I’m currently reading Limitless by Jim Kwik and there’s an excellent  method that he outlines if you struggle with getting stuff done due to procrastination. So I though I’d share.

Generally I am fairly disciplined when it comes to getting stuff done but like most people I can find it easy to fall victim to procrastination.

Procrastination is really deferred progress for no good reason. One cause is that a task seems to big, or you feel like you don’t have the time or energy to complete the task.

Jim Kwik introduces the concept of Small Simple Steps (or S cubed).

The essence of this approach is for any task that you find you are procrastinating on, pick a small part (step) of the task to start on. The key thing is to pick a step that is so small and so simple that you cannot fail at it.

For example the task of losing 50kg of fat could be as simple as putting on your workout shoes.Don’t worry about actually going for a walk/run/workout just do the small simple step of putting your shoes on.

You can also apply this to work, for example if you have a bad quality codebase with no tests and unreadable code it’s easy to put off making it better. One small simple step here could be to add the first unit test. It could be even smaller such as add a unit test project.

I’ve applied this technique a few times since learning about it and even though it seems trivial, it does work.

If you like this technique and use it successfully let know on Twitter :)

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