Apply Newtonian principle to overcome procrastination

An object in motion will stay in motion and an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an external force – Newton’s laws of motion

 

Trent of The Simple Dollar published a to-the-point article “The Thought of Starting This Project Overwhelms Me”. It is very well said that we should concentrate on

• Important but not urgent thing and
• Discard the urgent but not important things

I think this is a nice scale to judge an activity.

Trent did not go into the technicalities (how) of doing this. A few things that has helped me start the ball rolling when I feel overwhelmed are:

• Stop thinking about the activities (stop breaking down into small chunks etc.)
• Stop planning (where to start, what to do, why to do etc.)
• Just start doing anything that first comes to mind

That always starts the ball rolling and things kind of fall into place. Recently in my job I had to write a big technical design document and there were so many things I had to put together that I felt the same way as Trent. Here is how I went about it. I Thought (planned, brood, worried) about it for a day. The more I did those the more overwhelmed I felt. Finally, I just put my foot down and just opened a template document and start typing whatever came to mind. At first it looked and felt weird. But after a few minutes the relevant ideas start showing up and in about 4 hours I could put down everything.

I think Newtonian principle is in work here. Once thinking/planning/worrying sets in, it has a tendency to generate more of the same. And once the actual doing sets in it attracts more doing. But the change does not happen automatically. You need to apply some force. So just apply the force (how much tiny it may seem) and see how the things just take care of themselves.