What’s stopping you from getting things done?

I was recently emailing a friend, John Peterson, and I mentioned my blog again to him. His response was: “What’s your next post about? When’s it coming out?” Both were fair questions, and I clearly avoided the latter in my response. It led to me pondering about why I specifically avoided the question of “when?”

John had put up his post of the day about writing in a “stream of consciousness instead of perfectly themed chapters of a book.” It got me thinking and led me to a revelation: I have been stuck in an analysis paralysis of focusing on the perfect blog post. The writing of a long, perfect blog post seemed like such a big, intimidating project that it was impossible for me to find the time to sit down and write for multiple hours at a time. This perfectionism mindset has been a major impediment in any progress of producing content.

I actually found the time to record a six minute long podcast that was scheduled for release about a month before this. After reviewing my work the next day, I canceled the scheduled release and scrapped the whole project. I just hadn’t spent enough time on the project to make it worthwhile to the reader. In addition, it was not high enough quality, so it did not make the cut. However, if I had never tried to produce a podcast, I would have never known what the outcome would be. I’ll stick to blogging for now.

When it comes to blogging, like many other things in life, consistency is of high value. Before I can even consider being consistent with blogging on a regular basis, I need to start with something. To get anything in life accomplished, one of the most important things to do is to simply get started by taking action.

Recently it was my birthday, so I am officially one year older. One of my biggest motivators is a quote taped to my bathroom wall: “In one year, you will be one year older” (Ramit Sethi). In other words, you have 365 days until you are one year older, and every single day that passes, you are another day closer to being one whole year older. Personally, a year is a long enough time period where if I were to look back to day one of 365, I would want to see substantial self-improvement. That improvement, however, starts every single day when you wake up. A great starting point to start tracking when this year starts is your birthday. No matter when your birthday is, think about how much you can improve yourself between now and your next birthday. When it is your birthday, think of it as a milestone of improving yourself, and ask yourself: “What can I do to keep improving myself in the next year?” At the time of writing this, I have another 355 days left in my year, and the clock is ticking.

As I said above, the most important thing to do is to get started, but what does that even mean? It means making small, focused, and achievable goals to complete tomorrow to make it an accomplished day. The way I think about what goals to set for the following day is to ask the question: “If I could only accomplish three things tomorrow, what would those three things be?” As long as each goal is met the next day, it has been a success. By all means, if you are on a roll, you can go beyond the small goals you set for yourself and go above and beyond. The reason I am here writing this is because I sat down before going to bed last night and wrote three things on a post-it note:

1. Read one chapter of the book I am currently reading, which is The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur by Mike Michalowicz.
2. Do 20 pushups throughout the day. (I ended up doing three sets of ten. Twenty pushups would have made it a successful task, but I was already on a roll, so I asked “why stop here?”)
3. Write one paragraph of my next blog post. (I ended up scrapping all of my original ideas and just wrote. I reached one paragraph easily, but again, I was already on a roll, so I did not stop.)

These were all achievable goals for me, and I did achieve all of them. If I had stopped there, I would have been satisfied with my day and felt like it was a success. That being said, completing these three small goals led to so much more than I had expected. It let to me doing more pushups than I had expected to do, and it led to me writing this blog post.

Going above and beyond will not happen every time, but at the minimum, you should always be accomplishing the small goals you set for yourself. If you are not accomplishing the small goals, go smaller until you have three goals that you can achieve. Only after having a successful day of achieving the three goals should you consider making bigger goals.

The idea behind small, focused goals is to maximize effective use of your time, rather than efficient use of your time. I could be using my time very efficiently every day, but if I am not focused on anything that will have an effect, I’m really not accomplishing much. I could watch cat videos and scroll through news feeds on Facebook extremely efficiently, but that’s not an effective use of time. These goals you set should be an effective use of time to get you closer to your goals. Start smaller than you think, too. For example, if you really want to start working out for the first time in a long time, set one of your goals to do something you know you can accomplish. I started with five pushups one month ago. I continued to do only five pushups for an entire week, but that’s 35 more than I’d normally do in a week.

One thing that has personally helped me focus on completing these small goals is something very simple: writing it down on an index card or post-it note. I have already taken a few minutes to define my goals for tomorrow on another post-it note. Now it’s your turn. What will your three goals be to accomplish tomorrow?

PS: If you want more information about being effective vs. being efficient, one of the best podcasts I have listened to is by Tim Ferriss, and the link to that episode (#63) is here.