May 11, 2009 • 5:30 am 0
We all know how great it feels to have a clean work space. This week take two minutes to clean up one draw or small part of your workspace.
Pick the space that is least organized, most messy, and the part that could use your attention the most. But don’t go overboard. Tell yourself you will give it two minutes and no more.
You can clean up a lot in two minutes and you will feel a lot better about your workspace.
Filed under: Office, Productivity, 2 minutes, Cleaning, Tips
May 4, 2009 • 5:30 am 0
This may not apply to everyone, but if you have a rice cooker and enjoy green leafy veggies for dinner you can save some time and stove space.
Just put your fresh greens, like spinach, into your rice cooker with some water and you’ll have steamed veggies in no time. Plus you don’t have to take up another pan to cook with!
Just keep an eye on the cooker, because it may overcook them.
Filed under: Personal, Productivity, 2 minutes, Cookin, Tips
April 27, 2009 • 5:30 am 0
I am assuming that readers will already be using an RSS feed of some sort.
For many of us, missing a few days of our feeds means that we have hundreds of articles to sift through. Sometimes it can take us hours or days to catch up with everything we missed. Or we give up and mark everything as read.
Next time you are in your feed reader, take a few moments to look through your feeds two types of feeds:
Thinning out your RSS feed gives means that when you read it, you are reading things that you actually care about and want to read.
On the other hand, if you are still building your feed, take some time to subscribe to a few feeds from sites that you regularly visit.
Filed under: Personal, Productivity, RSS
April 20, 2009 • 1:24 pm 1
The 2 Minute Blog has been going for just over a month now and I thought it would be nice to take some time to do some branding for the blog.
I wanted to have a logo that had something to do with time, so I headed over to istockphoto.com and began searching for clock icons… then I found one for an hour glass. Ooh! an hour glass is cool becuase it gives the illusion that time is moving slower. Egg times are three minutes and often come as hour glasses. You can get a 2 minute task done before an egg timer runs out. Brilliant.
So I found two concepts that I liked. The first is a traditional hour glass icon, from my favorite icon designer, Scott Dunlap. The second is a hour glass with wings on it. I like this concept because it shows that time often gets away from us, and we can harness our time better by accomplishing our two minute tasks.
Please help me decide between the two logos (note: these are just concepts, not full quality):
April 13, 2009 • 3:54 pm 0
In this 2 minute post I am going to show you how to sign up for a free account with 37 signal’s Backpack To Do application. This is in follow-up to a previous post about Online To Do List Tools.
If you want to use back pack with a group of people — partner or business — you will have to upgrade to a paid account.
Filed under: Office, Personal, Productivity, Tools, Uncategorized, 2 minutes, Tips
April 6, 2009 • 5:30 am 0
According to an article on HowStuffWorks.com about flushing toilets, the average low-flow toilet uses 1.6 gallons for each flush.
Another post on water conservation estimates that the average, non-Navy shower uses 20 gallons of water.
How do these two facts relate? We can use the excess water from our showers to offset the water that we use when the toilet flushes.
I know it may seem gross to talk about toilet flushing, but this is a no brainer way to save water on a regular basis, much more than just turning off the sink when we brush our teeth.
If we want to save water, first join the Navy in turning off the water after you get wet and while you are soaping up.
Next, place a bucket in your shower to collect the water you waste waiting for the water to warm up. Then, when you flush the toilet, pour the clean, cold water from the shower into the back of the toilet.
Let’s say you did this 3 times a week.
Filed under: Going Green, Tips
March 30, 2009 • 5:30 am 2
This goes for personal and business calls.
You will feel better about having the calls off of your todo lists, and the people you are calling will appreciate hearing back from you in a timely manner.
Filed under: Office, Productivity, Social, 2 minutes
March 23, 2009 • 5:00 am 7
Actually, you don’t need any tools for your two minute to do lists because if it takes less than 2 minutes you do it right away.
However, there are times when you can’t get to it right away, but a 2 minute to do pops into your mind. “I need to take out the garbage,” you think, on your drive to work.
For those times, there are a few to do list applications online that you can use. Here are my favorites:
All of these apps have online access, aswell as iPhone apps, for those savy 2-minuters on the go.
I have tried all four, put prefer Backpack. Yes, they have a free version, but you have to search around for how to get the free account instead a paid one: look for the links underneath of the normal signup table.
I’ll post more on tools and apps at another time, but I am trying to keep the post times within about 2 minutes.
Filed under: Office, Productivity, Tools, 2 minutes
March 16, 2009 • 1:12 pm 0
You can even start your own blog in 2 minutes!
To make things easier (and cheaper), instead of buying a domain, uploading a CMS, and configuring it to my preferences, I went to WordPress.com and registered a new blog with them.
I even went to Google Trends and researched whether more people searched for “2 minute rule” or “two minute rule”. 2 minute rule it was, and so the2minuteblog.wordpress.com was born.
Now, let’s see if I can take 2 minutes a week to update it 
