When I started thinking about the 5 second rule or the 5 second process I had in the back of my mind something else. There was a voice in my head saying you have seen this before haven’t to you?
When I started thinking about the 5 second rule or the 5 second process I had in the back of my mind something else. There was a voice in my head saying you have seen this before haven’t to you?
It related to something almost religious , spiritual . Was it in Buddhism? Something about now only being the relevant thing. Tomorrow never comes as they say. And the past really is in the past . The only thing we have is now. With the 5 second rule I approximate some of those old teachings. I concentrate only on the next few seconds. They are all that matter. Those few seconds don’t give me time to procrastinate. I start the task. A task may in reality take something more than just 5 seconds – it may take 10 it may take 20 it may take 2 or 3 minutes. But the main thing is I have accomplished something. It may not be everything. It may be just a very small component of something much bigger.
At this point I would like to quicly tell you a story. For many years I could not find the time to claim back money due to me from my health insurance provider. Much had happened in my life. I had renovated a whole house. I had moved house. It was a time of much chaos. I had been living on a building site for months on end. And at the same time I had been trying to organize builders and workers to complete work. I had been holding down a full time job at the same time. Health claims had been completely neglected. In fact I had not even told my insurance company about my move. They later sent me a bill for about €500 illegal costs to track me down to my new address. I was annoyed because I had told them about my move and my new address but somehow they had not entered it into their system.
The whole story was something I didn’t want to approach. Over the course of about 6 years I had amassed a whole heap of unclaimed bills. I had paid doctors and hospitals directly. But claimed nothing back from the insurer. And I had been paying out a lot in contributions.
When I decided to change my life this unfinished business was one of my main blockers. I couldn’t do other things. I couldn’t take up new tasks since this unmanageable thing was hanging over my neck. All of the bills had been scattered across multiple file boxes and storage areas. The task of collecting everything was truly daunting. It would take days. And even then, if I actually accomplish the task it had been so long I really thought I would have no longer have a claim on the money anyway.
So this became one of my major monumental tasks to tick off. In itself it was no big deal. To somebody who doesn’t procrastinate it really would have not been anything. But to me it all looked insurmountable. I applied the 5 second rule. I developed the habit of simply grabbing the nearest file that I came across and flicked through it. If I saw a likely looking bill I would take it out and put it on a pile. Likewise, If I found a box in the cellar or garage, I would quickly open it and rummage through. Anything that looked useful I took out and put on the pile. No real thought went into it. It was completely unstressful – I only thought about the small task of putting paper into a pile “now”. I didn’t worry about processing it further.
I had at least collected a good pile of health claims. The main task was still neglected but it sure did look a lot more manageable. A start. The next phase was to order the bills in the date. Bucket them up into years. Having completed that, the project suddenly seemed doable! I called up the insurance company. I no longer knew how to submit claims. My insurance company had been bought by a far bigger insurance company since I had last had any contact with them. The system was different. No more sending off bills with claims forms via an email address or post.
The insurance company made things easy. I read did not know what I had been worrying about! I got a customer account set up online and found out I could simply upload all the documents and they would take care of everything for me. To boot I found out but there was no time limit on submitting claims.
I still had a minor problem to resolve. My scanner wasn’t working. It took me a whole morning to fix. But when that fired into life I spent the whole evening scanning in bills. When everything was ready I uploaded to the insurers online portal. There were 39 invoices in total. A huge burden was off my back. Within a few days I received a letter from the insurance company. It was a complete listing of each and every bill and it told me how much they were paying me back. The total was about €8000. That would easily pay for insurance over the next year or so!
Not everything was finished as there were one or two queries about some of the claims . But the main thing was I had achieved something very big (to me). I felt enabled to continue with other tasks. For example I cancelled legal protection I had taken out for rental property. This was back in the day when I had been living in Germany – over ten years ago. I had been paying about €100 every year for the last 10 years for legal insurance that I did not need.
That was another one of those tasks that I had been dreading. I seem to remember back to when I try to cancel it before. They wanted forms I seem to remember. It would have taken effort to get those forms. And I had felt overwhelmed. However now it all seemed different. Within a few minutes I had located a standard letter online in German which let me cancel the legal cover in an orderly way.
Again a few days later I received a letter from the legal company. My legal cover would now be cancelled at the next opportunity. That was another big thing that had been weighing on my shoulders. For most people this would have been a trivial task and they wouldn’t have thought very much about just getting on and doing it. But for a procrastinator like me it really was a major hurdle in life. With this unfinished business I felt it difficult to proceed with other tasks. Everything had got out of hand.
Why am I talking about this? I’m trying to demonstrate the power of the 5 second rule and how getting one thing done allows us to proceed with more things. It also shows why getting rid of old neglected business is so important. It needs doing before we can proceed to doing more useful tasks that are relevant to our lives now. The stuff we often put off.
Before rambling off on my story I was saying something about religion spirituality. What does the 5 second rule have to do with that? Well I would suggest you take a look at the book called the Power of Pow. It’s all about living in the moment, now!
The book draws on many spiritual and religious teachings, learnings and concepts. It suggests we should not be preoccupied with the past and the future, we shouldn’t be worrying ourselves about these things. NOW is what we should be concentrating on. I suggest you do your own research on this. There is plenty about this on the Internet. And the Power of Now can be bought very cheaply on Amazon.
