sitting and starting at a screen.

So I propose a challenge. Let’s adopt a personal policy to schedule all meetings to end at :55 minutes, instead of on the hour. 

And use those five minutes to stand up from your desk, do a stretch or two, and get some water. And maybe take a mental break by watching a cat video while you’re at it (are those still a thing?).

This works best when it’s a consistent practice. Try to get your whole team to adopt it. There’s nothing you can get done in one hour that you can’t get done in 55 minutes. If you need scientific proof to get buy in, consider Parkinson’s Law - “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Soon, you’ll find the whole team keeping their eye out for wrapping up by 5 minutes to the hour so everyone has time to pee before their next call.

Make it your personal mission to protect those precious five minutes as the magical times in your day. 

And - you know I have to say it - use at least one of those minutes to stand up and stretch!