Some tasks just take five minutes.

Some jobs are made up of five minute tasks.

There's a message notification. I'd asked a venue for clarification of a line on their rental contract. Their response clears it up and the line won't be a problem. I reread the contract one more time before signing, attaching the signed contract, and message it back along with a request for their payment information.

There's a message notification. Another reimbursement request for food at local meetups. I check the form and there's ten of them now, so I sort them by platform and reimburse all the people who wanted to be reimbursed via PayPal.

I have an article draft up on my screen on what supplies are useful for running a weekly meetup. I add two items that aren't there yet and tighten the introduction. This post benefits from pictures, so I spend a minute grabbing one of the items out of my backpack and taking a picture with reasonable lighting.

There's a local event next week. I'm not running it, but the person who is only advertised it on the mailing list. I copy it and put it up on Meetup.com and Facebook and Discord. Thinking about it for another minute, I also put it in the announcements for an adjacent group that I think will be interested.

There's a message notification. Someone's asking about a community complaint. I give them a little bit of information on what I can and can't help with, and share my call calendar link.

Resolve Cycles are a technique, pioneered (as far as I know) by CFAR. A Resolve Cycle is when you spend five minutes by the clock attempting to actually solve your problem, right now, right there, no ifs ands or buts, or at least to make real progress.

I've worked with people who believe if a task would take less than five minutes, you should just do a resolve cycle right then, and not bother putting the task on your todo list. I think about when I worked in software, when that would have made sense.

I have a post-mortem from a big event I helped run a few weeks ago open. I read through it, extracting two of the lessons and adding them to my notes for the future. One gets set as a reminder to poke me in eleven months, just in time for next year's version.

There's a message notification. I asked a couple days ago about an adjacent organization's operations and how they're tracking success; I think the survey I plan to run later in the year could help them. I send a message asking a followup question.

I still have the article draft on meetup supplies. I add an introduction, looking up the other articles in this series to make sure I'm matching the style. That's about a paragraph of text.

There's a message notification. An attendee at a conference I was at a few months ago is planning to start their own meetups in an adjacent community and they knew I'd written a lot about running events. They ask for where to start with my material. I fire back a few links, and offer a call later in the week.

While I'm in my messages I see a few announcements from other local groups. I open them up, read or skim depending on the amount of text. Business as usual for most. One of them is planning a big event though, and I fire off a quick question as to whether they'd like help getting the word out. 

I've been in this role for about three years.

As the song says, a year is five hundred, twenty five thousand, six hundred minutes. Multiply that by three years, divide by five minutes. This number is nonsense of course, I don't work 24/7, and I don't habitually track my time in lower resolution than a week. (I do for freelance work, and a couple times a year for calibration.)

Still. Three hundred, fifteen thousand, three hundred and sixty. That's a lot of five minute spans. Not everything I do can fit in a resolve cycle. Maybe only half of my actual hours do. In a typical day I might get thirty-one tasks done. Only one of which takes more than five minutes.

I think about Paul Graham's Manager vs Maker Schedule.

I'm still in my message queue. I realize I expected to see the announcement sent out today for one of the regular local meetups in another city, and I haven't seen it yet. I check my archive, and the suspicion is right - there's a message saying that organizer is stopping running things. I check that city's standing website for the local events, and it still shows those meetups as active. I put in a change on the website to mark them as inactive. While I'm in there I fix a typo.

I've been experimenting with AI coding agents. These days it's hard to find the time for the deep focus I used to need to write good code, but I can still make progress on the coding projects I care about if I fire agents off and check their work later. I check this one - it says it finished a new feature I gave it. I check, and the feature mostly works. I put in a few tweaks and bug reports.

There's a message notification. Another reimbursement request for food at local meetups. I check the form and there's six now who want to be reimbursed via Wise. I open that and start to through the reimbursements, but notice halfway through one of the receipts makes so sense here. I fire off a message to that organizer asking for clarification. 

There's a message notification. Someone in one of the adjacent organizations, whose message channels I'm in, has a question about how many events in a certain category there are. It sounds like their initial guess is off by an order of magnitude. I give my best guess as an update and offer to try and narrow it down if they want.

I have a grant report due. I pull up the last couple weeks of reimbursements and ops expenses, collecting email notifications and photographs of receipts into the database where I try and keep track of this kind of thing.

There's a message notification. It's from a local organizer who was missing detail on how to reimburse them for a recent meetup. I'd asked them for transfer details, and their response has transfer details. I try putting in the transfer. It works, but because it's nonstandard I have to document it manually - it'd be easy for this one to get missed next week when I check.

I pull up the draft on meetup supplies. I add another line and an argument for why this seemingly small supply is surprisingly useful. I go to add the photos from before, and realize they're on my phone and I need to transfer them to my computer.

There's a message notification. I didn't respond to a message from weeks ago, the sender messaged me again politely. It should have gotten handled. There's nobody else whose role it obviously is to handle it. It would have taken five minutes to respond to when it came in.

As I read my todo list, I stare at the ambitious projects I wrote down years ago. Most are still unfinished. They've advanced checkbox by checkbox, accomplished in five minute cycles sandwiched between other more immediate priorities. Some of them still seem obviously like the kinds of things someone should do, that it's absurd nobody has done yet.

I'm spending all my effort in getting to orbit and staying there. Half the time I hope someone else is building the payload. The other half the time I remember that hope is not a strategy. This is not a successful approach to the problem.

 There's a message notification.