It related to something almost religious , spiritual . Was it in Buddhism? Something about now only being the relevant thing. Tomorrow never comes as they say. And the past really is in the past . The only thing we have is now. With the 5 second rule I approximate some of those old teachings. I concentrate only on the next few seconds. They are all that matter. Those few seconds don’t give me time to procrastinate. I start the task. A task may in reality take something more than just 5 seconds – it may take 10 it may take 20 it may take 2 or 3 minutes. But the main thing is I have accomplished something. It may not be everything. It may be just a very small component of something much bigger.
At this point I would like to quicly tell you a story. For many years I could not find the time to claim back money due to me from my health insurance provider. Much had happened in my life. I had renovated a whole house. I had moved house. It was a time of much chaos. I had been living on a building site for months on end. And at the same time I had been trying to organize builders and workers to complete work. I had been holding down a full time job at the same time. Health claims had been completely neglected. In fact I had not even told my insurance company about my move. They later sent me a bill for about €500 illegal costs to track me down to my new address. I was annoyed because I had told them about my move and my new address but somehow they had not entered it into their system.
The whole story was something I didn’t want to approach. Over the course of about 6 years I had amassed a whole heap of unclaimed bills. I had paid doctors and hospitals directly. But claimed nothing back from the insurer. And I had been paying out a lot in contributions.
When I decided to change my life this unfinished business was one of my main blockers. I couldn’t do other things. I couldn’t take up new tasks since this unmanageable thing was hanging over my neck. All of the bills had been scattered across multiple file boxes and storage areas. The task of collecting everything was truly daunting. It would take days. And even then, if I actually accomplish the task it had been so long I really thought I would have no longer have a claim on the money anyway.
So this became one of my major monumental tasks to tic off. In itself it was no big deal. To somebody who doesn’t procrastinate it really would have not been anything. But to me it all looked insurmountable. I applied the 5 second rule. I developed the habit of simply grabbing the nearest file that I came across and flicked through it. If I saw a likely looking bill I would take it out and put it on a pile. Likewise, If I found a box in the cellar or garage, I would quickly open it and rummage through. Anything that looked useful I took out and put on the pile. No real thought went into it. It was completely unstressful – I only thought about the small task of putting paper into a pile “now”. I didn’t worry about processing it further.
I had at least collected a good pile of health claims. The main task was still neglected but it sure did look a lot more manageable. A start. The next phase was to order the bills in the date. Bucket them up into years. Having completed that, the project suddenly seemed doable! I called up the insurance company. I no longer knew how to submit claims. My insurance company had been bought by a far bigger insurance company since I had last had any contact with them. The system was different. No more sending off bills with claims forms via an email address or post.
The insurance company made things easy. I read did not know what I had been worrying about! I got a customer account set up online and found out I could simply upload all the documents and they would take care of everything for me. To boot I found out but there was no time limit on submitting claims.
I still had a minor problem to resolve. My scanner wasn’t working. It took me a whole morning to fix. But when that fired into life I spent the whole evening scanning in bills. When everything was ready I uploaded to the insurers online portal. There were 39 invoices in total. A huge burden was off my back. Within a few days I received a letter from the insurance company. It was a complete listing of each and every bill and it told me how much they were paying me back. The total was about €8000. That would easily pay for insurance over the next year or so!
Not everything was finished as there were one or two queries about some of the claims . But the main thing was I had achieved something very big (to me). I felt enabled to continue with other tasks. For example I cancelled legal protection I had taken out for rental property. This was back in the day when I had been living in Germany – over ten years ago. I had been paying about €100 every year for the last 10 years for legal insurance that I did not need.
That was another one of those tasks that I had been dreading. I seem to remember back to when I try to cancel it before. They wanted forms I seem to remember. It would have taken effort to get those forms. And I had felt overwhelmed. However now it all seemed different. Within a few minutes I had located a standard letter online in German which let me cancel the legal cover in an orderly way.
Again a few days later I received a letter from the legal company. My legal cover would now be cancelled at the next opportunity. That was another big thing that had been weighing on my shoulders. For most people this would have been a trivial task and they wouldn’t have thought very much about just getting on and doing it. But for a procrastinator like me it really was a major hurdle in life. With this unfinished business I felt it difficult to proceed with other tasks. Everything had got out of hand.
Why am I talking about this? I’m trying to demonstrate the power of the 5 second rule and how getting one thing done allows us to proceed with more things. It also shows why getting rid of old neglected business is so important. It needs doing before we can proceed to doing more useful tasks that are relevant to our lives now. The stuff we often put off.
Before rambling off on my story I was saying something about religion spirituality. What does the 5 second rule have to do with that? Well I would suggest you take a look at the book called the Power of Pow. It’s all about living in the moment, now!
The book draws on many spiritual and religious teachings, learnings and concepts. It suggests we should not be preoccupied with the past and the future, we shouldn’t be worrying ourselves about these things. NOW is what we should be concentrating on. I suggest you do your own research on this. There is plenty about this on the Internet. And the Power of Now can be bought very cheaply on Amazon.