How to Start Working

There are a lot of things I don’t want to do. On days when I’m feeling especially unmotivated, my inner rebel and thought gremlins form a bad 1–2 combo. Here’s how I overpower them all and get stuff done anyway.

A while back, I spent a huge chunk of the sunny weekend doing a rather daunting writing task. Two things helped me through it — one big, one small.

The big one was to break up the task into several deep work writing blocks. As I started each 45-minute session, I wrote out what I aimed to accomplish in that time and the specific steps it would take to achieve it.

The second thing that helped me was to do something small that made the task environment more conducive to my productivity. For that day, I picked some flowers from my garden and put them in a glass near me as I wrote. This brought me delight in moments of doubt when my eyes wandered off the screen.

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