“To begin, begin.” — William Wordsworth
“Patience only works if you do. Doing the work + patience = results. Planning to work + patience = procrastination” — James Clear
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” — Joseph Campbell
“One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.” — Paulo Coelho
One Day or Day One
Now or never. Now, not how. Soon is not as good as now. Don’t just imagine doing things someday. Do them now. You don’t find the time to do something; you make the time to do things.
About 99% of the time, the right time is right now.
“The magic you are looking for is in the work you are always avoiding.”
- Often, what we resist the most, holds us the biggest rewards.
- The thing you fear the most is often the thing you most need to do.
- Or: The magic you are looking for is in the fun you haven’t discovered yet.
The Problem
當我們面對一個龐大、困難的專案的時候，很容易會感覺到心理壓力 (feel unprepared/concerned about the potential negative outcome)，不知道從何開始，內心就會產生抗拒和焦慮，遲遲不願意開始做事情。
明知道自己手上有一兩件應該要先做的重要大事，最後卻先選擇其他比較簡單的事來做。 如果只是偶爾為之，的確能創造出一定程度的成果和價值，但如果想讓待辦清單發揮正確的功效，一定要先做 最重要的工作。
The Solution
- When you find yourself procrastinating, don’t resist. Instead lean into it. Procrastinate 100%. Try to do absolutely nothing for 5 minutes. Make it your job. You’ll fail. After 5 minutes, you’ll be ready and eager to work.
- If you’re going to procrastinate, do something you enjoy.
- 積極拖延 (Positive/Productive/Structured Procrastination)
- The gist is that you should never fight the tendency to procrastinate—instead, you should use it to your advantage in order to get other things done.
- While you’re procrastinating, just do lots of other stuff instead
- Nothing Alternatives (禁做他事法) by Raymond Chandler
- You don’t have to do X
- You can’t do anything else other than X during this one focus session
- Skinner’s Law
- If procrastinating, 2 ways to solve it:
- Option 1 - Make the pain of inaction > Pain of action
- Option 2 - Make the pleasure of action > Pleasure of inaction
- The person with a gun to their head or crack cocaine at the finish line doesn’t need motivation.
- If procrastinating, 2 ways to solve it:
- The “Fall Behind”, “Catch Up”, “Go Ahead” Mentality
- 當拖延已發生時，可抱持的心態
- Falling behind is not quitting. It’s just a third of the story.
- 降低成功的門檻 (Telling yourself to lower the bar/stakes, embrace mediocrity, and “choose to” be satisfied)
- Observe the sensation, write it down, and ask yourself: “What am I trying to escape from?”
- 將其分割成一個個細小、可控、明確、具體的階段性任務
- Break complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable chunks 1
- Start on the first one
- 遠離/移除讓你分心的事物，利用環境的信號來減少拖延
- You’re Not Lazy, You’re Dopamine-Depleted
Solving the problem of procrastination is solving the problem of getting started — getting started is the key factor for the other critical idea — momentum.
“The heaviest weight at the gym is the front door.” — Ed Latimore
- 萬事起頭難
- It’s easier to steer a moving ship than to put a stationary one into motion.
- Work has a sort of activation energy, both per day and per project. It’s just about matching the required activation energy—overcoming that initial hurdle.
- The Physics of Productivity by James Clear
- [@abdaalFeelGoodProductivityHow2024]
- Newton’s First Law of Motion, often called the law of inertia :2 ‘An object at rest stays at rest, while an object in motion stays in motion, unless acted on by an external imbalanced force.’ In other words, if an object is still, it will remain still; if an object is moving, it will continue moving, unless another force (like gravity, or air resistance) prevents it from doing so.
- As Newton recognized, it takes way more energy to get started than it does to keep going. When you’re doing nothing, it’s easy to carry on doing nothing. And when you’re working, it’s much easier to carry on working. When you feel like you’ve tried everything to properly motivate yourself but you’re still procrastinating, you need one final boost to get started.
- I like to think of the principle of inertia as a literal hump on a road. Imagine you’re about to cycle down a hill. You’ve got your helmet on, your gears are well oiled, and you’re itching to get started. There’s just one problem. You need to cycle uphill a little before you get to the long slope down. It’s going to take a burst of energy to get over the hump, and exerting that energy might not be the most pleasant thing in the world. But once you’ve overcome it, you’ll be cycling down-hill, the wind in your hair, feeling better than ever and gliding on home.
- You don’t find motivation to start; you need to start to find motivation.
- Motivation is a natural byproduct of movement. When in doubt, just start moving.
- Start even if you can only do a little. Once you get started, it is much easier to continue going.
- The None-Zero Day Principle — becoming one is non-zero
- step by step, day by day, week by week
- The Scandinavians / In Norwegian, they have a phrase dørstokmilla (The Doorstep Mile)
- meaning that the first mile away from your front door is the hardest of all.
- It is the psychological threshold that we have to get over in order to go outside, to leave the comfort of the house behind, and set foot into nature.
- The None-Zero Day Principle — becoming one is non-zero
- See also: The Ovsiankina Effect
When people procrastinate, there’s usually a good reason.
It’s really helpful to respond to a person’s ineffective behavior with curiosity rather than judgment. 3
If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context.
For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness. When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it’s typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being “good enough” or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well.
People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them, or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look harder.
If a person can’t get out of bed, something is making them exhausted. If a student isn’t writing papers, there’s some aspect of the assignment that they can’t do without help. If an employee misses deadlines constantly, something is making organization and deadline-meeting difficult. Even if a person is actively choosing to self-sabotage, there’s a reason for it — some fear they’re working through, some need not being met, a lack of self-esteem being expressed.
Footnotes
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Define the Minimal Enjoyable Action (MEA). Harness the power of Small Wins. ↩
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from «Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica 自然哲學的數學原理» ↩
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All human behaviors make sense with enough information. ↩