Take-5

"Take-5" is my shorthand for "taking 5 minutes by-the-clock to think about it".

The technique may be as old as the hourglass, and it sounds trivial but it's one of the most useful I've learned.

To clarify, you must use an external physical thing such as a timer (or another person), set it to vibrate after 5 minutes, so there is something external to your mind that takes care of the question "when am I done thinking?".

Or else, on truly hard questions, you are likely to blank out for ten seconds and then stop like "yep, no idea".

The harder a question, the faster we give up.^nil On "impossible" questions? We're liable to give up as a reflex, cutting the conscious mind out of even the assessment of impossibility.

5 minutes sounds short, but it can seem like an eternity. And that is a very good trick to do some genuinely original thinking.

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