An Important Habit Just to Get Started
Every day, my to-do list is a reminder of all the other projects I haven’t started yet. Passion for projects that I “just don’t have time for”. When will I have time? A familiar friend – fear – is knocking at my door.
This post originally appeared on the Crew blog .
“I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself.”
When Bonnie Ware, a nurse who looked after patients in the final weeks of their lives, posted the most common regrets she’s heard , giving up on the pursuit of dreams was number one.
“When people realize that their life is almost over and look back at it clearly, it is easy to see how many dreams remain unfulfilled. Most people didn’t even fulfill half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was because of the choices they made or didn’t make, ”she wrote.
Each day we choose how to spend the few hours we have. Yet despite the constant warnings to chase what we believe in, we often fall prey to procrastination and the fear of even starting out.
For me and 95% of the American population who admit to being the victim of procrastination or even total avoidance of what we want to do in our lives, “time management” goes so far. And when it comes to why we can’t get started, there are more serious emotional and psychological reasons.
Seeing the future and helping it
Procrastination isn’t just about putting things off. He deliberately puts off important work, knowing that there will be negative consequences in the future.
We’re not just forgetful or complacent. We intentionally harm ourselves by focusing on short-term pleasure at the expense of long-term pleasure. Nearly all studies agree that procrastination leads to higher levels of depression, anxiety, and worsening of well-being. In our professional life, this can have dire consequences. In our new way of working with increased autonomy, to work when and how we want, your word is your reputation. And missing deadlines without a good reason is really not a good reason.
Dr. Pierce Steele, professor of organizational behavior at the University of Calgary, has come up with a simple formula to determine why we make a choice.
In summary, motivation is the motivation or preference for a particular course of action, or what economists call utility . At the top of the equation, expectation is the odds of an outcome coming from your choice, and value refers to how useful that outcome might be.
Basically, impulsivity is your sensitivity to lag (how easily distracted you are), and lag is how long you have to wait to receive your reward.
So, all our decisions boil down to the expectation of a good result depending on how long it will take us to complete the task. Seems simple, right? We weigh the potential value against the effort expended. But what happens when our understanding of the potential value of what we do is skewed?
Recent studies of chronic procrastinators have revealed what Dr. Fushia Sirois, professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield, England, called “temporary myopia,” or an inability to see into one’s future.
We all have a way to bring our minds into the future, whether it’s planning and goal setting or positive affirmations. But for procrastinators, that vision is blurry. It’s more abstract and impersonal, and procrastinators often feel emotionally disconnected between who they are and who they will become.
Another hurdle is what behavioral economists call inconsistency over time — the tendency of the human brain to value immediate rewards more than future rewards. Add it all up and we’re in a bad place to make decisions from the start. Our motivation to start any task depends on how much we value it, but we attach more importance to what is happening now, rather than what awaits us in the future, and we justify this decision by emotionally separating ourselves from our future. “I am”.
This is why you can go to bed promising to change things for the better and wake up only to stick with the same old habits.
I present to you: 1. The future of you: 0.
Learning to diet in a pastry shop
But it’s not just internal strife that causes lack of motivation. The world we live in is toxic in terms of motivation.
In his research, Dr. Steele compares our daily lives to trying to diet in a candy store and then accuses us of getting fat. We are driven over and over to the place of consumption. And consumption trumps creation.
Products are created every day to get you to use them. Hooked by Nir Eyal – a basic, hands-on guide to creating products that indulge our impulsiveness and keep us coming back to things we might not “should” use, have become a staple in the business world. Your business’s survival depends on people coming back again and again. So it’s no surprise that companies are giving up on it in order to become sticky. They need your attention and they know how to get it. This is nothing new.
Ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates and Aristotle coined a word to describe this type of behavior: akrasia . Simply put, Akrasia is weak-willed – unable to see long-term value and lends itself to instant gratification. It’s like watching TV drunkenly instead of reading a book or working on a project you wanted. Or ordering takeout instead of preparing yourself a healthy meal.
This is why the ability to delay gratification is an important predictor of future success. Success takes hard work. Long hours of concentration with no promise of reward. However, with the world around us and what it does to our brains, it’s all too easy to just give up and take the low-hanging fruit.
Forming a habit just getting started
Ironically, the guilt and frustration we experience about not getting started is often worse than the pain of actually getting the job done.
In the words of writer and theorist Eliezer Yudkowski :
“From moment to moment, getting the job done is usually less painful than putting it off for later.”
This is the “just the beginning” hump that is so difficult to overcome. But once we do that, momentum takes over. We see immediate results from the work we do, and instead of looking for ways to avoid it, we look for ways to get it done.
While there are a few common “cures” for putting off work you’ve already started, such as breaking big goals into short, actionable pieces (“I’ll be working on my article for 1 hour at 11am Tuesday morning,” not “I’ll work over my talk on Tuesday ”), taking planned breaks and rewarding yourself for completing milestones and the entire project, how about getting over your fear of getting started?
