At home on Sunday
Your room is a complete mess. You have been told to tidy it. You have been standing in the doorway for ten minutes.
What do you do?
Step 1: What Would You Do?
There is often more than one good answer. Pick one and see what happens.
Homework
You have a book report due on Friday. It is Monday. You have not opened the book.
What is the best first step?
Step 2: What That Was
The name for what you just worked out.
Some jobs feel impossible. Often that is not because they are hard. It is because they are big and you are looking at all of it at once.
Find the parts
Write down everything the job is made of. It usually turns out to be four or five ordinary things.
Then only do the first one
You do not need to feel ready for the whole job. You need to know what the first step is.
Step 3: Try It
These ones do have right answers.
Put It in Order
Tap the steps in the order you would do them.
You have to give a two-minute talk about a country next week. What order?
- 1Find three interesting facts
- 2Decide what order to say them in
- 3Say it out loud once
- 4Time it and cut anything too long
- 5Pick the country
Step 4: Quick Check
Two questions, then you are done.
Question 1 of 1
A job feels too big to start. What is the most useful thing to do?
Step 5: Your Life Mission
Something to do away from the screen. Nobody is checking.
Name the first step
- Think of something you have been putting off.
- Write down every part of it.
- Circle the first one and do only that.
Why: Almost everything that gets put off is waiting on a first step nobody has named.
Step 6: What You Learned
- A job that feels impossible is usually just big.
- Write down the parts. There are fewer than you think.
- Then do only the first one.
For the grown-up
Task paralysis at this age is routinely mistaken for laziness, and treated as a motivation problem when it is a planning problem. A child staring at a blank page usually cannot name step one.
The most useful help is not doing the task with them but asking "what is the very first thing?" and then staying quiet. The silence is doing the work.
This lesson pairs directly with the Goals & Work chapter, where the same technique is applied to things that take weeks rather than an evening.