What does it mean that the two-minute version?

Every habit should have a two-minute starter version for low-energy days.

Example: You have a daily writing habit that typically runs forty-five minutes. One Tuesday you wake up with a headache, your child was up twice in the night, and your calendar is wall-to-wall meetings starting in an hour. The forty-five-minute version is impossible. But you have a two-minute version: open your notebook, write one sentence about what you would write if you had time, close the notebook. You do it standing in the kitchen while the coffee brews. The habit fires. The identity signal — I am a writer — transmits. The streak holds. On Friday, when energy returns, you write for an hour. The system survived the low day because it had a degraded mode, not just a full mode.

Try this: List your five most important daily or near-daily habits. For each one, write its full version (what you do on a good day) and then its two-minute version (the absolute minimum that still counts as doing the thing). The two-minute version must be completable in 120 seconds or less with no special equipment, location, or mental state required. Test one two-minute version today, even if you have the capacity for the full version — you need to know it works before you need it.