300 seconds
Not stalling.
Pausing.
How many decisions or commitments would end up more positively if you had a five-minute snooze button on hand?
Esprit d'escalier* isn't as hard to live with as its opposite. The hasty one-liner, the rushed reaction, the action we end up regretting–all of them can be eliminated with judicious use of the snooze button. It's a shame there isn't one built in to our computers when we're communicating online…
When in doubt, go for a walk around the block.
*The feeling we get when we think of a witty response on the way home instead of at the dinner party, when it would have been the perfect put-down.