Recently I’ve been battling the forces of internal resistance and losing. I’ll sit down to do some work and I end up watching videos of halloween decorations or something equally insane. I’ll get to the end of the day and say to myself, “Tomorrow I’ll do that work and get it done.” Tomorrow comes and it’s the same routine.
It’s not even difficult work, it’s basically me logging in and sprucing up some articles with pictures and better formatting before going live. As I’ve found recently though, the hardest part of getting work done is actually beginning it. If you can manage to begin your work, your chances of finishing it skyrocket.
For some reason while sitting in bed an idea flashed into my head about how to defeat this. It’s called “Just two hours“.
The trick is to lower resistance by convincing yourself that all you have to do is complete a small chunk of work for the day. I said to myself, “the hell with completing big tasks, 2 hours of work is better than nothing.”
If you give yourself a multi faceted task to complete for the day, you may find yourself not starting it because you don’t want to. You can’t find the will to do so when no one is telling you to do it. In short, you may lack self discipline. Start breaking your tasks down into smaller units and I have found that the resistance is much more manageable.
So the next day I decided to just do 2 hours of work for the day and a curious thing happened.
During the 2 hours of work, I noticed that I was really going with the flow. A couple minutes before the 2 hours were up I was still in the middle of what I was doing. I decided to abandon the 2 hour rule for the day and keep working until my task was complete.
So by tricking my mind I only had to do 2 hours of work, I ended up doing much more and ultimately completing the task I set out to do. The key here is that if you can’t sit down and do something, you may have to trick yourself into believing it’s not a big thing to do.
This is a good way to get yourself going. The other trick I use is the 2 minute rule. I tell myself I’ll just work on something for two minutes! Which usually just involves opening the application I need to use. But somehow just that process of opening the app seems to help and I get working on it! (for way more than two minutes)
This sounds like a useful technique. I personally always try to eradicate Procrastination, but it is so easy to get distartacted by the Internet. Especially streaming series is the most time consuming thing on earth.
Nice post!
Believe me, I know all about it. Personally I like to waste time watching people playing street fighter. I don’t get it. Best to just turn it off.