Procrastination is usually treated as a lack of discipline. If you look at what happens when you put something off, though, it tends to start with a feeling about the task: it seems too big, too vague or unpleasant, so you look for something easier to do instead.
Trying to overpower that feeling with willpower works badly. A more reliable approach is to make the first step so small that it doesn’t trigger the feeling at all.
Shrink the first step
The idea is simple: commit only to the first two minutes of the task.
- Instead of “write the report”, open the document and write one rough sentence.
- Instead of “go for a run”, put on your running shoes and step outside.
- Instead of “clean the kitchen”, put away five things.
Two minutes is short enough that it’s hard to talk yourself out of. It’s even easier with someone working alongside you; see body doubling. Once you’ve started, the task also feels different. It’s now something in progress rather than something looming, and unfinished tasks tend to pull you back to them. Often you keep going.
Be willing to stop
This only works if stopping after two minutes is a real option. If you tell yourself “just two minutes” while planning to force out two hours, you’ll resist starting just as much as before.
Some days you will stop after two minutes. That still counts, because you’ve kept up the habit of starting.
Decide when, in advance
Starting is easier still if you’ve decided exactly when it happens. Research on goal pursuit has found that simple if-then plans, such as “if it’s 9:00 and I’ve made coffee, I open the draft”, make people noticeably more likely to follow through than a general intention to “work on it”.
The plan helps because it removes a decision at the moment you’re most likely to put things off. You aren’t deciding whether to start; 9:00 means you start.
Remove what’s in the way
Look at what has to happen before you can begin, and remove as much of it as you can. (Your surroundings matter more than most people expect; there’s more on that in Change Your Room Before You Change Your Habits.)
- Leave the work open. At the end of the day, leave tomorrow’s document open with the cursor where you stopped.
- Set things out. Running shoes by the door, notebook on the desk, guitar on its stand rather than in its case.
- Write down the next step. “Fix the intro paragraph” is easier to start than “keep working on the proposal”.
When the task is unclear
Sometimes you keep putting off a task because you don’t know what it involves yet. If your two minutes keep turning into staring at the screen, use them differently: write down what you don’t know, or describe what the finished result should look like. Working that out is often the actual first step.
A one-week test
Pick a task you’ve been avoiding. Write its two-minute version on a sticky note, along with an if-then plan for when you’ll do it. Do the two minutes tomorrow, then decide whether to stop or continue.