Calibrate your personal do-it-now threshold

When This Fires

• When implementing GTD or any capture-and-process system and choosing your dispatch threshold
• When the default 2-minute rule feels either too generous or too strict
• When you want to optimize the boundary between "do now" and "capture for later"
• Complements Never apply the two-minute rule during maker time… (never during maker time) with the calibration for when the rule does apply

Common Failure Mode

Accepting 2 minutes as universal truth. For someone with a streamlined capture system (30 seconds to log a task, 2 minutes to review and execute later), the actual threshold might be 90 seconds. For someone with a complex project management workflow (5 minutes to properly log, tag, and schedule a task), the threshold might be 5 minutes. Using the wrong number either creates unnecessary management overhead or unnecessary interruptions.

The Protocol

(1) Select 10 recent small tasks (1-5 minutes each). (2) For each, estimate or measure: Execution time (how long it took to actually do). Management overhead (time to capture + time to review + time to re-engage context + time to execute during processing). (3) Plot or compare: at what execution time does management overhead roughly equal execution time? This is your personal threshold. (4) Apply: tasks below your threshold → do immediately (during processing time, not maker time). Tasks above → capture for later batching. (5) Recalibrate when you change task management systems, since different systems have different overhead profiles.