Some People Seem To Have An Ability to Move Mountains In The Time It Takes Others To Get Out Of Bed In The Morning
I have a confession; I am not one of those people.
For me, without a strategy, getting the smallest task done can at times take me much longer than it should.
If I am not careful I can spend more mental energy on thinking about a task than on what it would take to get the task done.
When I was a kid my report cards invariably said ‘daydreamer’. And that was me, staring out the window, lost over the horizon somewhere.
My brother Stephen on the other hand was a dynamo. I would go to bed seeing him working at his desk, and wake up to see him there in the morning.
Way back, in the dark days of pre-history, if you had food, shelter and water. And if your belly was full and you had someone you were at least mildly attracted to nearby, what was incentive to expend energy to do anything else?
We are wired to run when we need to, find food when we need to, procreate when the urge moves us. The rest we have to use our rational mind to force ourselves to do.
I know that I am not alone. The author Steven Pressfield in his book The War of Art draws an analogy between getting things done and an internal war we wage against our primitive brain. He refers to the force always trying to hold us back from achieving things ‘The Resistance’. The Resistance is what keeps us from writing that book we have always wanted to write, or approaching the girl in the café, or starting that online business, etc.
The Benefits of Reward and Punishment
So how do I, a documented day-dreamer with a millennia of inertia bred into me manage to chase my dreams and get things done? The short answer is I use a simple strategy, and one major incentive that applies directly to a part of my brain that does not like being disturbed – my ego.
I have books on my dresser that go into great detail about well researched strategies for getting things done.
I have not been able to read a single one of them to the end.
Some of the techniques leave me baffled in their complexity, while others simply put me to sleep. I have resigned myself to hoping that if I just leave the books on the dresser next to my bed, then when I sleep the wisdom contained in them will make its way from the pages to my sleeping brain.
It hasn’t happened yet. Perhaps they will invent an app for it.
Until that time I have devised my own high-tech approach to getting things done. And I am now prepared to share it with you.
My supper high-tech solution for getting things done
1. Lists
I write a list, and another list, and another other list. I have text lists on my computer desktop.
I have my five year plan list, and my 6 month plan list. The next is my weekly tasks list, and then there is my daily tasks list. I have my recurring tasks that I have to do each week: check email, do business admin.
I check my lists before I go to bed at night so that I know what I have to do the next day, and what I have to accomplish before the end of the week.
2. Public Support (or humiliation, depending on how you look at it)
I have heard a number of psychological strategies for getting things done. One goes like this: if you have an idea for a big project, you should not tell anyone about it because, the theory goes, that if you do, then you give away the power. Simply by telling people you are going to do something dissipates the drive to do it.
It sounds interesting in a cosmic sort of way. But, it does not work for me. If I don’t tell anyone what my plan is, then who is going to hold me accountable whether I do it or not?
The other theory says that if you want to get something done, tell people you are going to do it. More than that, tell people exactly what it is you are going to do, tell them when you are going to do it, and tell them when you are going to have it done by.
This works for me because it appeals directly to the ego and fear part of my brain. That is, it is akin to having a carrot and a stick – if I get the goal accomplished, I can sit back and feel good with myself that I got it done. If I don’t, I have to explain to everyone why watching 12 hours of TV suddenly became more important than building that tunnel to China I said I was going to do by New Years.
Carrots and sticks appeal directly to the primitive part of the brain. I may have a full belly now, but there is guy in the cave next to mine eyeing my mate, and he has a pretty awesome collection of comfy bear skin rugs that he likes to show off. If I tell my cave-spouse I am going to bring her back a bear-skin rug she just might stick around. If I don’t, she might wander off to the next cave while I am snoozing with my full belly.
Your Turn
What techniques or tricks do you use get things done?
