Goal #21

Goal #21: follow the two minute rule

I haven't read David Allen's book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, but I did come to learn about one thing he has in it, so I picked up a copy and read those few pages.

It's the two minute rule, and it goes like this: if there's something you need to do which will take a maximum of two minutes, do it now.  His theory is that, at more than two minutes, the amount of time and energy you spend adding the thing to your to-do list, worrying about it later, and so on, exceeds the amount of time you would just spend doing it now.

Allen does acknowledge that the selection of two minutes as the time limit is somewhat arbitrary but seems to work well on a regular day.  If you have a longer stretch of time, maybe you can go as high as 10 minutes, or if you're super busy you can cut it down to 30 or 60 seconds.

I learned all this a couple weeks ago; it's been percolating and I've said to myself a few times, "Oh, it won't take long, just do it now."  But this week I'm really going to try to be good about it!

Recap of Goal #20:
- Sunday night: 7.5 hours
- Monday night: 6 hours.  I barely eked this one out, and I did it at the cost of a workout (although if you factor in the time it took me to fall asleep, I probably just missed my goal).  But here's my question: both sleep and exercise are good for you.  Which is more important?  In order to get my workout in, I would have had to cut it down to 5:15 of sleep at most, probably more like 5 hours even.  Is that worth it?
- Tuesday night: 5.5 hours.  So close, but...UGH!  The most annoying part of this is that I could have had my six hours (or I could have gotten a quick jog in).  I was meeting some people on Wednesday morning, and the e-mail said "5:30." To me, that meant "be there at 5:30."  But they were all meeting and driving together and I was coming from elsewhere, so their plan was to meet at 5:30, be there at 6:00.  So many possibilities for that extra 30 minutes, but instead I just sat around twiddling my thumbs.
- Wednesday night: 6.25 hours
- Thursday night: 7 hours
- Friday night: 7 hours
- Saturday night: 7 hours

So, all in all, not bad!