When I was a kid, conversations about purchases that I had with my father usually revolved around how many hours I had to work in order to afford something, where something was almost always a video game or video game system. (My brother bought an NES in the late 80s. We even had a TurboGraphix 16. Then a Super Nintendo. Life was bliss way back when. I kid, I kid.)
This was a pretty valuable measuring stick. I've generalized the idea a bit later in life to time, too, and not just purchases.
If you're in to humerous units of measurement, five minutes is one-third of a Warhol.
Reading
Five minutes of reading isn't too much reading. Well-written posts—not mine, obviously—typically consume fewer than five minutes. If you're going to write more than it takes five minutes to read, then make a series of posts. Unless you're Steve Yegge, and then you can write all you want because it's clearly good enough.
One of the features of reading is that it's both a mental exercise and a mental break. Five minutes of dedicated concentration on something other than what I was working on can be pretty relaxing. I enjoy reading Ray Ortlund, for example; he's short, to the point, and rarely (if ever) wastes my time. And even if the posting itself isn't of much interest, there's usually some artwork attending. Taking that five minutes helps to reset mental perspective and forces me to slow down a bit.
The take home lesson here is that distractions abound—it takes discipline to turn them off and focus. A five-minute read is a great way to do this. Next time you get that long email from Aunt Nellie about her adventures riding a burro to Tuscon back in the late 1890's, maybe rolling your eyes and skipping past it is the wrong thing to do.
Commuting and Lunch
Let's do some back-of-the-envelope calculations. Assume you're working 240 days a year (say 2.5 weeks of vacation, some sick days, the usual holidays off) as a nice round number. If you're considering two different routes to work, one of which takes five minutes longer than the other, you'll spend on average about 10 extra minutes every day in the car.
That's 2400 minutes over the course of a working year. That's 40 hours—an entire work week.
My commute times went from seven minutes to 23 minutes (I moved) to 35-40 minutes (new job). While the moves were all justified—both spatially and professionally—the commuting equation really adds up. We don't usually think of our commute in vacation-equivalencies, but it's not a bad idea to do so. Five minutes of your commute is about one week's worth of vacation.
Conversely, that daily five-minute lunch overage is potentially costing your employer nearly a week's worth of productivity every year. Not insignificant!
Microtraining
I make a living in technology, but martial arts is my passion. As a part-time teacher I tell my students all the time that micro-training is essential to maintaining skillsets. Long bursts of training are often impractical: I'm out of the house for ten to twelve hours every day between work and the commute, teaching, and other responsibilities; I'm not going to be spending hours training. Instead, I pick small time windows (usually less than five minutes) where I can pack in some simple exercises that help cement what I've learned previously.
I do this as a karate student and instructor, but also in writing and coding. Learning Racket five to fifteen minutes at a time isn't necessarily super efficient, but it does help to keep me thinking about what I'm learning. And, like natural language acquisition, it helps sharpen my skills in my everyday languages like C and Python.
Thinking
Falling asleep can be hard. Some nights in the recent past while trying to learn Racket, I'll just look at the next Euler problem and fall asleep thinking about potential solutions. Or I'll do mental review of a form I'm learning or trying to remember.
Usually a five-minute trip down memory lane is sufficient to relax me enough to sleep.
In all, the trick here is to find things of interest that can be broken down discretely into n-minute chunks of time (where n for you is what makes sense). Given some form of equivalency, whether it's working or vacation hours, chapters read or written, conversations with friends, or catching up with family, it's easier to prioritize your time.