Another one of my features at GTDtimes blog. It’s about my favorite GTD rule - the 2 minute rule. Enjoy!

“You have to think about your stuff more than you realize but not as much as you’re afraid you might.”
David Allen, “Getting Things Done - the Art of Stress-free Productivity”

Last week one of my dreams came true and I had a chance to participate in David Allen’s GTD seminar and talk to the “guru” himself in person. The great thing about this seminar is the fact that you can actually get a sneak-peak of how David applies his methods in his real life. He showed us his desktop, the applications he’s using and actually demoed to us his very own GTD workflow.

One of the “a-ha” moments - 2-minute rule.
When we talked about processing inboxes and checking email, he reminded us about the 2-minute rule:
“Do it. If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined.”
We thought, “yeah, right… but what can you do in just two minutes?”.

And then David went ahead and played us the 2-minute timer he has on his computer and asked us to watch it closely… the first 15 seconds… 30 seconds… and we thought it would take ages for the 2 minutes to go by… 1 minute to go… I’m bored already… and David said: “look, we’re just in the middle of the two minutes…” 30 seconds to go… and I thought 2 minutes was as very short period of time!

You can get lots of stuff done in just 2-minutes!
When I came home I quickly set up my very own 2-minute timer and started checking out what I could do in just under 2 minutes. Here are my results (in no particular order):

• Read and reply to at least one email message. I discovered that when I’m in a “process-emails-to-zero” mode, I can process up to 3-5 email messages in under 2 minutes!
• Read a blog article. I’m reading blogs a lot. Again, if the article is very interesting, it takes me usually 2 minutes to read, if I’m scanning, I can scan up to 10 or more articles in just under 2 minutes!
• Write a short draft for an article. I’m using MindManager mind mapping software to write drafts of my articles. I wrote the draft to this article in 1 minute and 50 seconds! Of course it took me a lot more time to actually write this article, but I had my draft and outline ready!
• Empty 5 or more items from my inbox before my weekly review. Again, quick decisions and quick processing… and all in just 2 minutes!
• Perform online operations like online-banking wire transfers, paying bills, sending file attachments to clients or friends… all of these tasks that I’d normally put on my “action list” in Nozbe, I’d completed them so quickly that I couldn’t believe it!

The key to successful application of the 2-minute rule - quick decisions!
My tip for you - in order to apply the rule successfully you need to decide fast what to do with the item you’re processing. When you’re reading an email - decide what to do now - reply if you can. If you can’t respond at this moment, convert it to an “action”. Don’t hesitate, don’t open email messages more than once! The same applies to anything you process. Decide fast, don’t think too much. “Just do it. Nike” ☺

Try it for yourself! What can you do in 2-minutes? Let me know in the comments!
Please challenge me and let me know what you discovered you could do in under just 2-minutes and I’m hoping to learn something new myself. I’ve known about this rule for so long and never really applied it and now I’m glad I finally did. You’ll amazed yourself. I’m sure of that.

I’m actually so happy about this rule that I’m adding a small javascript 2-minute counter to my Nozbe web application (the feature will be out next week) to remind my users that maybe before you add a task to Nozbe, it can be done in just under 2-minutes?

BTW, it took you around 2 minutes to read this article… Wasn’t that fun?

Note: This is another of my articles published on the GTDtimes blog and this one actually made it to Evan Carmichael’s list of top 10 articles of GTDtimes list at #9.

I’ve read the book “Getting Things Done – the Art of Stress-free productivity” many, many times. I actually own the English, Polish and German copy of the book… and I’m buying the Spanish one now. Every time I’m reading the book in different language, I keep discovering new things, new “hidden gems” and re-discovering techniques I thought I mastered already. It’s like reading the book from different perspective each time (because the translators tend to take a little different approach each time).

One of these hidden gems is the concept of what David Allen calls: “Cranking Widgets”.
The concept is simple – according to David – one of the healthiest jobs psychologically is the one where you show up at work and you see three things:
• A bunch of un-cranked widgets
• A widget-cranking machine
• A bucket to put the cranked widget
Isn’t your job now tad simpler? All you have to do is just take the un-cranked widget, put it into a widget-cranking machine and later put the cranked widget into its bucket.