Are there ways to combat or even anticipate procrastination and correct course?
Sweat over the little things (because they add up)
When we think about starting a new project, we are usually held back by huge milestones – big ideas. We often forget about small aspects – small details that are overlooked when we think about starting.
When you allow small losses to accumulate, such as sleeping longer when you want to start early, or allowing easy distractions, you are working to implement a small waste process. But they don’t stop there.
In his book Procrastination and Obedience, Professor George Akerlof wrote that procrastination is a great example of when repetitive errors of judgment occur because we mistakenly ignore their costs and benefits:
“In this case, each error in judgment results in little damage, but these errors together result in large losses over time and ultimately cause significant regret on the part of the decision maker.”
There is a thought process called the Zeigarnik effect , which is triggered when you are close to completing a task, pushing you towards the finish line as if you are running from a zombie swarm. You feel like you just can’t stop until you’re done.
We have all experienced this feeling at some point, be it the last chapter of a book or the last page of an essay, once we cross this threshold, it will be easier for us to keep moving. So why not switch your own process from small losses to small gains?
Hemingway always stopped writing in the middle of a sentence so that when he returned to work the next day he could pick up where he left off, effectively forcing himself to go into “must be done” mode.
Use a commitment device
Only the beginning is a mental battle that we sometimes need to turn into something physical before we can win. One way to do this is to implement a commitment mechanism – some strategy that will make it damn impossible for you to continue negative behavior.
For Victor Hugo, author of The Gorback of Notre Dame , this meant locking all his clothes in a closet so that he could not go out, socialize or be entertained and was forced to write.
According to Douglas Adams, who wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , he was locked in a hotel room for several weeks (which his publisher and editors seem to have done regularly without much complaint from him (and why writers always want strange books) strategies to make them work?)).
Create the right environment to get started
Looking back at Dr. Steele’s equation of motivation, one of the main factors killing our motivation is impulsivity. Look around you right now. How many things are within reach that could potentially distract you? Our urges take over, and creating an isolated workspace is often the easiest way to combat them. As my father used to say, “out of sight, out of mind.”
For example, writer and artist Austin Cleon creates two separate work areas surrounded by things to get him started: an analog desk with paper, pencils, and drawing supplies, and a digital desk with his computer, MIDI controller, and tablet. Establish systems and processes so that the goal is not to “create excellence,” but simply to create.
This could include cleaning your work area or setting small, easy-to-reach daily goals (such as committing to 10 minutes of writing every morning). Whatever your method (and there are plenty to choose from), the goal is always to focus your attention on the “just start” mode, not on the “need to finish” mode.
Don’t worry about being perfect
In high school, I almost failed my drawing lessons because I didn’t give up on projects. Technically, they were done. In my opinion, they weren’t perfect yet.
In the end, the anger and fear of handing over a low-quality job got to the point where I didn’t even bother doing it. This is a common obstacle to work. We are afraid of the unknown and instead of walking blindly forward, we spend more time planning.
InDrawing the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards discusses how we all draw and create freely as children, but most of us stop as adolescents:
“The beginning of adolescence seems to herald an abrupt end to the artistic development of drawing skills for many adults. As children, they faced an artistic crisis, a conflict between their increasingly complex ideas about the world around them and their current level of artistic skills. “
This crisis is not limited to the creativity of children. As adults, when we are faced with a new task or goal, our current skill level is usually not related to our vision of how we want to see the final goal.
Consider if you’ve ever wanted to create a website or book. The daunting task ahead will surely cloud your idea . Instead of the excitement of experimentation, we feel self-doubt and fear. The ultimate goal, this ideal image of what we want to create, is suffocating.
As author and marketing guru Seth Godin describes it:
“We tell people that the path to Carnegie Hall is paved with practice, practice, practice. But practice is another word for preparation. I’m not talking about preparation. Getting ready is not the same as getting ready. Willingness is an emotional choice, a decision to implement something … The paradox is obvious: the more important the idea, the less we can be ready. And so we are concerned that the world or our market is not ready for the leap … Wherever we turn, the doors seem to be closed, not open. “
Overcoming the paralysis of the ideal gives you a chance to try. To explore without being limited to how you have identified something in your own mind.
The fear of getting started is often much less than the pain of work. However, our brains can trick us into thinking that the opposite is true. And once we have rooted these beliefs, it is difficult to get rid of them. But the greatest achievements don’t happen without a start.
If we want to create more than we consume , we need to develop these habits every day. Looking back, do you want to remember something that you wanted to do and never started, or when you tried to do something that you could call your own?
Start off. Every day. Start and then restart. Let go of your fear and reconnect with the vision of the future that you so badly want.