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BE KIND TO YOURSELF
If you struggle to get something done with some amount of regularity, there’s a good chance that you feel guilty about this and you beat yourself up over it. It’s likely you give yourself a much harder time about it than is helpful. We already know that unfinished tasks create tension in your brain. If you layer guilt and shame on top of this, you’re making it even harder to get a task done, and you’re making yourself miserable.
“Feeling guilty when you’re away from work, when you aren’t in a position to do anything about it, is not helpful, and can be painful,” writes Dr. Art Markman, a professor of psychology and marketing at University of Texas, Austin. “It will make you feel worse about your job in general and spoil time that you could be spending with friends, family, or engaging in an enjoyable activity. Shame, though, is a different story. There is evidence
that people will explicitly procrastinate to avoid shame. Feeling shame about work you have not completed is likely to make the problem worse, not better, making it an emotion that is almost never helpful.”²
Feeling bad about your lack of progress is likely to make it more difficult for you to stop procrastinating. So, give yourself a break. Beating yourself up isn’t going to improve anything, and, since you’re reading this book now, you’re already taking steps to avoid procrastinating in the future.
In my experience, the best way to deal with this is to find a way to break the task into bite-size pieces, which lead to habits that lead toward success. Circling back to the Zeigarnik effect, every time you complete one of these smaller tasks, you get to take that weight off your mind. And as each of these subtasks is finished, you’re that much closer to completing the task overall.

TAKE BABY STEPS

Podcast guest Dr. B. J. Fogg, the founder and director of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University and the author of Tiny Habits, has been studying human behavior for more than two decades. What he’s learned is that only three things can change a person’s behavior long term. One is to have an epiphany, which very few people can summon on demand. Another is to change your environment, which is possible for nearly everyone, but not necessarily feasible at any given time. The third is to, as Dr. Fogg puts it, “take baby steps.”³
I like the way this story illustrates the principle of small, simple steps:

A King was watching a great magician perform his act. The crowd was enthralled and so was the King. At the end, the audience roared with approval. And the King said, “What a gift this man has. A God- given talent.”

But a wise counsellor said to the King, “My Lord, genius is made, not born. This magician’s skill is the result of discipline and practice. These talents have been learned and honed over time with determination and discipline.”
The King was troubled by this message. The counsellor’s challenge had spoiled his pleasure in the magician’s arts. “Limited and spiteful
man. How dare you criticize a true genius. As I said, you either have it or you don’t. And you most certainly don’t.”
The King turned to his bodyguard and said, “Throw this man into the deepest dungeon.” And, he added for the counselor’s benefit, “So you won’t be lonely, you can have two of your kind to keep you company. You shall have two piglets as cellmates.”
From the very first day of his imprisonment, the wise counselor practiced running up the steps of his cell to the prison door carrying in each hand a piglet. As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, the piglets steadily grew into sturdy boars. And with every day of practice the wise counselor increased his power and strength.
One day the King remembered the wise counselor and was curious to see how imprisonment had humbled him. He had the wise counselor summoned.
When the prisoner appeared, he was a man of powerful physique, carrying a boar on each arm. The King exclaimed, “What a gift this man has. A God-given talent.”
The wise counselor replied, “My Lord, genius is made, not born. My skill is the result of discipline and practice. These talents have been learned and honed over time with determination and discipline.”⁴

One of the only things that is likely to change your behavior is to make incremental progress. You really don’t want to make dinner? Make something simple for your family to snack on while you cook dinner later. You’re having trouble writing that big speech for next month’s conference? Just write the keynote to the speech now. You’re overwhelmed by the amount of reading you need to do for your economics class? Set a goal for yourself of reading the first chapter. Like the wise counselor, you must take it one step at a time, one day at a time.

What you’ll notice in all of these scenarios is two things. One is that they present you with something achievable—a win on the way to reaching the championship of getting this job done. The other is that they all put you in a situation where you’re likely to get even more accomplished. You’re already in the kitchen now, so you might as well finish making dinner. You’ve gotten through the keynote and you’re on a roll, so maybe it makes sense to draft some more pages. The first chapter of your economics text
wasn’t nearly as dry as it seemed from the outside, and you already have the book open; you can handle a few more chapters.
By breaking a task that you’re procrastinating about into smaller pieces, the path to getting it done becomes clear.
The best way to deal with the tension between what you want and what you’ve done so far to achieve it is to remember what the Zeigarnik effect teaches us. You’re not going to be able to ease your mind about this task until you complete it, so get yourself moving toward completion. Start somewhere. Anywhere. Even if you don’t have the energy or the motivation to get the entire thing done, get started on getting it done. You’ll be thankful for the relief.