My suspicion is it’s giving yourself 5 minutes to think of short, valuable things to do. For example, you might be planning to get dinner with a friend at a particular restaurant, and then stop to think of ways to prevent failure or make the dinner better. “I’m not certain they’ll be open the day we’re thinking of. It would only take a minute to call and see if they’ll be open.” → “Oh, they aren’t actually going to be open that day. Should we switch restaurants or days?”
What’s good about that prompt is that the cost of doing it is low (the amount of time you’ve dedicated to searching) and the search space is constrained (things that you can do quickly, which will probably be low-cost for that reason).
My suspicion is it’s giving yourself 5 minutes to think of short, valuable things to do. For example, you might be planning to get dinner with a friend at a particular restaurant, and then stop to think of ways to prevent failure or make the dinner better. “I’m not certain they’ll be open the day we’re thinking of. It would only take a minute to call and see if they’ll be open.” → “Oh, they aren’t actually going to be open that day. Should we switch restaurants or days?”
What’s good about that prompt is that the cost of doing it is low (the amount of time you’ve dedicated to searching) and the search space is constrained (things that you can do quickly, which will probably be low-cost for that reason).
This sounds similar to Resolve Cycles and/or Yoda timers.