CONCEPT
The Two-Minute Rule
Allen's elegant heuristic — if it takes less than two minutes, do it now — whose economic logic AI has inverted by compressing two-hour tasks into two-minute prompts, swallowing the rule's filtering function whole.
The two-minute rule is the most cited and most practiced component of GTD: during inbox processing, if an item can be completed in under two minutes, execute it immediately rather than capturing it for later. The rule exploits an economic asymmetry — below a certain duration threshold, the overhead of managing a task through the system exceeds the effort of completing it. For two decades the rule governed a stable population of small tasks (short replies, quick delegations, five-second lookups) at the margins of real work. AI has exploded the population of qualifying tasks by compressing two-hour efforts into two-minute conversations. Applied without modification, the rule converts the entire workday into an unbroken chain of immediate executions — a firehose of action that leaves no room for reflection. The rule's survival requires its evolution from a time heuristic into a significance heuristic.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Allen calibrated the two-minute threshold through pragmatic observation