The blog

Pre­sum­ably, there are days when your to-do-list just keeps grow­ing, when most of the tasks are big­ger and more time con­sum­ing, so you have dif­fi­cul­ties apply­ing the two-minute rule.?? If you would have had a lot of short and sim­ple tasks on the list, it would have been eas­i­er, because then you would have been able to take fif­teen min­utes to quick­ly han­dle a hand­ful of two-minute tasks.

Now it feels like you’re stuck with the task that you ​“sim­ply have to” do right now and you see no light ahead, because next in line is yet anoth­er mega task to be dealt with.??You feel stressed because you know that sev­er­al clients are wait­ing for you to come back to them with dif­fer­ent materials.

Ahead of your­self or lag­ging behind?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could move for­ward quick­ly with many of the tasks on the to-do-list? It wouldn’t hurt if you knew you were ahead instead of lag­ging behind, and due to this felt a surge of ener­gy, now would it???You see, you work bet­ter and get bet­ter results if you feel pos­i­tive and ener­getic, rather than like a sunken ship and a vic­tim of your workload.

Do this

1. Allo­cate 15 min­utes when you’re able to work with focus. Even if you’ve got an awful lot to do, you’ll have time to do this. It’s not more than a cof­fee break, an unex­pect­ed phone call or a colleague’s spon­ta­neous vis­it to your room.
2. Choose five to-do tasks from your to-do list. It is either tasks that are next in line in terms of pri­or­i­ty, or tasks that have been on the list for a long peri­od of time for which you have a bad conscience.
3. Even if the tasks are five mas­sive tasks, ask your­self for each one of them: What can I do on this task in two min­utes, even if it doesn’t mean that I will com­plete the whole task??? Can you quick­ly send an email to the one who is wait­ing? Can you google an address, you’ll need lat­er? Can you make a quick phone call? Can you come up with a brief agen­da for the meet­ing? Can you read an email with the infor­ma­tion you have to make a deci­sion on lat­er? Quick­ly print a list of sta­tis­tics to work with this afternoon?
4. Work for two min­utes on each of the five tasks. 
5. When the fif­teen min­utes have passed, con­tin­ue with the major task you worked on ear­li­er. If you allow for more time than two min­utes, you are let­ting your own pri­or­i­ties down and you will think that this was a bad tip.?

After­wards, you will feel that you’ve got­ten a lot done in a short time and that you have advanced on many fronts simultaneously.

Will this real­ly turn out to be effective?

Maybe you are think­ing that this will result in many scat­tered, unfin­ished tasks that you won’t have time to finish???Well, you’re right.??But, I don’t rec­om­mend that you work like this all the time (since then the day will become too chopped up), only work like this when you feel that you’ve been busy with a sin­gle task for too long and you feel frus­trat­ed that you don’t progress with any­thing else.

When you return to the tasks that you’ve worked with for two min­utes, you will notice how good it feels that ​“some­one” already start­ed doing them. This is much nicer than start­ing from scratch.??So, in the right sit­u­a­tion, this method is unbeatable.

How do you do it?

How do you do to quick­ly make progress on mul­ti­ple tasks simultaneously? 

Please leave a com­ment below.