Obvious Ideas

Today a friend of mine mentioned that you can find on David Allen’s web site a GTD utilty called “Two Minutes Timer”. As it name states it’s a two minutes timer, that will make a sound when the time ends and flashes “What is your next action?”. If you aren’t famililar with the GTD methodology – the 2 minute timer is intended to facilitate the 2 minute rule, which states that:

“If the Next Action can be done in 2 minutes or less, do it when you first pick the item up. Even if that item is not a “high priority”, because it takes longer to store and track any item than to deal with it the first time its in your head.”(p. 131, “Getting Things Done”)

While the GTD methology is a great thing, paying 10$ for a utility that I can write in half an hour seemed to be as too much. Making a quick google search for gtd + “two minutes timer” reveled to me that I wasn’t the only one who thought like that. 20 minutes later I’ve compiled a list replacement timers for PC, Mac, Google Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and more…

Really valuable resource was the LifeHack post about one of this apps (for PC – third in the list) – in the post comments I found most of the other links.

Some of this utilities are even handier than the original one by David Allen, as they offer more features such as -

• Setting the timer for then two minutes – while the 2 minutes rule is cool, sometimes you want to set a limited period of time for a certain task, which is longer than two minues.
  This is very useful on meetings – see rule #6 – “Stick to the clock” on Business Week’s article on How to Run a Meeting Like Google.
• Counting below zero – ideal for seeing how you exceed your original estimaiton of time (helps you to realize how much time the different task you do take).

PC

• Two Minutes Timer by Avesh Jain – The application pointed out by LifeHack. (requires .NET Framework 2.0)

• Two Minutes Timer by Brett Kelly – Simple application , written specailly to replace David Allen’s one. (requires .NET Framework 2.0)

• Minute Timer 1.1 – Freeware general timer, that can be used for keeping up with the 2 minutes rule.

Mac

Dan Messsing from Stuntblog wrote a Two Minutes Timer for Mac – you can find it here.

As a PC user I didn’t really looked into, and I don’t know what other alternatives exist. If you like something else, you’re more than welcome to leave a comment with a link.

Web Based

http://www.lumisoft.net/teatimer.htm?2

Google Widgets
(can be used on your Google Homepage or any other webpage)

• Online-Stopwatch.com – stopwatch and a countdown clock.
• Timer – simple timer. When the time ends a popup jumps.

Yahoo Widget

Tea Timer – simple countdown clock originally designed to be used as a cooking/tea timer. Can be configured to display topmost after the alert is triggered. Also it continues to countdown below zero.

Easiest way

Among the comments on LifeHacker I saw another possible solution for keeping up with the two minutes rule – “Even cheaper – LOOK AT A CLOCK”.

Hope it was useful for you,

Arik