Does this sound like you: I ALWAYS have work to do. Lots of it. I’ll NEVER be done with everything. AND there are some things I just can’t seem to get started!
Here are a few ideas to get started and beat procrastination:
- OBC (my acronym for Objective Based Conversations)—What are the top three things that need to happen right now? Write them down, either on a post-it or your to-do list. They MUST be in bullet point format.
- Set a SHORT time limit, say 5-10 minutes, to do the first OBC item. Why? Because allocating time gives you the feeling of control. It’s easy to set a timer on your cell phone.
- Just start. Movement is the key.
Below is more from Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram, on how he does the same thing.
Rule #5 from my book The Fantastic Life: Get a Win
Crossing something off your to-do list is a win, even if it’s something small. And one win leads to another and, before you know it, your entire list has been accomplished.
The five-minute trick that helps Instagram’s CEO crush procrastination
“Most procrastination is caused by either fear or conflict,” says Christine Li, a clinical psychologist specializing in procrastination. Even if we’re motivated to accomplish a task, fear—of failure, criticism, or stress—pits us against ourselves. We want to finish the project, but we also don’t want our fear to become reality. “This conflict makes it seem like it would be unwise or even impossible to move forward,” says Li, “which explains why we sometimes procrastinate even when it makes no sense to do so.”
And so the five-minute rule lowers that inhibition, lulling us into the idea that we can dip quickly into a project with no strings attached, according to Julia Moeller, a postdoctoral research associate at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. “Thus, the person reserves her right to reconsider her engagement after five minutes,” says Moeller, “which might increase the feeling of being in control and making an autonomous decision, rather than feeling forced to do something the person really absolutely does not want to do.”
The tactic also lowers what psychologists refer to as the “costs of an activity,” including emotional costs (fear or anxiety), opportunity costs (missing out on other activities), and effort costs (how exhausting is the activity). Our motivation to engage in an activity increases as costs decrease, says Moeller. So compared to facing down hours of work, a five-minute sprint transforms a burden into something quick and exciting.
The true intrigue of the five-minute rule, though, is why we persist beyond the allotted five minutes once we get started. This is partly because our expectations about how we’ll feel during an activity are often imprecise. Once you’ve started, we often have a more positive attitude toward the task at hand than we expected, says Moeller. For example, studies show that, in general, female students believe they are worse at math than their male counterparts. Yet gender differences disappear when students are surveyed about competency and anxiety during a math test—suggesting that female students’s expectations about their negative feelings toward math do not accurately predict their actual feelings while they are doing it.
Moreover, most activities, even cleaning the dishes or spell-checking a spreadsheet, can elicit the“flow” state, the term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In a state of flow, we become so immersed in an activity that we forget about our surroundings, making time feel as if it’s flying by. Rewarding and motivating in and of itself, flow is also more likely to occur during challenging activities, says Moeller—like challenging oneself to get as much done as possible within five minutes.
Ultimately, Systrom’s five-minute hack, much like the Tomato Timer, revolves around the question of how to give ourselves control over our work. After five minutes of intense work, a massive project may still be massive—but having overcome the initial obstacle of getting started, it will no longer seem impossible.