The How To Do Things Blog

The most effective anti-procrastination tool I’ve ever discovered is something I call the Right Now List. It takes a few minutes to learn, about a minute to use once you know it, and can massively…

Ah, so you will execute your great plans as soon as life becomes a little easier and more spacious than it is now. This is exactly backwards! Forming and achieving aspirations _is_ how life gets easier and…

Procrastinators aren’t really afraid of effort. In fact, sometimes we put in great effort to avoid a task others would dispatch in a few minutes. What we’re really afraid of is the emotional pain the…

If you brainstormed some goals you’d like to achieve, you might come up with something like this: Your tastes may differ, but notice that the projects that come to mind when you think about “goals”…

When people subscribe to this site, I ask them what their biggest productivity struggle is, and the most common answer is lack of motivation. The usual assumption about motivation is that you need it in…

Degree of difficulty: Easy Benefit: Save potentially hours a day, depending on your habits A simple tool every procrastinator should own is a kitchen timer. It has lots of uses, but one is to force…

A major reason procrastinators avoid starting big tasks is the fear that they’ll run out of time just when they start getting somewhere. This fear makes big tasks seem like they require big stretches of…

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…