Two Minutes is All You Need to Change Your Habits Forever

Atomic Habits is a fantastic read! Highly recommend it.

Want habits that actually stick? You might only need two minutes. Here’s how two simple ‘Two-Minute Rules’ can transform your routine—and your life.

Building a new habit is never easy. I always compare it to upgrading a dirt road to an interstate highway—it takes a ton of planning, a ton of time, and a ton of material. Initially when we start off on this new habit, the road is bumpy, it’s hard to figure out where it even starts or ends, and you can fall off the path easily because it’s not marked very well.

As you repeat this path though, your brain starts to ‘upgrade’ it. It might add in some markers of where the road is. It might smooth the dirt so that you aren’t tripping on it anymore. Then as you keep doing it, eventually, it will turn this dirt road into a concrete or asphalt road. Then once you’ve mastered this habit, it’s built into a massive super highway that move you across it instantly. That’s the power of our neurology. It can change at any time, and it can become a POWERFUL tool to doing new things and retaining new habits. But, same as upgrading an actual dirt road in the world to a giant super highway, it will take time and effort, and it’s easy to abandon it when things are tough.

There are ‘tricks’ though, that can help us. There are two different versions of the ‘two-minute rule’ that come in handy when you’re building up a new habit. Here they are.

The first two-minute rule

You’ve probably heard this one before. If doing something takes less than two minutes, you should do it. Let’s say you want to stop building up a pile of mail by your door, and want to eliminate this unwieldy stack of papers. Today you’re stuck in this cycle of letting it build, then having to spend an hour or two going through it all, and reducing it back to zero. Instead, consider how much easier your life would be if you never allowed it to become a stack. How do you do that?

Well, every time you walk in the door with your new mail from your postbox, immediately go through it. I’m willing to bet it will take literally less than two minutes to do it. You can easily identify junk mail, important mail, and recycle appropriately. If something needs to be dealt with, you could at least separate that out into a smaller pile of action items you’ll take on that day or that week.

That way, you’re building a new habit of no longer allowing a pile to accumulate! All it takes is two minutes at a time.

You can do the same thing with an existing giant pile! Set a two minute timer, go through however much mail you can in that time, and then stop. If you did that over the course of a month, I bet the pile is gone, and you’ve again successfully started the habit of doing it.

The second two-minute rule

This second one is similar, but different. It comes from James Clear’s Atomic Habits. This basically states that the importance of habit building is less about the time spent doing the thing, but more about the commitment you make to doing the thing. So in the above example, what you’re really trying to do is build a new habit of sorting the mail the second you receive it. Maybe two minutes feels too long, and you’re always rushed when you first come in the door, and feel like you can’t do it. Perhaps you could instead set a twenty second timer. Could you sort your mail for twenty seconds? Probably! Commit to the habit in a much smaller way, because the key thing is just that you’re training your brain to always sort/process things as they arrive, vs. letting things accumulate.

These two rules are powerful in combination. You can break down complex new habits into much smaller ones, and then add on the time as needed.

For example, let’s say you want to meditate for 15 minutes every morning before you work. 15 minutes can feel like a lifetime when you’re first starting a new meditation habit! It will be very easy to not do, and you will dive right into work same as you always do.

Instead, start off by saying you will meditate for 2 minutes. Or even 60 seconds! I bet you could spare 60 seconds to sit, close your eyes, and breathe. Then once you’re done, you set off to work. That way, you’re building that new road in your mind that associates starting work with meditating. Over time, you can increase the time you sit, but in the beginning all that matters is that you’re building a connection between these events.

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