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Five minutes. It’s not much time.

As we struggle to run our freelancing businesses and balance our work and life priorities, it’s easy to think that five minutes isn’t enough time to accomplish anything.

And all too often, our life is made up of five-minute chunks … five minutes until the doctor can see you, five minutes until your next call, five minutes until the family gets home …

Because we think of those five-minute chunks as wasted time, we tend to sit there are do nothing. But five minutes is plenty of time to accomplish some tasks. It’s certainly enough time to do small things to boost your business and personal life.

In this post, I’ll share my tips for what you can accomplish when you only have five minutes available. With this list, you’ll never need to waste five minutes again.

7 New Five-Minute Tasks

Have you got a minute? How about five?

Good, then you can be productive.

Here are seven tasks that only take about five minutes to complete:

1. Update your portfolio. Our freelancing portfolios are an important part of our freelancing marketing strategy. They should always show our most current work Yet, even though our portfolios are so important to our freelancing businesses, we often neglect them. It only takes a few minutes to link to your latest article or add an image of your newest design.
2. Write a testimonial. Testimonials are another important freelance marketing tool. Would-be clients like to see that your current and former clients are happy with your work. But as freelancers, we need to not only focus on getting testimonials, but on giving them. If you’ve been happy with a product or service, take a few minutes and write a recommendation.
3. Run your virus protection tool. As a freelancer, your computer is an important business tool. Your probably use it for everything from doing project work to sending invoices to answering emails. Since you rely so heavily on your computer, make sure that you have updated virus protection software and that you run that software regularly.
4. Make or update your to-do list. To-do lists keep me on task. But sometime I get so busy that I lose track of where I am. Five minutes is enough time to pull out your to-do list, scan it quickly to get an idea of where you are, mark finished tasks as completed, and add any new tasks that have come up since you created the list.
5. Drink some water. Water is a large part of what makes up our bodies, yet most of us don’t drink enough water. According to the Mayo Clinic, men need 13 cups of fluids daily and women need 9 cups. If we don’t get enough to drink, we can become dehydrated. Even mild to moderate dehydration can lead to symptoms such as tiredness, headaches, and dizziness.
6. Back up an important file. We should be saving our work often and keeping regular backup files. If you’ve ever had to redo work because of a computer glitch, power outage, or other problem you know what a hassle that can be. Fortunately, it just takes a few minutes to save your work and create a backup–but those few minutes could save you hours of rework.
7. Update your tablet and smart phone apps. Those clever mobile developers are always coming out with new versions of the apps that we love and use. If you’re like me, your apps are usually a few versions behind. Take a few minutes to log into your account and bring your mobile apps. up to date.

16 More Five-Minute Tasks

Are you looking for even more ways to be productive in just a few minutes?

You’ll find sixteen more five-minute tasks in my post on Freelance Folder, 15+ Things You Can Do In 5 Minutes to Help Your Freelancing Business.

To summarize, those tasks are:

8. Open and read an email.
9. Listen to a voice mail.
10. Send a thank-you note.
11. Add an automatic signature to your emails.
12. Download a software update.
13. Stretch.
14. Put something away.
15. Read a blog post.
16. Leave a comment.
17. Update your profile image online.
18. Retweet, Like or Google+.
19. Pay a bill.
20. Invoice a customer.
21. Hug someone.
22. Look out the window.
23. Turn off an unused light or appliance.

Your Turn

As you can see, even five minutes can make a difference. We’ve given you a total of 23 ways to be productive in a short amount of time.

What five-minute tasks would you add to the list?

Image by wwarby