This morning while I was doing chores, I heard part of a Hidden Brain episode on how to get out of a rut. Psychology confirms what most of us know: it’s exciting to start or end a task, but it’s easy to get stuck in the middle, your initial motivation waning when your goal seems impossibly far in the future.
The sensible solution, of course, is to divide tasks into doable chunks: instead of focusing on all your Saturday morning chores, focus on loading the dishwasher then starting the laundry then cleaning the litterbox. But even this sensible chunking of tasks grows tiresome when today’s tasks are the same as yesterday’s and the whole remainder of your life, it seems, will be devoted to completing one task after the next.
Today’s Hidden Brain episode discussed how perfectionism can be our biggest obstacle: writer’s block, for example, is often rooted in a desire to write something perfectly, or at least well. Again, the solution to this is simple (and thus paradoxically difficult). Instead of setting a goal to successfully accomplish a thing, set a goal to simply work on the thing. According to this mindset, simply showing up to write is a win, even if you don’t produce anything good.
My experience writing a dissertation taught me the way to write a book is to write chapter by chapter…but sometimes writing even a chapter is an impossibly large task. That is why my weekly writing sessions at the library have been invaluable. I don’t have any target dates or deadlines for any given chapter; I just have a commitment to work on the book for an hour or so every week. Is the project going slower than I’d like? Yes. Is slow progress better than no progress? Absolutely yes.
After being stuck for years on a book I wanted to write but wasn’t actually writing, simply setting a goal to work on it once a week has gotten me unstuck, for now. I’m embarrassed to admit how long it has taken me to realize the simple trick of setting a weekly appointment on my calendar to Do The Thing, but once again, slow progress at realizing life lessons is better than no progress at all.
Hoarded Ordinaries 