The Two-Minute Rule — Clear the Small Stuff
Two flavours, one name: if it takes under two minutes, do it now; and when starting something big, shrink the first step until it takes under two minutes.
The clearing rule
David Allen's original rule from Getting Things Done: if an incoming task takes less than two minutes, do it immediately instead of writing it down. The reasoning is arithmetic — recording, tracking and re-deciding a two-minute task costs more than doing it, and a hundred tiny items on a list generate a background hum of unresolved commitments that drains attention from real work.
The rule has a failure mode: a stream of two-minute tasks can eat an afternoon. Apply it to tasks that arrive while you are already between blocks, and batch the ones that arrive during focused work.
The starting rule
The habit-building version, popularised by James Clear, attacks the opposite problem: projects that never start because the first step looks enormous. Shrink the opening move until it takes under two minutes — open the document and write one sentence, put on running shoes and step outside. Once started, momentum usually carries you far past the two minutes; the rule exists only to defeat the threshold.
Together the two rules bookend every task's lifecycle: start absurdly small, and clear trivially small immediately. What remains on your list is exactly the work worth scheduling.