A Two-Minute Rule Mindset
In Getting Things Done, David Allen recommends adopting a two-minute rule for our to-dos (see this diagram).
The rule is basically this: When creating your to-do list, for each project you have active, ask, “What’s the next action?” But if the next action would take less than two minutes to complete, do it. Don’t even put it on your to-do list.
The rationale for that guidance is that it takes almost as much time to write a task on the to-do list than to dispose of the task. Part of the benefit of the approach is that when our to-do lists are less crowded, we’re less likely to be overwhelmed by the contents of it.
The Getting Things Done methodology is about how to get more done, but I think it’s worth applying the two-minute rule to an effort to have fewer things to do.
Greg McKeown’s book Effortless has an interesting example of this application:
“John opened a desk drawer to take out a pen. When the drawer stubbornly refused to shut, he went through his usual dance: opening it as far as it would go, shaking it, closing and opening it again, and moving things around. This went on for a while.
“Intrigued, his colleague, Dean Acheson (a mentor of productivity guru David Allen), asked what was going on. It turned out that a pencil tray was in the way. How long had it been a problem, Dean wanted to know. "Two years," John replied. "For two years I have been bothered by that every single day." How long would it take to solve it? Two minutes. John solved it right then.”
McKeown argues that we often put off those kinds of fixes because in the moment, it takes less time to put up with the problem than to solve it. But if we just ate the cost of the two-minute solution, we’d permanently make our lives easier.
McKeown recommends asking ourselves three questions:
What is a problem that irritates me repeatedly?
What is the total cost of managing that over several years?
What is the next step I can take immediately, in a few minutes, to move toward solving it?
Beyond the tactical applications of the two-minute rule—unsubscribing from emails rather than deleting them, setting up auto-payments—there’s a wider way of using this approach to create more time.
This entails looking for situations in which there are problems, urgent requests (a symptom of a problem), requests for which you’re not the right person, or just things you don’t feel like doing.
And in those situations, rather than taking the easier-in-the-moment approach of responding, instead, ask, “How can I prevent this from coming to me next time?”
That might entail interventions like:
Coaching subordinates on what authority they have to make decisions
Identifying the process steps (or people) that are causing issues and directly addressing those
Eliminating low-value activities altogether
All of those take more time today, but they create more time tomorrow.