Productivity is Mostly Two Simple Skills

Whatever task you’re trying to do, the hard parts are always the same: starting it and finishing it.

The middle 90% of the task is different. It’s much easier, because you usually know what to do next. The last action you took suggests the next one.

For example, if you’ve already brainstormed potential topics for an article you need to write, the next thing is obvious: choose one of them.

Once you’ve chosen a topic, again the next step is fairly obvious: write out all your thoughts on the topic. After you’ve done that, you’ll shape those ideas into an outline, and so on.

These obvious “next things” form a chain of cues — a sort of breadcrumb trail, or handrail, guiding you through the middle stretch of the task.

This is why most of the psychological resistance to doing a task dissolves the moment you get started: suddenly there aren’t infinite paths forward. There are only a few sensible next steps you might take after marking up an essay, getting out all your ingredients, or listing the definitions you need to know for the test.

However, if you haven’t started the task yet, there are infinite paths forward. There’s no “last thing you did” to take any clues from.

And infinite paths forward is paralyzing. The mind, with no clear thing to grab next, begins to come up with reasons to start this task later.

If only you could start tasks in the middle!

But you can’t, by definition. Each task has that unavoidable stage where you haven’t done anything yet. To get to the easy middle, you have to start. You have to enter the task from nowhere.

So that’s our first of two hard parts of any task: starting it.

The Endless Middle

The other hard part of any task is finishing it.

As we’ve established, working through the middle of a task is relatively easy, because each action you take suggests the next one.

This easy-flowing quality of the middle is what makes it so hard to finish, however: the middle keeps leading to more middle. Often there’s no clear final step that suggests you do nothing next.

The longer you’ve worked on something, the easier it is to find yourself tweaking things endlessly, fiddling with details, or expanding the scope even further.

This is especially true if you have ADHD. The ADHD mind tends to lose track of the long view of what it’s doing, fixating instead on the details in front of it. I can easily spend hours “improving” a blog post, only to make it longer and more convoluted, essentially getting myself further from the finish.

A Method for Starting and a Method for Finishing

I’ll give you a go-to strategy for each of the two hard parts below. However, perhaps the most helpful thing of all is simply remembering that every task has these same two hard parts.

You could even say that all you have to concern yourself with, for any task, is getting in and getting out. If you can get in, and you can get out, the rest will take care of itself.

That bears repeating. Whatever the task at hand is, it will be much easier to do if you:

1. Remind yourself that getting in and getting out are most of the battle
2. Employ specific getting-in and getting-out strategies.

That’s it. That’s 90% of productivity. Below are two basic GI/GO strategies that work pretty well.

How to get in

For getting in, I use what I call a “Right Now List.” I make several of these every single workday.

A Right Now List (RNL) is a sticky note listing the very first tiny little steps you’re probably going to do to get started on a task. This is not a full plan or an outline for your task, it’s just the first two or three small, foolproof actions you’re probably going to take at the very start.

The key is to make these steps tiny and granular. They should be so simple and unintimidating that even you wouldn’t put them off.

Typical RNL items are things like:

• Turn on the computer
• Open a new document (or load the existing one)
• Get out the relevant supplies
• Reread the instruction sheet
• Type out what you’re trying to accomplish, as though in a message to a friend
• Google or ChatGPT “How to [do the task at hand]”

These first actions are trivially easy, and they will get you past the first of our two hard parts. They will take you from outside the task to inside it, dissolving the psychological barrier between not-started and started.

In less than a minute, you’ve made it to the middle. You now have a handrail, a breadcrumb trail. You’re no longer trying to step into the task from nowhere.

How to get out

To get out — to finish — just remember ABC.

ABC is shorthand for an old salesman’s adage: Always Be Closing.

Throughout the entire task, even from the beginning, you should hold a simple idea in mind: that you’re trying to bring this thing to a close.

That sounds obvious, but when you’re in the middle of task, proceeding from one thing to the next, endings are seldom an intuitive next step. It’s easy to keep doing and fiddling and making more work for yourself.

When you start a new section in your article, write with an awareness that you want to bring that section around to an ending as quickly as possible.

When you start studying chapter 7, remind yourself that the point is to finish studying chapter 7.

When you’re comparison-shopping printers, remember that the point is to have ordered a printer.

Let the completed form of the task take shape in your mind early on, and steer it towards the end from the start. Always Be Closing.

Forget “working on.” Get in, and get out.

Focusing on getting in and getting out of a task, rather than “working on” it (or avoiding it altogether) will save you boatloads of time. Entire days saved. Tasks won’t take as long, you’ll procrastinate on them less, and fewer tasks will stagnate halfway through.

Whatever the task is, focus on getting in and getting out. RNL to get in. ABC to get out. The better you get at these twin skills, the more productive you’ll be.

Learn more about using Right Now Lists and other tactics in 3 Secret Weapons for the Productivity-Challenged. This is a free resource for subscribers. Download it here.

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