Question
What is when to do tasks immediately?
Quick Answer
If a task takes less than two minutes do it immediately rather than scheduling it — because the overhead of capturing, organizing, and tracking it exceeds the cost of doing it now.
Example: You finish a deep work block and switch to your administrative window. Your task list has twenty-three items. Fourteen of them are genuinely small: confirm a meeting time, rename a file, approve a pull request, reply to a one-line question, update a spreadsheet cell, forward a document. You could review, prioritize, and schedule each of these fourteen items across the week. But the act of scheduling each one — deciding when to do it, tagging it with a context, adding it to a time block, re-reading it when the time block arrives — costs more cognitive overhead than simply doing the thing. You spend forty minutes dispatching all fourteen. Your task list drops to nine items, all of which genuinely require thought. The administrative weight you have been carrying for days evaporates in less than an hour, and you enter your next deep work block with a mind that is noticeably quieter.
This concept is part of Time Systems in the How to Think curriculum.
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