Fight Productivity Paralysis With the 2-Minute Rule

Hour Glass designed by Bohdan Burmich from the Noun Project

The feeling that you get from crossing things off your to-do list can be addicting. It’s easy to get caught in the trap of adding absolutely everything to your system, including things that can be done in two minutes or less. With enough small and insignificant tasks, you can clog your system and lose considerable time and focus. And if you overwhelm your system enough, you might even paralyze your productivity completely.

Management consultant and author of Getting Things Done, David Allen, has a two-minute rule that can not only make your projects move forward incessantly, but it can also prevent many small things from overloading your system in the first place:

If you determine an action can be done in two minutes, you actually should do it right then because it’ll take longer to organize it and review it than it would be to actually finish it the first time you notice it.

Thinking of your time in two-minute increments will allow you to get a lot of things done.  When you simply do something, you eliminate all of the prioritizing, scheduling and picking of tasks. As Allen put it in arecent interview with Success magazine, the rule “is actually tricking you into making an executive decision about what is the next thing that needs to happen and that’s really the training people need.”  The two-minute rule is in essence, a mind-trick.