Why the artificial time constraint instead of just applying “Do it now” to everything?
Two reasons. First, it’s poor triage. If the cartridge on your exotic pen runs out of ink, and it turns out that finding a replacement cartridge online is harder than you expected, you don’t want to spend the next half hour at work surfing the web just to finish what you started when there are almost certainly more important things to do. The search for the pen cartridge might have actually started as a two-minute action, but having the rule in place keeps your attention from spiralling into minutiae. Once your realize that more than two minutes have elapsed, you can make a judgement call to either continue or to put it on your task list. By putting it on your list, you can review it in relation to other items to see if what you’re choosing to do is the best thing you could be doing. The rule’s delimiting effect is intentional. If you’re processing an in-basket with 50 items, adhering strictly to the two-minute rule means that you’ll spend a theoretical maximum of 100 minutes processin
