Do you procrastinate often? Is making a work routine an issue for you? If you answered ‘yes’ to either of these, you’re like many working professionals around the globe.
A typical work routine is filled to the brim with errands and tasks and littered with easy-to-completes as well as easy-to-procrastinates. Knowing where to begin or which job to pick first can be difficult at times, especially when your to-do list is overwhelming.
This is where The Two-Minute Rule enters the scene.
The Two-Minute Rule is a famous achievement hack that states that if any important assignment will take under two minutes to finish, you should drop everything and do it immediately.
“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. If you don’t avoid the question about what’s the next step, lots of two-minute items could be done right then. Now, there are many times that you have a next step that’s going to take a longer amount of time, like drafting some big new spreadsheet. You wouldn’t want to do that in two minutes. ”
– David Alen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
The idea is to make your habits as simple as possible to start. Anybody can meditate for five minutes, read a page of a book, or set one item of clothing aside. Once you’ve started making small good decisions, it’s a lot simpler to keep doing so. A new habit should not feel like a test. What you need is a ‘gateway habit’ that sets you down a progressively beneficial path.
You can, for the most part, make sense of the gateway habits that will prompt your ideal result by mapping out your objectives on a scale from ‘simple’ to ‘exceptionally difficult’. For example, running a marathon is hard. Running 5 km is hard. Taking 10 000 steps is a little difficult. Going for a 10-minute walk is doable. Putting on your running shoes is extremely easy. Your objective may be to run a long-distance race, but your gateway habit is to put on your running shoes and get moving.
It all comes down to habit.
And once you have it, you’ll see the success from the Two-Minute Rule in all aspects of your professional – and personal – life adding up quickly.
