Mastering the Art of “just the Start”

For most of us, nothing is more daunting than facing a blank page face to face. Of course, tabula rasa means you can take a project in any direction, but that limitlessness can quickly become overwhelming.

This post originally appeared on the Help Scout blog .

Sitting down to get started on an activity that requires a lot of mental energy can often seem like the hardest part of the effort. But first you need to understand and overcome the obstacles – mental, emotional or physical – that keep us from sinking.

“Procrastination is not waiting, and it is more than postponing. It’s a decision not to act, ”psychologist Joseph Ferrari told the American Psychological Association. “It is very useful and helpful to gather information to make an informed decision, but when someone just keeps on gathering over the point of sufficient resources, then they are indecisive and waiting is counterproductive.”

So what exactly is holding you back from this initial push to get started, and how can you overcome the resistance and get started right away? Here’s what research shows about our procrastinating smart brains.

Brain Science Behind Our Indecision To Start

We all have our own unique set of problems. Perfectionism. Time is running out. Impulsiveness. Disorganization. Choose your poison. Neuropsychological research shows that the main reason for delayed task start is not limited to one specific factor. It is based on failures in any of nine aspects of the brain’s executive functions.

“Procrastination is increasingly recognized as a violation of self-regulation, so that procrastinators, compared to non-procrastinators, may have a limited ability to resist social temptations, pleasurable actions, and immediate rewards when they are. … … benefits of training are obvious, “- wrotethe researchers in theirstudy in 2012, dedicated to the study habits of students.

This means that everything from impulsivity to self-control, scheduling, activity changes, task initiation, task monitoring, emotional control, working memory, or orderliness can prevent you from getting started on a task. In other words, your problems getting started may be completely different from someone else’s. So while low awareness may be the cause of procrastination for some people, perfectionism may be the culprit for others, the researchers say.

Thinking critically about the root cause of what is holding you back from starting can help you deal with this resistance and begin to overcome it.

Dreams too big can actually backfire

Walt Disney said, “If you dream about it, you can do it.” But while big dreams worked for the mastermind of Mickey Mouse, there was certainly more to the job than just a dream. Research has shown that fantasizing about an idea can keep us from actually starting to realize it.

“The theory is that if we can envision our future success, that will motivate us,” writes psychologist Jeremy Dean in his book Forming Habits, Quitting Habits . But while Dean admits that positive thinking can be an important motivator, he also says that creating what he calls “positive fantasies” about what our future success might look like can actually backfire:

“The problem with positive fantasies is that they allow us to anticipate success in the here and now. However, they do not warn us about the problems that we are likely to face along the way, and can rob us of our motivation. “

This does not mean that dreaming about your ultimate goal is a bad idea. What matters is how you approach this thinking. “Unlike fantasies, a more effective way to visualize the future is to think about the processes involved in achieving a goal, rather than just the final state of achieving it,” says Dean.

Try writing these steps down so you can see them on paper. Break them down into guided actions so you don’t just go astray with a dream that’s too big to be embraced.

Avoid the trap of hard work

Our brains love hard work. It’s nice to get to mailbox zero or spread the papers on your desk because you get an immediate and tangible reward – seeing your results right here and now. But often we fill our days with hard work so we don’t just get to work that we really need to do.

Productivity coach Michael Bungei Stanier advises, instead of making a long list of things to do during the day. “It’s not an indicator of success if you check out forty-seven things in a day, if you didn’t actually accomplish the most important thing,” Stanir writes. “Identify three important activities you want to do each day and list them as ‘all day tasks’ on your calendar so you can remember what they are.”

When you jot down a project to start as an “all-day task,” you will continually remind yourself what your top priorities for the day are.

Be more forgiving

Postpone the task long enough and you may be trapped in the feeling that it’s too late to start. “What’s the point?” you may ask yourself. “I’m already so behind.” Not so fast. It turns out that forgiveness plays an important role in helping us get started with the urgent tasks we have been avoiding.

Psychologist Tim Peachil and his research group at the Department of Psychology at Carleton University have studied the relationship between forgiveness and task initiation by examining the learning patterns of university students. They found that those students who were able to forgive themselves for postponing their first exam did a better job and got down to speed on the second exam. The researchers write:

“Forgiving yourself for putting off until later is likely to be an important step in changing your motivation.”

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