The Two-Threshold Rule: A Tiny System for Deciding Which Coding Ideas Deserve Your Time

Every developer knows the feeling: your notes, backlog, and brain are overflowing with ideas.

• A script to automate an annoying task
• A new feature for your side project
• A refactor you know would clean everything up
• A wild experiment that might be the next big thing

The problem isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s deciding which ideas deserve your time.

Enter the Two-Threshold Rule: a tiny system that helps you quickly filter ideas so you spend your time on what actually matters—and stop overthinking the rest.

The Core Idea: Two Thresholds, One Simple Decision

Most prioritization advice tells you to think in terms of impact vs. effort. That’s useful, but vague. The Two-Threshold Rule makes it concrete.

You create two clear thresholds:

1. Impact threshold – What’s the minimum impact an idea must have to be worth serious effort?
2. Effort threshold – What’s the maximum effort you’re willing to spend on a low-impact idea?

Then you only pursue ideas that are either:

• Very high impact, even if they require real work
• Very low effort, even if their impact is modest

Ideally, you want ideas that are both high impact and low effort—but they’re rare, so don’t rely on them.

Everything else gets parked or dropped.

Turning Impact–Effort Into a Visual Dashboard

To make this concrete, use a simple impact–effort matrix. Draw a 2x2 grid (or use a digital board):

• X-axis: Effort (low → high)
• Y-axis: Impact (low → high)

Label the quadrants:

1. High impact / Low effort → Do immediately
2. High impact / High effort → Schedule, plan, and protect time
3. Low impact / Low effort → Do opportunistically (if under your effort threshold)
4. Low impact / High effort → Drop ruthlessly

Your impact threshold is a horizontal line: anything below it needs to be extremely cheap to justify.

Your effort threshold is a vertical line: anything above it needs to be significantly impactful to justify.

When new ideas appear, plot them quickly:

• If it lands in High impact / Low effort → make it your next task.
• If it lands in High impact / High effort → add it to a scheduled project block.
• If it lands in Low impact / Low effort → do it only if it’s tiny and you have slack.
• If it lands in Low impact / High effort → say no.

This matrix becomes your visual dashboard for idea triage.

The Two-Minute Rule for Idea Triage

The biggest trap with prioritization is not choosing badly—it’s not choosing at all.

To avoid endless debates with yourself, use a two-minute rule:

If you can reasonably decide on an idea in under two minutes, decide immediately.

That means:

• In under two minutes, estimate impact (roughly) and effort (roughly).
• Put it in the matrix.
• Apply your thresholds.
• Decide: do, schedule, park, or drop.

If an idea clearly fails your thresholds (low impact, high effort), discard it without guilt. If it’s high impact and reasonable effort, schedule dedicated time. If it’s small and reversible, err toward trying it.

The goal isn’t perfect accuracy. It’s avoiding a backlog full of “maybe later” items you’ll never truly commit to.

The Reversibility Filter: Bias Toward Cheap Experiments

Some ideas are risky. Not because they’ll break production, but because they might waste a lot of time.

This is where the reversibility filter helps:

If trying an idea is cheap and easily reversible, bias toward quick experimentation.

In practice, that looks like:

• Spinning up a separate git branch for a refactor experiment.
• Writing a small prototype script instead of building a full system.
• Testing a minimal version of a feature behind a feature flag.

Ask yourself:

• Can I test the core of this in 1–2 hours?
• Can I isolate it so I can throw it away if it fails?

If the answer is yes, the idea moves closer to the Low effort side of your matrix—even if the full version would be big.

This is how you increase your rate of experiments without committing to massive projects.

Protecting Time: Borrowing From the 20% Rule

Companies like Google popularized the idea of “20% time”—a fixed slice of time where engineers can work on self-directed projects.

You can copy this idea at an individual level.

Reserve a fixed, protected portion of your week for high-upside coding experiments that pass your thresholds.

For example:

• One afternoon per week (e.g., Fridays from 1–5 pm)
• Or one deep-work block twice a week (e.g., Tue/Thu mornings)

Use this time only for:

• High impact / reasonable effort ideas you’ve scheduled
• Reversible experiments that cleared your thresholds

No bug fixes, no random tidying, no inbox. Just deliberate experimentation.

This is how “small” experiments sometimes turn into big outcomes—like how AdSense and Google News originally came from side projects and internal experiments.

The difference: those ideas had a protected lane to be tried.

A Tiny System That Beats Ad-Hoc Intuition

Developers often rely on intuition:

• “This feels cool, I’ll start it.”
• “This is annoying, I should fix it sometime.”
• “Maybe I’ll explore this new framework this weekend.”

On any single decision, intuition might be fine. But over months and years, it leads to:

• Half-finished tools no one uses
• Over-engineered improvements with tiny payoff
• Neglected, high-impact ideas that feel “too big” to start

A tiny, consistent decision system beats this. It doesn’t have to be complex:

1. Impact–effort matrix as your dashboard
2. Two thresholds (minimum impact, maximum effort)
3. Two-minute rule to decide quickly
4. Reversibility filter to bias toward small, cheap tests
5. Protected time each week for the winners

This small structure reduces overthinking and makes it far more likely you’ll ship the kind of experiments that sometimes turn into something big.

Practical Setup in 15 Minutes

You can implement the Two-Threshold Rule today with minimal friction:

1. Create your matrix

   • Use a whiteboard, Notion board, Trello, or a simple 2x2 table in a doc.
   • Label quadrants by impact/effort.

2. Define your thresholds (rough, not perfect)

   • Impact threshold: “Worth it if it meaningfully reduces recurring pain for me/team/users.”
   • Effort threshold: “If it takes more than 1–2 days, it must be clearly high impact.”

3. Dump your current idea list onto the matrix

   • For each idea, give a fast gut-feel ranking: high/low impact, high/low effort.
   • Don’t overthink; keep to the two-minute rule.

4. Act on the output

   • High impact / Low effort → pick 1–2 and do them next.
   • High impact / High effort → schedule them into your calendar.
   • Low impact / Low effort → cherry-pick only if tiny or fun.
   • Low impact / High effort → delete or archive.

5. Block your experiment time

   • Add recurring calendar events for your “20% time.”
   • Fill that time only with ideas that passed your filters.

Repeat this light triage weekly or whenever your idea list gets noisy.

Conclusion: Make It Easy to Do the Right Work

You don’t need a heavyweight productivity system to decide what to code next.

With the Two-Threshold Rule, you:

• Focus on high impact or low effort (preferably both)
• Use an impact–effort matrix as a simple, visual guide
• Decide quickly with a two-minute rule
• Lean on a reversibility filter to favor cheap experiments
• Protect consistent time for your best ideas

The result isn’t just better prioritization—it’s momentum.

You ship more experiments. You waste less time on dead ends. And you give your highest-upside ideas a real chance to exist in the world, instead of living forever in your notes.

Start small: sketch the matrix, set your thresholds, and triage your next five ideas. That’s all it takes to put this tiny system to work.