There are a lot of ways I trick myself into meeting my goals, like coming up with various rewards and punishments for myself or outsourcing my progress tracking to apps. In general, I’m a deeply goal-oriented person and I am, for better or worse, obsessed with “winning”—which I always thought made me a perfect candidate for complicated productivity techniques like detailed to-do lists full of tasks in order of priority. While I do love a good technique, I decided to switch things up last year when I got worried that maybe I was spending so much time prioritizing and planning that I wasn’t spending enough time doing. So I just focused on the doing—and it worked. Here’s what I mean and how my bright idea helped me crush last year’s resolutions.
Adopting a “do it now” mindset
I’ve covered a lot of productivity hacks for Lifehacker and the two I liked best, both in theory and practice, were the two– and 10-minute rules. The idea is that if a particular tasks takes less than two (or 10, depending on your preferred approach) minutes to complete, you should just get it out of the way early in the day. It’s smart because it leaves little time for deliberation or over-planning, but even when I used it for the 10-minute tasks, I wasn’t convinced it was effective enough. Some tasks take longer than 10 minutes. I felt like the “just do it” mentality was helpful for me, but could be more helpful. So I started thinking more in terms of simply “do it now,” not in terms of time allotments.
Sitting down every morning to write out a to-do list and determine how long each responsibility will take, which are most important, and which will demand the most resources works well for some people, but it is too tedious for me. Since coming around on a “do it now” mindset, I don’t do that anymore at all. When I think of something, I just do it, no matter what it is or how long it will take (within reason). If, for some reason, I can’t fit it in at the moment I come up with it, I add it to a note on my phone, which I also count as doing it now, though the “it” is adding the task to the list.
How this has helped me
My goals for the last year have largely been about my health and fitness, as well as my living space. I wanted to become a healthier, better me, which involved more time in the gym and having a clean, organized home to relax in. My “do it now” mindset helped me with both, especially when I was starting out on my resolutions around this time last year. I didn’t pressure myself to work out at a certain time or try to wedge exercise into a structured daily schedule. Instead, I just firmly told myself I’d go when it occurred to me and I wouldn’t deliberate or make any excuses. I found myself at the gym on lunch breaks, Saturday mornings, and late week nights. As soon as I thought of it, I went (or worked out at home, usually riding my Peloton)—and it worked. The longer I did this, the more working out became a normal, expected part of my day. Notably, by the fall, I had developed such an affinity for my hour of physical activity each day that I did start scheduling it and have been able to wake up every day before the sun to simply knock it out. I don’t think that would have happened if I hadn’t tried my new motivation-first approach.
The same was true for cleaning. There are so many cleaning techniques and approaches out there and, to be clear, each one of those works well for a certain kind of person. I’ve tried them all and nothing was as useful to me as just cleaning something the moment I thought of it or saw it needed to be done. If I see a dirty baseboard, I don’t file that information away for “living room cleaning” day; I hop off the couch and wipe it down. Building this habit was a challenge because it’s easy to kick the can down the road and decide to complete these tasks during designated home-tidying times, but once I got the hang of it, I noticed something: I no longer needed to set aside a Saturday afternoon for cleaning. There was nothing to clean in bulk because it all got handled whenever an issue sprang up.
What do you think so far?
My goals for the new year this time around are to stick with the momentum I built up working out and cleaning, but also improve my finances and notch some professional accomplishments I’ve been putting off during the year I spent on self-improvement. As soon as I finish this, I’m going to call one of the companies overseeing one of my 401k accounts to check on my rollover status, which is something I would have procrastinated on before entering my “do it now” era.
Different things work for different people, but you can get caught up in thinking too much and doing too little. My technique doesn’t come from a book and, I’ll admit, does have to be abandoned sometimes when there are serious, large-scale projects that need to be broken down and handled systematically, but the beauty of it is that it leaves time and mental energy for doing that when I have to.
