Right-size your tasks and start big

If a task is too easy, you can get bored and lose focus. If it’s too difficult, your brain gives in and lets your mind self-distract. Willpower is finite. So you’re always at risk of losing focus. As you go through the day, you deplete your willpower as you avoid temptations and distractions. Suffice it to say that by the end of the day, you don’t have much willpower left, and you’re more prone to distractions. So how you organize and plan your work can significantly impact your ability to stay focused on it and see it through.

Knowing this, you can design your day to start with your most important work. Assuming you wrapped up your previous day with some notes, you should already have a very clear idea of where to focus your initial efforts for the day. Deplete your willpower on the tasks that are most important and most productive. Then, check your email, catch up on industry news, or take a break to go for a walk. Ideally, aim for around three tasks per day. They can all be related, but breaking them into component parts, you’re more easily able to make progress without getting overwhelmed.

To maintain focus, we have to design our work such that each task isn’t so challenging that we give up or so easy that we’re bored and distracted. By breaking up overwhelming tasks into component tasks of just the right difficulty, we can approach problems in a manner that finds the balance and helps us maintain focus. Where a larger task might overwhelm us to the point of driving us away from working on it or avoiding it, smaller tasks feel more approachable.

Smaller tasks also help sustain us because the finish line of a small task is closer, and when we can see the finish line, we can more easily dig deeper and push through. Then, as we complete tasks, we get a small surge of dopamine. We make progress towards our target, and we start to build momentum and excitement that helps us clear the next hurdle. When you’re staring at the same incomplete task for weeks, it can drain you of your enthusiasm.

The other significant benefit of smaller tasks is that they require you to hold less context in your head. So it’s easier to start on a task because you don’t have to build up quite as much context before setting to work on it. Then when you’re invariably interrupted, it’s easier and faster to resume your task because you have less of that pesky context to rebuild.

You may have heard the phrase “Release early. Release often.” It’s a great way to iterate on software, but it turns out it also works nicely with how our brains are hardwired. By designing our work in bite-size chunks and shipping more frequently, we’re less likely to stall out or become emotionally drained from a lack of progress.

When you break your tasks down into more approachable parts and start your day by focusing on the most important one, even if you don’t get to everything, you will have accomplished your one big thing for the day.

Your next steps

1. Organize your work into smaller more approachable individual tasks so that you have around 3 primary tasks each day.
2. Start each day by focusing on your most important task.
3. Choose your day’s three tasks, and commit them to paper.
4. When you notice yourself overwhelmed by a task, try to break it into smaller and more approachable sub-tasks.