The 2-Minute Rule

Sometimes despite planning and setting things straight, we won't be able to do a particular task. I'm pretty sure many of you just like me have been in this situation a lot of times. Thanks to the 2-Minute Rule that I came across when reading Atomic Habits that helped me fix this issue of starting an action. This rule is fairly simple and it states that

If an action can be done in two minutes, it should be done at the moment it's defined

One might wonder how will it be possible for me to achieve a big task such as building project XYZ using this rule. In this context, the 2 minute rule seems pretty contradictory as it’s not practically possible to build an entire project in 2 minutes. But that doesn't mean you should rule out the entire idea of building this project. Instead, this rule asks us to check if the most simplified task that's needed to achieve the bigger task can be done in under 2 minutes. So assuming you need to open your code editor to build project XYZ, you might want to think if you can move yourself and open your editor in under a minute and that clearly should be doable.

This rule essentially lets us create a mindset that the most simple task to achieve a bigger task can be done so easily. And once the mindset has been set to perform an action, we intend to work on it at least for sometime. The end goal of this rule is to just make you start.

How I benefited from this rule ?

Being a hobbyist security researcher, there's almost always a need for me to run Burp Suite. For anybody who has used Burp Suite knows how much it eats up your RAM space and starts heating when you run this alongside apps such as Firefox and Discord.

It took me sometime to realize that this is the reason that I didn't end up working on security despite allocating time for it in my schedule book. I've always played this safe game of "I'll compensate for what I missed tomorrow" and it just keeps adding up and suddenly interest fades away one day.

Only after reading this rule, I broke down my task into simpler pieces. This went on something like :

Work on security → What are the most essential tools you need to launch ? → How long does it take to run Burp ?

And there I go, I have my answer. I can easily run Burp in under two minutes. Next, I wanted to understand how to reduce my RAM usage and to do that all I need to do is Google. And does it take more than 2 minutes to Google? Voila, I also optimized my workflow and thus started working with ease.

This rule in particular has worked like magic for me. Maybe it's your time to try this out and let me know how it went. Cheers.