Why is the concept simple?
It’s because all the “thinking” has been done for you. All you have to do now is just to do the job and go home. At home your mind will be free – you won’t be thinking about your job and about your widgets… and you’ll have all the energy to do something else, spend time with your family, do sports, whatever you wish… isn’t that great?

Converting our office work into a “cranking widgets” job
This is the key of Getting Things Done. If we want to master the GTD techniques, we should learn to convert our tasks into a series of widgets to crank. We should actually think about them as “widgets”.

Of course, our “widgets” will be a little more complicated that the ones shown in the example above, but still, they will be only widgets. How to convert your actions into widgets which are simple to crank? There are three main rules to keep in mind:

1. Each Action must be “actionable” and must represent a small step.
How many times we catch ourselves putting actions on our to-do lists like “prepare dinner” or “prepare power-point presentation” or “check all the systems settings”, where all of these actions are actually projects which should be split down into small, very small actionable items. In our “prepare power-point presentation” example, we can divide this into:
• Gather data to show in the presentation
• Prepare pie-charts with representing data
• Prepare a structure of the presentation
• Prepare presentation template
• Add first slides as a presentation structure
• Add data and pie-charts
• Fine-tune the layout of the presentation
• Add animations and other effects…
• Etc.
Get the picture? Each of these steps is a small actionable “widget” to crank and once you have this list, all seems very logical. What seemed like a tedious project is now a series of simple widgets to crank.

2. Choose “Next Actions” of as many projects as you can and try to move them forward.
This is one of the rewarding thing that happens to you when you practice GTD on your daily basis. Just choose a next action of each of your projects and put them all into your “next actions” list. Start cranking these “next actions” and by the end of the day you’ll feel simply great.
Completion. You’ve moved each of the projects forward! Although they were small steps, yet you’ve progressed in so many of your projects and you’ll feel like you’re the king of the world. I live in my “next actions” list every day and I know how rewarding it is to see your “next actions” list done and completed.

3. Try to avoid binding your actions to time. Don’t be a slave of your calendar.
With Outlook or other calendars we tend to plan our day with a minute-to-minute schedule. Like I’m going to call Ted at 12:14 and I’m going to “Gather data for my presentation” at 12:18 until 12:47 when I’ll be replying to the email to my boss… etc. You get the picture.
Then all of the sudden, Ted’s line is busy, gathering data for presentation takes longer than 30 minutes and your boss has already phoned you and you don’t need to write him any email… your nice structure is gone forever and you feel frustrated and unproductive.
David Allen repeats several times that your calendar is a sacred place and you should put only appointments there. Or any other time-related stuff for that matter. Something that happens on this particular date and time, or will not happen at all. Other stuff can be done at any time.
Once you have your widgets ready, you can crank them at any time you wish. You can change the order of them or choose to skip some and do the others, depending on your contexts. It’s all up to you. Don’t be a slave of your calendar, focus on flexibility when cranking your widgets.

You can convert your sophisticated office work into a simple “cranking widgets” job.
It’s easier than you think , it’s very rewarding and you feel like you’ve done so much when you master the “cranking widgets” method. I’m still learning this but the more I succeed the better I feel about it.

What tools to use to create your “widgets” list and “next action” lists?
Any to-do list will do. A sheet of paper will do actually. I’m using my Nozbe web application as it gives me the ability to easily mark with a “star” a next action in each of my projects and later see all my “next actions” in one list. I can even reorder my next actions list too while I’m completing them. I actually spend my day looking at this list in Nozbe and I’m trying to crank as many widgets as I can.
How do you crank your widgets? Let me know in the comments!

Note: This is the first article I wrote for GTDtimes blog (the official David Allen Company blog) back in March. It’s about people who just “get” the GTD (getting things done) method without even knowing about it… people like my business partner Luis and my wife Ewelina.

Over the years that I’ve been learning and mastering GTD I’ve stumbled across many great individuals who taught me a lot about how to implement GTD in my personal and business life.

