How to Stop Procrastinating: a simple Guide to Mastering Difficult Tasks and Breaking the Procrastination Habit

Practice #7: Create a Mini Habit for Challenging Tasks

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As we’ve discussed, one reason people procrastinate is they know a task
will require hard work. You’ll need to mentally (or physically) push
yourself, so you keep putting it off and doing something else that results
in a dopamine rush of instant gratification. It’s perfectly normal to avoid
doing something you know might be unpleasant. But if you’re often
struggling to get started on a challenging task, then a quick fix for that is
to use the mini-habits strategy.
“
Mini habits”
is a term coined by my friend Stephen Guise, which appears
in the book of the same name. The purpose of mini habits is to remove
the resistance that you feel when it comes to starting a difficult (or time-
consuming) task. It’s easy to schedule an activity into your day (like
running for an hour), but it’s hard to complete when you feel a lack of
interest.
Mini habits work because they eliminate motivation from the equation.
Instead of setting an extremely challenging goal, you set a “lowball” goal
that makes it super simple to get started. Let’s go over a scenario in the
following paragraphs that illustrate this point.
Imagine you set a goal to exercise for 30 minutes. Everything goes
perfectly the first week. You join a gym, attend a few classes, and enjoy
the endorphin rush of frequent exercise.
One day, your boss asks you to work late, so you’re forced to skip your
scheduled class. You tell yourself, “That’s okay, I’ll do it tomorrow.” But
in the back of your mind, you start to doubt your commitment to this new
exercise habit.
This pattern repeats itself over the next few weeks. You miss classes for a
variety of reasons: Your kid has the flu. You didn’t pack your gym clothes.
The roads are covered in snow. You have to wash your cat. Suddenly, this
“30 minutes of exercise time” has turned into a task that feels impossible
to do consistently. Stinks, doesn’t it?
The mini-habit concept prevents this scenario, because it eliminates that
overwhelmed feeling you get when you think a task is too difficult to
complete. To quote Stephen:
When people try to change, they usually try to get amped up for the

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change, but no matter how badly you want the change, you haven’t
changed yet! As motivation wanes, so does progress. You don’t need
more motivation, you need a strategy that can leverage the abilities of
the current you into a better you.
In other words, the simplest, most effective way to create a lasting change
is to create a goal that might seem too easy to complete but is also so easy
that you can do it on a consistent basis.
So, if you’re finding yourself frequently procrastinating on a specific
activity, then create the simplest possible habit you can think of to force
yourself to get started. Here are a few examples:
Want to start writing? Set a goal to write one sentence.
Want to run more? Set a goal to put on your exercise clothes.
Want to improve your sales record? Set a goal to pick up the phone
and call the first lead.
Want to improve your grades? Set a goal to spend five minutes
reviewing your notes.
Want to improve your nutrition? Set a goal to eat one mouthful of
a salad.
I’ll admit these goals seem ridiculously simple. But that’s the point—each
activity is completely doable, no matter what your schedule is like. If you
can push yourself to just get started, then often you’ll find yourself doing
more of an activity than you initially anticipated.