We have all heard the saying “starting is half done.” I have found that to be true in my life. It is so easy to make a long list of all the things I want to get done, and daily just read the list without making progress toward accomplishing anything on the list. Nothing happens until I choose something and get started.
My wife and I have been wanting to put together a collage of pictures from our 450 mile walk across Spain to hang on the living room wall. But the project just sat on my list, it never got started. We both wanted it to happen, yet the wall remained blank.
Last week my wife stated that she wanted the project done this month, before an upcoming event. A few days later, the printed pictures were at the frame shop being assembled. It will be hanging on the wall in about three weeks.
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So, what changed? We added urgency to the project. Suddenly the project had a deadline. To meet our deadline, we started the process by choosing the pictures. After six years of wanting this project to be done, our portion of the project was completed in a few hours. Why didn’t we do the few hours of work years ago so we could have been enjoying the fruits of our labor all these years? Good question.
That’s the way of life. Without a deadline, projects can wait, as we convince ourselves we’ll have time to get it done later. In college, almost all papers are written the night before they are due. All-nighters are pulled to cram for a test rather than learn a little bit every day. How many times are presents purchased the day before the party?
I recently began writing a Broadway musical. But the project didn’t move forward until I joined a focus group of other writers. We set deadlines and critique each other’s work. I recently submitted two songs from the musical to an upcoming fall review, and both were accepted. The director and musical director of the show have created even more deadlines. Those deadlines push me to finish.
Deadlines are one tactic to improve performance, but there are several other methods to realize the dreams and goals we wish to accomplish.
Start where you are
I have often wanted to tackle a project, but I felt like I didn’t know enough about the needed aspects to begin. So instead of starting, I convinced myself it would be better to learn more about the subject first. After an extended period without doing any research, I was still at square one.
Most of the time it is best to just begin the project and learn what we need to accomplish each piece as we get to it. We must finish that terrible first draft before we can publish a book. This bad first draft holds so many people back. Where did the silly notion originate that the first draft must be great? The first draft is always terrible! It is not meant to be great. It is meant to get all the ideas onto the page. Once the ideas are on the page, the book can be cleaned up and made great.
When we were making the picture collage of our journey across Spain, we didn’t need to get it perfect. We only needed to get it done. Any of the pictures we picked would serve the purpose of bringing back those wonderful memories. We chose 15 pictures. But there were many other pictures we could have used that would have also inspired great memories. Even after completion, the project is not carved in stone. Making a change later is easy compared to tackling the whole project.
Just get started so you can finally enjoy your finished project, even if it is not perfect.
Take perfection off the table
No project needs to be perfect. I doubt perfect even exists. It simply needs to meet the desires that made you want to do the project in the first place.
In the operating room we have a saying, “The enemy of good, is better.” I remember looking at my first small bowel anastomosis. The stitches were not perfectly even, and the anastomosis looked a little lopsided. I felt a strong urge to cut out the area of the bowel repair and do it over to make it look perfect.
My attending surgeon asked me what the objectives of the anastomosis were. I responded, “to create bowel continuity without having any leaks.”
“Does the sewing job you have just finished meet those criteria?” he asked.
I looked at it and said it did. So, we moved on. If I wanted the anastomosis to look perfect, something only I would know, I would have to prolong the surgery. This would increase the risk to the patient, add operating room time and expense, increase the time everyone else in the room had to work, all without adding benefit to the patient. If the anastomosis works, it works.
Break projects into small tasks
Sometimes a project seems so big we don’t want to start. When we walked across Spain, if we looked at the 450 miles to the finish we might not have felt like starting. But if we only needed to walk five miles to our lunch stop, that we could easily do. After a few weeks of doing those small walks, we arrived in Santiago.
Writing a musical is a huge task and thinking about the totality of the project can prevent a person from even starting. But a musical is made up of a culmination of many small tasks. Write an outline for the play. Write the dialog for Scene 1. Write the song they will sing at the end of scene one. Record the soundtrack for the song. Write the harmony for the song. Record the harmony voices……
When the project is broken down into small tasks, each easy to do, after a while, the job is finished.
One of the members of our study group is writing a novel. She was having a hard time making good progress and worried she might never finish the book. I told her she could easily finish it this year, but she didn’t agree. I gave her the task of writing for one hour first thing in the morning, every day. She was not sure she could do it.
She sent me a text after completing her first hour of writing to tell me she wrote for one hour that morning and it felt great. She can easily write 500 words in an hour, and most days she will write much more than that. Even by writing only 500 words a day, over the next six months she will have written over 90,000 words. That is a good-sized novel.
Set up block time
Every time we start to work on a project, there is a ramp up delay as we get into the mood, see where we left off and decide where we are going today. Sometimes it is best to have a large block of time to do parts of a project.
Imagine if you were to paint a bedroom in your house. Every start up requires masking, tarping, painting and cleaning up. It would be a big waste of time if you only painted one wall of the room each day in order to only spend one hour per day on the project. The results will not only look better, but will also take less total time if the entire room was painted all at once.
Sometimes the best efficiency is to block out a big chunk of time to do a large chunk of the project. Blocking out the morning and painting the entire room is far more efficient.
Block time takes preparation. You must look ahead in your calendar and choose an open slot and book it for painting. Look at your projects and pick out the parts that require block time and make room in your schedule for it. Some blocks need only a few hours, but if you don’t plan ahead, you will never have that small block of hours available.
List only three tasks on your to do list
This is hard for most high performers to do. Since there are so many things they want to get done, they usually list them all. But there is never a day when they can pat themselves on the back and say I have accomplished what I wanted to get done today, since they will never cross everything off this long list, especially since they are continuing to add new things to the list as the day unfolds.
Becoming more focused will speed up our accomplishments. Only list three things on our to-do list for any given day. Then order the items by importance and don’t go to item number two until number one is finished.
If three very important things are completed today, it will be a very productive day. Don’t waste time doing a bunch of little easy things when there are big things still unfinished. After crossing off the final item on our list, we can say we are all caught up. Then we can play, relax, or do some other things we also want to get done. These additional tasks are a bonus.
The feeling of accomplishment we get from completing our to-do list every day creates great momentum. The feeling of overwhelm, which comes from not being able to get the never-ending list completed, will vanish.
There are many other ways to boost our productivity both at home and at work. If you are interested in having a more productive and balanced life, consider my high-performance coaching program. It will change your life, decrease burnout, and create a greater level of joy both in your work and with your family.
