Overcoming Procrastination by Starting with the First Task

Are you planning, playing and fiddling, or are you doing? That’s what I am looking at in this week’s episode. 

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Episode 292 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 292 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.

The area of time management and productivity is like many areas in that there is a lot of planning, thinking, tools and systems to play with and much more that is anything but doing. 

Yet of all the different areas, time management and productivity is the one that is meant to focus on execution and getting stuff done. Sadly, over the last twenty years or so, certainly since the digital explosion began around the mid-1990s, the focus seems to have moved away from doing the work and more towards organising the work. 

Now a limited amount of organising is important, after all, knowing where something is does help you to be more productive. But, moving something from one area to another is not being productive. It’s just moving stuff around. It’s not doing the work. A document that needs to be finished, needs to be opened and finished. Moving it from one folder to another will not write the document. All it does is moves it from one place to another. That’s not being productive. That’s procrastination. 

And it’s on this subject that this week’s question is about. How to focus less on the minors and more on the majors—the activities that get the work done. 

And so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Caroline. Caroline asks, hi Carl, I recently took your COD course and I am struggling to meet the target of only spending 20 minutes a day on organising and planning my day. I find I need a lot more than twenty minutes. Is there a reason why this is important?  

Hi Caroline, thank you for your question. 

 The twenty-minute rule, so to speak, is not necessarily a strict number, it more a way to help people understand that planning and organising, if not checked, will become a dangerous form of procrastination. 

We often use the excuse of something needing more time for planning or thinking about to avoid doing the work. If you think about it, how long does it take to decide something? The answer is no time. You either do it or you don’t. Now that does not mean some things need researching, but researching is different from thinking about and planning. 

To give you an example. One of my bigger projects this year was to redesign my website. It’s been on my list since January the first, and I’ve used the excuse all year that I need to think more and plan what to put there and what to remove. 

Yet, really, I already know those answers and I could very easily have written them out in around ten minutes. That extra thinking time was just an excuse to avoid doing the many hours of work that I know is involved in redesigning a website. 

In the end, I decided to just get it started. I opened up a Keynote document, planned out the design, asked my wife to choose three complimentary colours (she’s better with colours than I am) and mapped everything out. That took one hour (I felt a fool—not only did it only take an hour, I really enjoyed it.) 

The next evening, I sat down and cleaned up my website—removing old pages and cleaning up all the others and implemented the typeface and colour changes. That was two hours of pure joy (really, silly me. There I was procrastinating on the project most of the year and it turned into a very enjoyable project).

A couple of days later the hard lift work had been done and all I was left with was the tidying up. Project completed in just over a week. 

There really was no excuse. It turned out easier than I imagined, it was fun and it was completed in less than ten days. 

Looking back now I feel such a fool. I procrastinated most of the year because I thought it would be long, difficult and boring and it turned out to be the opposite of that. 

How many projects do you have lying around sitting there in your projects list with nothing happening? Why? What’s stopping you from starting the project? 

Try this little experiment. Pick one of those projects you feel needs more thinking and planning, open up your notes and write out what you think needs to be done to get it started—the very first thing. You do do not need to worry about the second task or the third. Just focus your attention on the very next task to get it started and do that task. That is doing. 

The issue with trying to plan out every individual next step is you will be wrong. Many of those steps you think you need to do will not need doing and things you never thought of will need doing. 

With my website redesign, I guessed right on about 30% of the tasks. The remaining 70% came up as I was working on the project. You do not want to be wasting time trying to think of all the steps you will have to take. Just do the first one. The next tasks will present itself before you finish the first. This is also a great way to prevent procrastinating on a complete project. 

Let’s be honest here, you cannot do a project. You can only do the tasks required to complete that project. So, focus on the next task. Don’t worry too much about what comes next. 

Strange how old sayings keep coming back. Saying like:

A journey of a 1,000 miles begins with the first step. 

Well, that very true for your projects. You just have to start wit the first step. The next step will present itself before you finish the first. 

Imagine you decide to decorate your living room. You’ve chosen the colour, so the next step is to clear or cover the furniture. While you are doing that you can be planning which wall you will begin with. You do not need to waste time sitting in front of a screen planning out what steps you will take. Begin with the first. Get the furniture out or covered and then tape over the fixed furnishings and power sockets. 

The great thing with beginning like this is once you’ve started you’re committed. You’re not going to leave your living room furniture stacked up outside your living room. You’re going to get the painting done as quickly as possible so you can get the furniture back in. 

I wasn’t going to leave my website redesign half finished. Once I began, I was committed and it had to get finished as quickly as possible. No chance of further procrastination then. 

Now organising tasks in a task list can be fun when you have just switched your task manager to a new one. All those new bells and whistles to play with. It’s a lot of fun. We convince ourselves that once we’ve moved everything over to our new app, then we will be productive. Trouble is, we’re not. 

The reason people keep switching apps is because they don’t want to do the work, and moving everything around is just an excuse for not doing the work. 

And have I repeated that mistake a lot? I’ve been down that road too many times. Feeling great because I can collect all these new tasks and ideas and it all looks nice and pretty, yet what I forget to notice is while I am admiring my organisational work, the real work is not getting done. 

This is the reason I emphasise the importance of restricting your organising time. It’s the easy part of having a productivity system. The hard part is just doing the work. It can be boring, time consuming and difficult. The trouble is the organising can wait, the work rarely can. 

The key to better productivity, less overwhelm and improved time management is more time doing the work and less time organising it. 

I know this is not for everyone, but I love sitting down on the sofa after a hard day’s work and cleaning everything up. The work for the day has been done, I can put something mildly interesting on the TV, have my laptop on my knee and simply move files, and other stuff to their rightful place. 

It’s being away from my usual work environment and in a more relaxed state that makes this process fun. I usually process my Todoist inbox at this time too. As I say, that might not be for everyone, but this means that the work comes first. The cleaning up and organising comes later. 

Now, if you are starting out with a new system, there’s a learning curve to go through and that curve is slow. When I devised my email process, for example, clearing forty emails from my inbox would take thirty minutes or so. Today, having run the process every day (almost) for the last eight years, I can process 120 emails in less than twenty minutes. It’s repeating the same process every day for a period of time that speeds you up. 

My daily closing down admin routines used to take an hour. Now it can be done in little more than fifteen minutes. Over time I have improved my process for doing that routine. It’s admin, it’s non-critical on a daily basis, but if I allow it to build up over a few days, it’s no longer a fifteen minute task, it’s more than an hour. Now my brain is not going to want to do an hour of boring admin tasks and will try and convince me to put it off again. Nope. I’ve learned that lesson. Far better to have fifteen minutes of boring admin than over an hour of it. 

So, Caroline, if you are just starting out on your COD journey, your organising and processing at the end of the day will take longer than twenty minutes. The important thing is you stick with it and build so called muscle memory. Very soon you will notice you get faster at it and the time it takes begins to tumble. 

Really, that’s the secret to better productivity and time management. Building processes, running them consistently so you get faster at them. 

With all that said, the focus should always be on getting the work done first. If you need to spend a little extra time organising, that could be a sign you are getting a lot of work done. However, never mistake activity for motion. Be hyper aware of what you are doing the majority of your time. Are you moving the right things forward? If not, and you are spending too much time planning, organising and thinking about how to complete a project, that’s when you want to stop, look for the very next tasks and do that. 

I hope that helps, Caroline. Than you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.