--- title: "Can you write for 5 minutes?" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2019/8/22/can-you-write-for-5-minutes.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2019/8/22/can-you-write-for-5-minutes" published: "2019-08-22T14:23:48" updated: "2019-08-22T14:23:48" tags: [] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Here’s a nice little web app that forces you to write continuously for a specified amount of time, and if you stop, all text is deleted. It’s a fun exercise, especially if you want to practice writing “flow”. Here’s…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Can you write for 5 minutes? By Roy Osherove August 22, 2019 Here’s [a nice little web app that forces you to write continuously](https://maebert.github.io/themostdangerouswritingapp/#/write?limit=5&type=minutes) for a specified amount of time, and if you stop, all text is deleted. It’s a fun exercise, especially if you want to practice writing “flow”. Here’s what 5 minutes on it got me (I’ll leave the typos in…): “every time something happens, I tell myself. Stop. Think. Act. Do. Repeat. Is that all it takes for something to happen? Our mind is a fragile thing. It thinks for itself, but it can also forget itself. It can litellrally forget that it itself, exists. That's crazy, says the mind to itself. A mind thinking in third person has a funny way of looking at the word. Here you are, writing a piece of text on a website. Why? What's the point? WHat would be lost if you had simply stopped writing? What does it take for something to stop? to start? What does it take to look at something, anything, straight in the eyes, and say "that's on me. I'm doing this". Yes, it was always possibel for us to conjur images of ourslves, the way we'd like the world to see us. But is it not the word just a bunch of minds looking back at themselves and asking how other minds see THEM instead? And in that kind of word, that kind of "hell is other people" world, what does it take to be kind? what does kindness even mean? Is kindness itself self explanatory? Is there a method to this madness of being untruistic? is there some form in which humans and their minds can coexit, side by side? does a body without a mind "exist" ? not being self aware, much like schorodinger's cat: it's possible that that cat was itself not aware it was in a box. If a box is, but a box is not aware, is it? Is IT really aware of anything inside of it? How the human complexity of the mind fails to capture this sort of unimaginitive dribble down into a human sized piece of dribble..” --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/