Experiment #30) The Minimum Effective Dose (MED)
What if the bare minimum was enough?
The Experiment: Clean SOMETHING in my house for 5 minutes a day
Hypothesis: My house will be cleaner come the holidays
Outcome: I discovered something even BIGGER than a sparkling home!
My idea this week was simple on the surface…
There’s this big joke around cleaning your baseboards before you have company:
Only, it’s NOT a joke if you NEVER clean your baseboards. I was recently at someone’s house, and I didn’t wanna’ look, I didn’t mean to look, but I was going to the bathroom and I couldn’t help but see it! The baseboards! They were FILTHY. I mean, dirty, dusty, and grimy. They looked like they’d been through some seriously hard times and were barely hanging on to tell about it.
I vowed to myself in that moment that I would not, under any circumstances, neglect my own. I couldn’t wait to go home and give my baseboards a run for their money!
Now, I usually clean my house thoroughly on the weekends (baseboards included most of the time!). However, with all the hustle and bustle lately, my weekends have been wacky and thrown off and I was finding myself frustrated, with smaller windows of time… not able to give my beloved home it’s full, proper pampering treatment.
I’ve been straight out with work, straight out with personal stuff, am soon-to-be straight out with holiday FUN, and then straight out with working on my own business stuff through the end of the year.
So, I came up with a plan…
What if, from now until the holidays are over, I clean 5 minutes every day SOMETHING I rarely clean in my house?
The goal was that come the weekends the cleaning would be easier and come hosting time, there wouldn’t be a shred of dust on any baseboard, door, or infrequently dusted surface.
In case you too wish to utilize my 5-minute-a-day idea, here are the things I tackled throughout the week:
Day 1) I swept* the downstairs, and cleaned the panels of the upstairs doors where dust can sneakishly collect.
Day 2) I cleaned all upstairs glass including windows and mirrors
Day 3) I Murphy oil-soaped (yes, that’s a new verb) the upstairs baseboards and later that day, came back for 5 more minutes to clean my desk
Day 4) Cleaned the panels of the downstairs doors
Day 5) Swept
Day 6) My usual cleaning day - house got a 90-minute clean, still some things I have to do throughout the week
This coming week, I plan to clean all downstairs glass, downstairs baseboards, clean the tub (because I didn’t do that on cleaning day like I usually do), and other little 5-minute tasks.
In 5 minutes a day, I discovered FAR more than sparkling mirrors and baseboards…
You might think the result of this little experiment is just that I have a way cleaner house, presentable baseboards, and don’t feel so stressed and overwhelmed come cleaning. You’d be right but you’d also be wrong.
What I discovered, or I should say, rediscovered is a concept called the Minimum Effective Dose (MED).
Sounds like a doctor should be telling me about this, Emily, not you… what’s the (MED)?
Minimum Effective Dose is a concept borrowed from fields like pharmacology and fitness AND the magic of it is that it can be applied to productivity, tasks, and achieving goals! It refers to the smallest dose or effort necessary to achieve the desired result -nothing more, nothing less.
This isn’t about being lazy. In fact, sometimes, you’ll have more capacity than others, and you can put in the MAXIMUM if you want. But, the concept allows you to achieve your goals even on the days you don’t have time to go all-in.
And look, I’m as 110% of a person as they come, I’m usually ALL or nothing, but I’m learning that actually sometimes a little at a time is a far more “compassionate” way to get to ALL.
How It Applies to Tasks and Goal-Setting:
Efficiency Over Effort: Instead of aiming for perfection or overworking yourself to burnout to get it ALL done ALL the time, MED gives you steps to your goals. By setting out to do a lesser amount of work, you can still set yourself up to get high-quality outcomes. It’s about working smarter, not harder.
Prioritization: MED helps you prioritize by identifying which actions matter MOST. Which matter most NOW. Which do I need to do today. You end up avoiding a lot of wasted time on non-essential tasks and puttering about.
Preventing Burnout: I don’t use MEDs every day in everything, but when you use it in the RIGHT areas of your life in the right seasons, it affords you a lot of GRACE and encourages sustainable progress by limiting unnecessary exertion, ensuring energy and focus are preserved for other areas.
Other examples of using MED in your life:
In Your Relationships…
Example: Daily connection
Want to deepen a relationship? What if you connected daily with your partner, best friend, or colleague just once a day? No rules except that it has to be without distraction. It could show up as: getting a meal, taking a walk, exchanging a conversation before bed, an affectionate gesture, sending a text to let them know you’re thinking of them. It allows you consistent and impactful touches of nurturing over time.
In Your Home…
Example: Calming the clutter chaos
Got endless junk drawers and bursting closets? Spend 5 minutes a day emptying a drawer, throwing out 15 items, cleaning out a cabinet? Or take a page outta’ my book and do the 5-minute daily tidying.
At Work…
Example: Email management
I don’t even want to SEE that you have 10,078 unread emails. You don’t have to get to Inbox Zero in one day AND you also don’t need to check and reply to emails all day every day. Dedicate two 15-minute blocks (e.g., morning and afternoon) to respond to urgent messages and file others. This minimizes distractions and keeps you productive without losing control of your inbox.
With Your Health…
Example: Physical activity boost
10,000 steps feels impossible for me 99% of the time. Instead, I commit to walking every day. Just walking. It could be to the mailbox and back for all I care, but my MED is to walk. You can apply it to drinking water, walking, eating better, building muscle, etc. etc.
Learning…
Example: Learning made easier
I recently bought a course and realized I can’t binge it all in one day (like I’d originally planned). Instead of going through it all at once, which is my nature, I set a schedule of watching just one video a day until I was done. You can also use this technique for studying/learning:
Learn all 47 presidents in just 10 minutes a day!
Outwit all your friends about the French Revolutionary War with just 5 minutes of studying at a time
Know everything there is to know about geography with just a short daily check-in
Don’t take it from me!
This is NOT my original concept. You can Google it and find about a bazillion resources on it and ways to apply it. An article I read by Shane Parrish was my first introduction to it and I’ve heard it many times since.
Remember, LESS isn’t LAZY.
On that note…
I’ll chat with you next week! I’d like to hear if this your first learning of the Minumum Effective Dose and if this gave you any ideas on how you could apply it for yourself! Very similar to the concept of Streaking but usually with an end-goal.
As always I LOVE hearing from you! You brighten up my inbox every time you comment or message me :)
*I live in New Hampshire and feel the need to spell out that “sweeping” isn’t vacuuming for us up here. Vacuuming is vacuuming. Sweeping is Sweeping. Sweeping takes me 5 minutes. Vacuuming takes me a half hour at least with my tumbleweeds-of-fur-producing dog 😂