Five: The Five-Minute Rule

Some days the task is not hard. Starting it is. Five is built on one rule: you only have to begin, and only for five minutes. Five minutes is small enough to say yes to on a day when nothing else is. Name the smallest first move. Press start. That is it. WHAT HAPPENS AFTER FIVE MINUTES Nothing, unless you want it to. The timer ends and you are free to stop. Most of the time you will keep going, because starting was the hard part and it is now behind you. But stopping at five minutes is not quitting, and Five never treats it as though it were. IT COUNTS STARTS, NOT FINISHES The moment the timer begins, the start is recorded. Stop after forty seconds and it still counts, because it was still a start. There are no streaks to break, no missed days marked in red, and no notification asking where you have been. Come back after three months and your record is exactly as you left it. THE GAP BETWEEN DREAD AND REALITY You can rate how bad a task feels before you start and how bad it actually was afterwards. Over time the difference between those two numbers becomes visible, and for most people it points the same direction: things are usually less bad than they look from the outside. That is not encouragement. It is your own record. A PLANT THAT ONLY GROWS A leaf unfurls for every completed five minutes. It never wilts, never shrinks, and never reacts to time away. It is a record of what you did, not a pet that suffers when you are busy. PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION There is no account and no sign-in. Nothing is uploaded, because there is no server to upload it to. Your record lives on your phone, and Settings can export all of it to a file at any time. What you type as your first move is shown back to you once and never parsed, categorised, or counted. WRITTEN INTENTIONS You can write a plan in your own words, at your own time: "When it's 9:00 on Tuesdays, I start five minutes on the report." It offers, it does not nag. WHAT FIVE IS NOT Not a productivity system. Not a habit tracker with a score. Not therapy, and not a substitute for it. It does one small thing, which is to make starting easier by making it smaller. SUBSCRIPTION Five is free for one week, everything included. After that it is EUR 2.99 a month or EUR 24.99 a year. Your record stays on your phone whether you subscribe or not, and can be exported at any time. Payment is charged to your Apple Account when you confirm the purchase. The subscription renews automatically unless it is cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Manage or cancel it in Settings, under your Apple Account, then Subscriptions. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://sinky79.github.io/five-legal/privacy.html