A Two-Minute Defrost?

Image by Marcelo Leal, via Unsplash, license.

Over at Hacker News (HN), I learned of a short post describing a productivity hack that looks like it could be helpful to overcome inertia.

The blogger calls it the Two Minute Rule, raising some hackles in the HN discussion thread, at least among devotees of David Allen's GTD methodology.

By my recollection, Allen's Two Minute Rule was to do any task that takes that amount of time (or less) immediately whenever possible. That's because two minutes is about how long it would take to enter the task into one's system with the view of performing it later, anyway.

In any event, the idea strikes me as a way to overcome initial resistance and build some momentum, so I plan to try it some time, and I'm passing it along.

Here it is:

Whenever you find it hard to get started on a task, consider scaling it down into a 2-minute version.

The author, Hoanh, provides a short list of examples, like reading a page as the two-minute version of reading a book.

Some of the HN discussion raises the possibility that the short version of the tasks helps one gain clarity about a next action, and I can see this for some kinds of tasks. But my best guess is that this is usually an inertia- or reluctance-breaking tactic.

-- CAV