Getting stuff done

There's this nice tip from a book I had read a long time ago. Some of the tips/lessons from the aforementioned book weren't useful to me but the following tip is something that I have found quite effective in getting stuff done. Say you have some task to do and you're finding it hard to get started because of reasons. Instead of not doing anything, try to make a promise to yourself that you will do the task for 5 minutes. Now it seems much less dreadful because no matter how bad the task is, it's only going to last 5 minutes.

Perhaps you may already realise what the tip is trying to achieve. It is to simply get you started, which tends to be the hardest part of a task for me. Once I get started, I usually work much longer than 5 minutes and I don't think I have ever just worked for 5 minutes. In the book, it does say that if you do just end up doing 5 minutes of work, then it's 5 minutes more work than nothing and also you don't feel as guilty working for only 5 minutes because that's what you had promised yourself.

From the same book comes a tip that tries to limit being distracted. Before you start working think about everything that you need to complete the task so you don't need to fetch it when you're in the middle of working. I guess nowadays everything we need to complete a task is contained within the computer but think about stuff that would interrupt your work, like the room temperature. Set the ideal climate before starting to work so you don't have to get up to change, turn on/off the fan, adjust the thermostat, etc. Eat and drink something before working too, so you don't get hungry or thirsty. Don't give excuses to stop working.

Another useful trick that I've found very useful when dealing with a complicated problem, is to break the task down into smaller tasks. Keep doing this until you break your problem down into tasks that addresses one specific aspect. Then work on those tasks. It also helps if the tasks are prioritised in terms of urgency and importance. An urgent task is a task that needs to be done as soon as possible and an important task is one that is crucial to the problem. Work on the tasks in this order: 1. urgent and important, 2. urgent but not important, 3. not urgent but important, and 4. not urgent and not important.

If you're coding, here's a simple but very useful algorithm for getting coding done that I have adapted into a flowchart from The Pragmatic Programmer (that I think everyone should read).

graph TD; s["Start"] --> a["Work out where you are"]; a --> b["Make a small meaningful step towards desired state"]; b --> c{"Did anything break?"}; c -- No --> d{"Reached desired state?"}; c -- Yes --> f["Fix broken code"]; f --> c; d -- No --> b; d -- Yes --> z["End"]; style s fill:#f00,stroke:#333,stroke-width:2px; style z fill:#f00,stroke:#333,stroke-width:2px;

In sum, to get stuff done, break it down into smaller tasks and prioritise these tasks by urgency and importance, and work on them. If you can't get yourself started, just promise yourself that you're going to work on a task for 5 minutes. If you're coding, do something similar by creating a small task that would help towards the getting closer to where you want/need to be.

I know these tips seem so simplistic but I have found that the essence of getting stuff done is really that simple. It really is just doing it.




Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License
.
2 comments Add yours
  1. When coding, I have the opposite problem. Once started, I find it hard to stop. I need to take breaks to keep my body from seizing up, but I can get stuck in problem-solving mode for hours without realizing it.

    1. Sometimes I have the same problem when I’m debugging, which often takes hours. My body reminds me to take breaks when it starts to feel uncomfortable (not to the extent of seizing up though). I guess something like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique could be useful but a lot of the time I don’t want to take a break in the middle of fixing bugs. Perhaps try something like the 20-20-20 trick too: every 20 minutes, take a 20 second break, by looking at something at least 20 feet away while stretching your body.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.