The five-minute rule for shipping

Most teams lose weeks to the gap between deciding and doing. The fix is not more planning. It is a standing rule: if a change takes under five minutes, you do it now, in the same session you noticed it.

The rule works because it removes the negotiation. There is no ticket, no estimate, no handoff — the cost of routing the work is larger than the work. Teams that adopt it stop accumulating the small debts that turn into big ones.

The second-order effect matters more. When small things get fixed immediately, the backlog stops being a graveyard and starts being a real list of real work. What is left in it is genuinely large, genuinely worth planning, and genuinely worth your attention.