The thing I hear most is the thing that should be easiest to fix, but it’s harder than people think. You know what to do. You’ve decided when you’ll do it. You might even have attached it to something you already do, stacked it onto your morning coffee or your evening meal. And it happened once, maybe twice, then it didn’t. The natural conclusion is that something’s wrong with you. It isn’t. You went too big, and going too big is a much easier mistake to make than people realise.

too big.

A client I worked with knew all about building habits, they’d read the books and knew the theory. They wanted to spend more focused time on their business strategy, so they set aside an hour each day after their evening meal. They did it on day one, managed less than an hour on day two, then stopped. It didn’t stick. They wouldn’t have advised someone else to take this approach, but they couldn’t see it for themselves.

Another client wanted to build a website, they’d made some progress, but the project had been going for the best part of a year, and they spent more time intending to work on it than getting something done. They set aside an hour a day and tried the morning and the afternoon but couldn’t get any consistency. The structure of the website was done, they knew what they wanted to say, the pages they wanted to be live, they just couldn’t write the copy.

start small.

An hour feels small and manageable. It isn’t. It’s too long. Most evenings you have three or four hours. An hour is a big chunk of that time. How small does that hour feel?

Setting a task to write a page of your website feels meaningful and small. A page will be complete. You will be a whole page closer to launching or completing the project. Surely a page can’t take that long to write? And yet, you’ve been trying to write a page for weeks, possibly months.

It turns out that ‘start small’ is meaningless, undefined advice. Small is subjective. And there’s a voice that says if I’m sitting down to do this, it should be worth the time, one sentence isn’t progress. That voice is the problem. It’s what makes you choose the hour, and the hour is what makes you stop. It’s one of the main reasons a lot of habits don’t stick.

The aim is to choose the right small thing, something that’s small enough to happen regardless of what else is going on in your day. It happens despite curveballs.

make it smaller.

After two days, my client scheduling an hour was getting nothing done. What if they’d done one thing on their list? It doesn’t feel meaningful, but after five days, five things are done. Five things that aren’t done when they are waiting for their hour of uninterrupted time. Those five things are meaningful when you look at them together.

Same for my client building their website. Writing one sentence every morning as their first task when they switched on their computer. After a week they had five sentences. Five sentences more than they had written in the previous five months. Five sentences on a website page are a lot of content. It is meaningful.

why small works.

Small works because it gets past the resistance that ‘big’ creates. It feels so easy it’s not worth trying to skip it. The effort to talk yourself out of doing it takes more energy than getting it done. And small compounds. Consider how you will feel at the end of the week, or the month, when you see the progress that small has made.

One of the most popular examples of going small is push ups. I succumbed to this because I couldn’t do push ups. I was terrible. So, I set myself the task of doing two push ups every morning after I got up. After a month I was doing eight unbroken with good form. It never crossed my mind that I couldn’t be bothered or didn’t have time to do two. If I’d set out to do eight from the start, I’d have found a reason not to. No time, too hard, not today. But I never started at eight. I started at two, and by the time I got to eight it was just what I did. The resistance never got the chance to exist.

three things to try.

To get to the smallest of small, consider these questions:

1. Does it take more than 2 minutes?
2. Does the thought of doing it feel hard or unappealing?
3. Do you believe it will work?

If it feels too small to matter, then you are probably close to small enough. Most people, me included, start too big. It’s an easy fix in theory, but in practice it’s usually difficult to see.                                                                 

Still not sure? I work with people to make tasks meaningfully small and structure them so they work. Then they build on them so their big goal becomes real in small steps that stick.

Book a free introductory call to find out how I can help you start small.