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Use the Two-Hour Rule to Make Progress on
Your Creative Projects
Two hour is long enough to make progress, but not so long that it gets away from you
CHARLIE GILKEY
AUG 27, 2013
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Are you having trouble getting started with a creative project or figuring out how to keep
momentum with it? Try using the two-hour rule.
One of the reasons people get stuck with creative projects is that they make a conscious or
unconscious plan to spend a full day or week working on something. Reality check: most of
us will never get full days to work on something, and when we do, we can't work for that
long anyway. Our creative energy
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The flip side of the coin is that most creative,
Start Writing daring projects
Get the app are hard to do in 15- and 30-
minute chunks. Most projects like this have an engagement threshold that requires that you
have enough time to set up andSubstack
sink into the
is the Flow.
home for Since it's frustrating to not finish and
great culture
hard for most people to pick up where they left off, the natural response is that we don't
start. Better to vacuum, check email, or stay up to date with the YouTube meme of the day.
(Because such things matter.)
Lastly, it's often very hard to tell how much to chunk your projects down into smaller
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Two hours is long enough that you can make significant progress, but not so long that it
becomes a Thing to manage.
Here are a few reasons why the Two-Hour Rule works:
1. It tracks the reality of our creative energy and circadian rhythms. Though each of us
has slightly different patterns, most of us go through a creative/circadian cycle about
every two hours. Peak-performing creatives in ideal environments can normally
sustain that energy for only 4--6 hours - most of us just can't maintain that level of
focus and get diminishing returns after 2 hours.
2. Most people can step away for two hours without things burning down. A
counterproductive belief that many creatives have is that they need to be plugged into
what's going on at all times. Granted, they don't tell themselves that overtly, but their
actions say otherwise. If you can't carve two hours out of your day somewhere, it's a
sign of other, more pressing issues than your creative work (over-commitment, co-
dependency, poor expectation management, etc.). (This post is written from the
perspective of creative knowledge-workers who have some autonomy over their time
but choose to fritter it away. If you work in an organization that has poor
communication practices and even worse expectations, then you may not be able to
keep your job and step away during your workday. Similarly, if you have a customer
service job or another primarily reactive job, you may find it harder to firewall your
time; to be reactive well is to be productive in that context.)
3. It's surprisingly simple to find two hours in your day to repurpose for the things that
matter most. Trim a TV show or two. Get up a little earlier. Get your kids to bed
earlier. Rather than batching chores and household work, spread them out over the
week in the evenings when you're tired and can't do anything creative anyway; then
use the afternoons you would've been doing chores to work on your project. Eliminate
a social activity that's not serving anyone. As Gandhi said, "Action expresses priority."
If it matters to you, you'll find a way.
4. Most of us know about how much we can get done in two hours. Compare "how many
words can you write in two hours?" to "how many words can you write in a day?"
Substitute your creative thing for "write" and you get my point.
5. It helps us think in the more native blocks of time rather than in artificial hours. This
one's subtle but still important. Hours are a relatively recent way of slicing human
existence, whereas part of the complex of features that make up self-awareness is the
recognition of blocks of time. The fact that we have psychochemical rhythms
(mentioned above) gives us an unconscious unit of experience. But there's more to it
than that: it simplifies both our daily planning and our project planning. Once you get
it, it's easier to say "that'll take me four creative blocks" rather than "that'll take me
eight hours" precisely because you know what you can do in a creative block (two
hours).
The next time you're thinking about getting started on a project or wondering how to
chunk it down, use the Two-Hour Rule to make it more approachable. Sneaky tip:
sometimes you have to give yourself two hours of time, at the same time that you tell
yourself that you have to do only 10 minutes of whatever needs to be done. More often than
not, you'll create for two hours if you give yourself the boundaries on both sides.
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The Two-Hour Rule works well unless, of course, you're shuffling or lying. Watch out for
those two as well.
Oh, and one last thing. Our planners have this line of thinking already baked in. Happy
planning and project-completing.
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