Some of them have been exposed to GTD since the day the book was published and have gradually become black belts… and there are others who have never heard of GTD or “Getting Things Done” but if you have a look at the way they work – it’s incredible to see how they follow the book’s advice without ever reading it.

I call them: natural born GTDers.
Who are natural born GTDers? To understand that let’s get back to the question: “what is GTD?” To me, GTD is not just a set of methods, it’s more like a set of habits. Powerful habits. n order to be successful in implementing GTD in your life, you’ll need to develop a series of habits:

• habit of putting all of your thoughts into your inbox and not keeping them forever on your mind
• habit of processing your inbox and deciding what to do with each item
• habit of managing projects and putting all of the project-related stuff where it belongs
• habit of “cranking widgets” – getting things done without thinking too much about your system
• habit of weekly review and re-organizing your actions for the next week
• habit of extracting “next actions” from a pile of to-dos in your projects
• habit of not putting everything into your calendar… just the time-specific meetings and actions

…and you’ll discover more of these as you read the book by David Allen.

Now, much to my surprise, they are people who “get” these habits… they have never read the GTD book, never learned any theory about time-management or project-management – they just intuitively know that this is the way to go and they are just doing that every day. They even don’t have any sophisticated systems for this, they use good-old pen and paper, old-school calendars and whatever applications they have pre-installed on their computers. But these tools don’t matter. The key to their success is the fact that they know the “habits” it takes to get things done and are just following these every single day.

The first natural born GTDer – Luis.
Just after I’ve read the GTD book, I started doing business with a guy named Luis who is to this day one of my business partners and a great friend. I remember I was greatly impressed by the concepts from the book by David Allen but what really struck me is that after a week of working with Luis I found out that he is following his daily habits in the same way David Allen describes it. I set down and talked to him about GTD and he was surprised there is such a thing as GTD. When asked about his daily habits, he just said it was so obvious that he never gave too much thought to it.

He just knew he had to make his actions list in the morning (“Next Actions”), he had to revise his projects and tasks every Monday morning (“Weekly Review”), he had to jot down all the stuff there was to do and later make sure to process it and attach it to a particular project (“Inbox processing”) and he had to spend his day with his list to make sure everything he had planned has been done (“cranking widgets”). No rocket science, he said, just a way to get stuff done and move along.

He just had his regular habits and mastered them. I didn’t. And what he said there wasn’t all that obvious to me at the time. The same thing happened when I met my future wife and discovered she’d been following similar habits and getting tons of stuff done… and neither has she ever heard of GTD before.

They are natural born GTDers – to them GTD is just obvious. I guess David Allen feels the same way.
Habits are not that “obvious” though. I had to “discover” all of these “obvious” techniques and learn my habits. Really study them, learn, fail and try again. And again. And again. And boy it wasn’t all that easy. These natural born GTDers make it look easy. It’s not. Maintaining good habits is a tedious task. Sometimes we feel too lazy to remember them, we try to talk ourselves out of them or simply unconsciously find ways to avoid them.

We tend to get flooded with lots of information and let ourselves be carried away by the pace of work and accumulate stuff to never find the time for the habits of processing, organizing, reviewing…This is why some of us (me!) need tools to help us. We need the tools to help us remember about our habits and guide us how to perform these habits. We sure will be covering some of there on the GTD Times blog. They range from simple pen and paper, calendars, computer based applications, web-based applications, you name it.

I developed my own web application to help me remember about my habits – Nozbe – and boy it helped me a lot – I finally had my projects, to-dos, notes, files… etc. in one system and could easily choose next actions for each day. I’ve initially used it only by myself for more than a year or so… but later decided to show it to the world and now there are thousands of busy professionals from all over the world getting more done thanks to my web application.

Are you a natural-born GTDer?
If you are – congratulations. However, chances are you’re like me so you need a way to develop your habits and a way to keep you on top of them. I’m sure you’ll find the book by David Allen a great read and if you have already read it, find your tools for the job and create a perfect habits-empowering system that will help you get things done and live a happy life. Feel free to post about your system in the comments.