A few years back I hit a wall. I had thought that I was a competent minister, but when I changed roles from youth ministry to working with adults I started to feel overwhelmed with the work-load. Some of the stuff that I learned from four years of working with high school students applied, but there were a bunch of new things I had to learn, and learn quick.

So I started to search for some ideas to help me become more productive, which inevitably took me to David Allen’s book Getting Things Done. I hate to admit this, but it took me a long time to get through the book, and I really didn’t even finish it until I picked up the audiobook from the library (which is a really cheap way to read a lot of books, by the way). The hardest part for me about the book was how complicated it seemed. There’s projects, next actions, contexts, and the funniest term of the book the tickler file. It all seemed so complicated to get started.

Until I started implemented the simplest idea in the book: the two minute rule.

The essence of the two minute rule is that if a task comes into your inbox (be it virtual or physical) and it will take you about two minutes or less to complete it, you should do it immediately. That’s right. Get it done in 120 seconds or less.

The most enlightening part of this concept to me was how many actions I had in my life and ministry that seemed like they would take a long time to get done, but they really could be done in less than two minutes. Here’s a list of actions that I’ve found can take less than two minutes:

• Emails sitting in your inbox that you need to reply to.
• Emails in your inbox that you need to archive/trash/file.
• Quick phone calls to volunteers to confirm things (be careful with this one, you could get trapped in an hour long conversation).
• Papers on your desk creating clutter.
• Books laying around that need to be put back on the bookshelf.
• A conversation with another staff member.
• Cleaning up your computer’s desktop of the clutter of files and folders.

There’s a lot of other tasks I could list, but I’d like to hear from you. If you’ve implemented the two minute rule in your ministry, what actions have you been able to do in two minutes or less?

Or if you haven’t ever tried the two minute rule, give it a shot right now. As soon as you stop reading this post take a look at your task list (or your office) and figure out as many different things you could do right now that will only take two minutes. When you’re done come back and share in the comments about your experience.

[image via Leo Reynolds]