Success Hack #4: The Two Minute Rule

The Two-Minute Rule is a popular success hack that simply states that if any necessary task will take less than two minutes to complete, you should stop everything and do it right away.

As near as I can tell, this hack was first popularized in David Allen’s otherwise forgettable book Getting Things Done. Most of his framework was otherwise too complicated to fit our framework for a quality success hack, although buried within the book are tangential discussions of useful hacks like costuming. The idea of completing all small tasks immediately is meant to prevent procrastination, but does it work? Let’s evaluate this rule in the context of our Framework for Success Hacks:

Compounding Benefits: 👍

Despite much searching, we could not find any actual scientific trials of whether or not this rule has been studied in an academic context. We’re therefore forced to evaluate this entirely in theory. Should anybody run the numbers, please contact us and we’ll update this.

Let us therefore assume that you implement this rule successfully. In such a case, let’s say each previously productive hour is reduced to 50 minutes of focused productive work, but you also accomplish 5 minor tasks that would otherwise pile up until the end of the day or be forgotten. Completing these minor tasks quicker could have benefits which could compound with time. Suppose the tasks would otherwise be blocking other people in your organization, then as an organization you could complete tasks in hours instead of days. This potentially major productivity boost would indeed generate benefits which would compound over time.

Diffuse Benefits: 👍

Again we also assume perfect implementation of this hack. Here, we score this strongly because in the alternate case we assume some of these tasks simply fall off the map. Therefore, the opportunity to potentially complete a dozen additional small tasks can produce a dozen assorted benefits.

Easy to Implement: 🤷‍♂️/👍

At first glance, this would seem to be pretty easy to implement. Yet this is perhaps a bit tougher than it might seem at first glance. Allen’s book was first written for a far less electronic world, and nowadays distractions are seemingly more significant as Allen writes in his updated version.

The reason this may be more difficult is that it must be paired with an additional hack that allows you to focus on more time-intensive tasks. That is, you may need to shut off your phone or email for 50 minutes each hour if you are going to get your larger items done, and often times these other tasks are easier said than done.

That said, it’s still relatively easy to adopt in theory, so we generally give this high marks.

For more information, see our comprehensive list of success hacks.

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