Just Do the Thing

Back in 2001, when David Allen published the groundbreaking productivity book Getting Things Done, he coined the “two-minute rule”: If you encounter a task that would take under two minutes to complete, just do it now.

He wasn’t recommending that you spend your days ricocheting between random little activities the moment they pop into your head. His point was that anyone who takes a systematic approach to managing their time — with some combination of to-do lists, plans, schedules, and so on — ­inevitably incurs overhead.

Those lists and plans take time and effort, and for some smaller tasks, it’s simply not worth it. By the time you’ve “clarified the next action,” or made an entry on a list, or scheduled a time to focus on it, you could have just done the thing.

Case in point: Recently, I realized I’d made three separate reminders to myself to order new bags for the vacuum cleaner. There’s no way this didn’t use up as much time and effort as just ordering the bags.

Authentic Generous Impulses

I’ve long practiced the two-minute rule as a way to power through tedious chores (even if far from perfectly, as indicated by my elaborate route to acquiring the vacuum-cleaner bags). Yet I was struck to hear meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein speak in similar terms about his own personal policy: Whenever he experiences the impulse to be generous, he tries to ­follow through on it, there and then.

What does this look like in practice? Imagine it occurs to you to send someone a message expressing gratitude, or to donate to a charity, offer money to a homeless person, or take a chore off your spouse’s plate — and you act. You don’t think about it too much. You just write the imperfect message or send off the donation and get back to your life.

Nongenerous thoughts (I gave at the office) may arise too, Goldstein notes. This is fine. There’s no need to judge them.

But also: Just do the thing. Follow through. Don’t wait.

Note that this suggestion isn’t about acting on feelings of guilt or obligation. Nor is it another instance of the disingenuous social-media injunction to #BeKind. The point here isn’t to try to be more generous than you currently are. On the contrary, the point is to notice the moments when you feel that way already — naturally and effortlessly. And then to not screw it up with overthinking.

I’ve found this practice fascinating. For one thing, acting on an authentic generous impulse (as opposed to the #BeKind kind) is almost hilariously rewarding, in terms of one’s own mood. The power of small generosities is wildly underrecognized as a tool to feel better.

For another, it becomes clear that what usually stops me from being generous isn’t that when I delay, some deeper mean-spiritedness takes over. Rather, when I overthink these gestures, I am usually setting the bar too high. I tell myself a message to a friend deserves real focus, so I’d better get all my other tasks out of the way first. Or I tell myself it’s inefficient to give money to homeless people rather than to homelessness organizations. Arguably true, but irrelevant if you never get around to the latter.

Without this, I’m forever telling myself that I’m soon going to become the sort of person who does all these good things — and then the result is that I don’t actually do them.

The Easy Option

This approach is useful for all sorts of small things that matter but usually never get done, such as two-minute chores, generosity toward others, and generosity toward yourself — a concept more palatable than “self-care,” and much needed these days.

It can be helpful to think about the time it takes to complete a task as ­including all the time you spend thinking about doing it, stressing about not having done it yet, and then actually doing it. This helps clarify that acting immediately isn’t a matter of becoming more self-disciplined or pushing yourself harder.

Instead, it means sparing yourself the unnecessary hassle of having ­to-dos hanging over you — of waking up at 3 a.m. remembering some task you should have completed by now, or of feeling bad about not acting as generously as you wish you had.

From this perspective, taking ­action is the easy option. It’s procrastination that’s the burdensome one. So why not cut yourself some slack and just do the thing?