In week one the goal was getting yourself to do things you had no desire to do, but they were all random, meaningless gestures. This week you are going to do one thing per day that you have been putting off. These are 7 things that you know you should do, but you haven’t been able to get yourself to do for at least a month.
Now, I can’t tell you what these tasks should be because I don’t know you. But they should be things you’ve put off for some time now. Some examples:
- Household fixes you’ve been putting off: changing a light bulb or a smoke alarm battery, fixing a wobbly table leg, tightening a screw that is keeping a cupboard door from closing correctly, cleaning out a junk-drawer, taking down that out-of-date calendar.
- Write a letter to someone you haven’t communicated with in a while that you don’t want to lose contact with.
- Make a doctor or dentist appointment.
- Drop off old clothes at Goodwill
Make your list.
You might assume this would be an easier assignment than last week when you had to do 7 meaningless tasks, but I find it’s not. There’s no psychological weight to meaningless tasks, and they’re novel, so they’re easier to do. But making an appointment with a doctor or doing things to take care of your home can have meaning to you beyond the action itself. And that meaning can get in your way much more so than the actual difficulty of the task will.
So don’t think about why you should do the task. Don’t think, “I should go through these magazine and throw out the ones I will never read again. I don’t want to do it. But if I don’t do it, nobody else will. And then we will have magazines all over the place and the house will look like a shit-hole. And then my mother-in-law will visit and think I’m not good enough for her son. And then I’ll question this whole stupid marriage.” You don’t want to fall in that hole of critiquing yourself or trying to justify things or finding faults and flaws in things — you just want to throw out the fucking magazines. So instead your thought process should be this, “I should go through these magazines and throw out the ones I will never read again. I don’t want to do it… but getting myself to do things I don’t want to do is my new thing so I’ll just go ahead and do it.” Try to think of nothing else about a task other than that you know you should do it but don’t want to. The goal here is that hopefully one day your desire not to do something will be your cue to actually do it.
Look, I’m not a self-help guy, and would never want to be. I’m just trying to break down a technique that I came to organically in my life. It would be great if this helped someone else out too. But if not, I hope it’s at least an interesting thought experiment.
So, in week one you do 7 pointless things you don’t want to do.
In week two you do 7 productive things you know you should do, but still don’t want to do.
In week three you will apply this technique to whatever your specific goal is. For the purposes of this blog it is weight-loss.
