“This will only take a minute.” Most business owners say it several times a day. Update the website. Reply to that email. Fix the invoice. Send the file. Each one sounds tiny, so you squeeze it in before the real work, or between calls, or right after lunch.

Then the “minute” turns into twenty. The website update needs a new image, which needs resizing. The email needs a careful reply. The invoice has a second error. By mid-afternoon, a handful of quick tasks have eaten two hours, and the important work you planned for the morning still hasn’t started.

The practice: For one week, time every task you think of as “quick.” Write down how long you expected and how long it actually took. Then plan with the real numbers.

Why it works

People are reliably bad at estimating how long small tasks take. We picture the core action, like typing the reply, and forget the setup, the interruptions and the follow-on steps. Timing a week’s worth of quick tasks shows you the gap between what you expect and what actually happens.

Once you know the real numbers, you plan better. If your “five-minute” tasks really average twenty, you stop squeezing five of them in before a call. You give them the time they need, or batch them, or let some go.

It also protects your focused work. Most of the damage from quick tasks comes from doing them in the middle of something important. Knowing they take longer makes it much easier to say “later.”

How to run it

1. Keep a simple log for a week: task, expected time, actual time.
2. Before starting anything you’d call quick, write your guess.
3. Start a timer on your phone and stop it when the task is fully done, including any follow-up steps.
4. At the end of the week, compare the two columns. Find your average gap.
5. Use that number from now on. If your quick tasks run three times longer than you guess, triple your estimate when planning the day.

The mistake most people make

Only timing the core action. A quick email isn’t just the typing. It’s finding the thread, checking a detail, rereading and fixing a typo. Time the whole thing, start to finish.

The other mistake is feeling bad about the results. Everyone underestimates small tasks. The point isn’t to get faster. It’s to stop planning your day around numbers that were never real.

Do this before Monday

Set up a three-column note on your phone: task, guess, actual. Starting Monday, use it every time you hear yourself think “this will only take a minute.” By Friday you’ll know how long your quick tasks really take, and you can plan the next week around it.

Focus Friday is AFEUSA’s weekly series on attention, deep work and protecting your time as a business owner. For more practical guidance for entrepreneurs, visit afeusa.org.