How to Get Started on Things You Keep Putting Off

How often do you make plans, set goals, come up with ideas … and fail to make a start on them?

• Are you waiting till next Monday to start on a diet?
• Are you waiting till “things aren’t so busy” to start exercising?
• Are you waiting till panic sets in before looking at your taxes?
• Are you waiting till you’ve got a whole day clear to tackle your email backlog?
• Are you waiting till you retire to start writing that book?

Ideas are great, planning is wise, and daydreaming about a better future situation can get you through the day. Reading and thinking about your goals can get you feeling enthused. But if you want to see any results, if you want to have an impact on the world (or, more prosaically, on your bank balance), you’re going to actually need to get started.

Thinking and planning are important, but action is far more important. You don’t get paid for your thoughts and plans — you only get paid for your results.

(Steve Pavlina, Do It Now, StevePavlina.com)

So why don’t we? Why do we keep putting things off? Why do we come up with elaborate reasons about how “now just isn’t a good time”?

Resistance Isn’t So Futile After All

In my experience, there’s always a sense of reluctant and resistance before getting going on almost any task or venture. I used to get this when starting on essays at university: it was until I read Mark Forster’s book Get Everything Done that I realised there was a name for it:

Resistance happens when one activity is harder for us than another one. By this I mean subjectively rather than objectively harder. … Resisitance is the reason that our lives tend to fill up with trivia. … Dealing with trivia is easier than dealing with important issues.

(Get Everything Done – Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk, Mark Forster, pg 71)

So why do new activities seem hard? Why do we resist putting down that first sentence of our book, or taking that first short walk as part of our exercise routine? What’s so difficult about writing a few words or walking for a few minutes?

Well, looked at one way, there’s nothing particularly difficult about it at all. The resistance that’s built up in our minds is to the whole thing. We’re not resisting writing one sentence – we’re resisting the outlining, drafting and redrafting and submitting to publishers process. We’re not resisting walking for a few minutes – we’re resisting starting on an exercise routine which we fear will take up too much of our time, or simply be too much hard work.

Starting on a new venture, especially one you’ve been thinking about for a while, represents a real commitment. You can come up with back-of-an-envelope business plans to your heart’s content (you could probably turn it into a party game), but the moment you actually take the first real step towards launching your business – registering with the relevant government bodies, for instance – is the moment when it stops being a perfect future ideal in your head. It becomes real.

The thing is, a “perfect” business or book or blog or building or whatever, stored in your head, frankly doesn’t mean anything to anyone. An imperfect, incomplete but real thing out there in the world does.

There is no perfect time to start. … The best strategy is to just jump in and get started. Don’t keep putting things off waiting for 12 doves to fly over your house in the form of a cross before you begin. Just start.

(Jack Canfield, How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be: The 25 Principles of Success – Amazon.com (different edition) / Amazon.co.uk, p292)

When you’re struggling to get started, when you’re putting off launching your blog because it’s not quite perfect or you haven’t written enough (you could’ve had Aliventures months sooner if I’d gotten over my resistance that bit quicker – thanks to Charlie Gilkey and Naomi Dunford for the final push…) then just jump in. Focus on the very first step:

• Leave the cookies out of your shopping trolley and buy fruit instead.
• Go for a half-hour walk.
• Write a paragraph. (If that’s too much, just open the document.)
• File one piece of paper.
• Clear one old email.
• Declutter one drawer, or one corner of your desk.

And don’t kid yourself that it’s not worth doing because “it’ll have no real impact”. If you wrote two paragraphs a day, you’d have a book within a couple of years.

When the First Step is a Scary One

Sometimes, that first real step is going to be a huge scary one that lands you smack outside your comfort zone.

I am a fairly timid person. I find pretty much everything scary the first time I do it. This has been the case pretty much my entire life (at one point, I hoped it’d be different when I was “grown up”. I’ve now realised that you never really grow up, you just learn to fake it better).

Now, I figure that I’m going to be nervous and awkward and jittery the first time I have to do anything new. But I also figure that I’ll survive it. After all, one of two things can happen:

• It’s so absolutely unutterably awful/embarrassing/uncomfortable that I decide there is no way in hell that I am going to ever attempt it again
• It’s not too bad and I know it’ll be easier the second time

Funnily enough, I think everything I’ve ever been scared about doing for the first time has fallen into that second category…

Are you putting off getting started on something because you’re scared? Are you avoiding getting focused on your goals or making a commitment to them because you’re stuck before you’ve even started? I know how you feel. Being scared sucks. But letting your fear get the better of you, and putting off doing things that you’d actually really quite like to try, sucks even more.

Whatever it is, tell yourself that you will survive the first time, and that it will get MUCH easier. It might be:

• Your first driving lesson
• Your first time going abroad
• Your first client / first paid project
• Your first Toastmaster’s meeting (I managed to put that off for MONTHS. And then I went last week and I absolutely loved it.)
• Your first visit to your girlfriend/boyfriend’s parents
• Your first attempt at cooking something
• Your first blog post
• Your first book submission to an agent

Try asking someone else, a year or two further down the line from you, how they felt before they got started. Chances are, they were just as scared as you.

Free Yourself From Your Conditions and Assumptions

We often build up a particular task or venture into something much bigger than it needs to be. How often have you set yourself a load of unnecessary conditions, or made assumptions that just hold you back from getting started?

Sometimes, the pressure of a deadline can cut right through these. If you had to make a real start within the week, what do you actually need to do – and what can you live without?

Here are a couple of examples of two very successful folks who got caught in this trap. The first is Christine O’Kelly, from the Self-Made Chick blog. She wanted to become a freelance SEO writer, working for SEO company’s clients, but she had a load of conditions and worries that made her spend several days procrastinating about getting started:

The excuses that I was telling myself were:

• I need a website first
• I need to get some kind of email marketing software
• I need to come up with some sort of sales pitch
• I need more in my portfolio
• No one will really want this
• I’m not good enough

(Christine did get going, and by spending 25 minutes sending out a few emails, she landed enough work to pay her bills for almost a year. You can read the full story here: How I made $100,000 by spending 25 minutes and $0 on Marketing)

The second example is Charlie Gilkey, a productivity and creativity coach who tries to practice what he preaches!

I put off starting a newsletter for about six months because of certain assumptions about how long it would take. It took four hours, tops, once I questioned those assumptions and just started.

(You can find out about those assumptions, and what steps Charlie really needed to take, in Start Before You Finsh: A Case Study)

What conditions or assumptions are you placing on yourself? Perhaps you feel you need to have a perfect system laid out, or you need to have all the answers, before you can begin. Maybe you’re making a straightforward task a lot more complicated than it needs to be. What steps absolutely have to be taken before you can start?

Accept That It Won’t Be Perfect

Your start isn’t going to be perfect. You know that, deep down. And you shouldn’t want it to be – after all, if you start off with perfection, it won’t be much of a journey!

With many ventures, you can afford to make a ton of mistakes at a start. When your blog or newsletter has five readers, it’s not a big deal if you screw up. When you’re doing your first client project, it doesn’t matter if your quoting was out and you end up working for less than your ideal hourly rate.

What are you putting off starting? What’s the first step? How can you overcome your fear? Which assumptions and conditions can you ditch in order to get going?

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