If it takes five minutes, do it now.

I like this rule, and I keep relearning it. Last week I finished a task that took about five minutes. It had been sitting on my list for months. Five minutes of work, months of carrying it around.

Construction runs on five-minute tasks: answering a contractor’s question about a fastener, confirming a dimension, forwarding a test report, replying to an RFI. None of them are hard. But each one is on somebody’s critical path, and when they pile up the project doesn’t stall on the engineering. It stalls on the waiting.

A few reasons the rule matters more in this business than most:

This is why KEG quotes most scopes within 24 hours and turns field fixes around in about a week. It’s not a productivity trick, it’s part of the service. The five-minute task you’re avoiding is almost always cheaper to do than to keep carrying.