Why it's so hard to do that thing you want to do

When you’re not sure exactly where your work is leading, you may not know when it’s complete. (DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University)

Those of us who are high achievers learn early on how great it feels to cross things off the to-do list.

When the homework is done, no one can nag you. You don’t have anything hanging over your head. You’re free! As a special bonus, you may even earn the approval of one or more people in the process.

Each time you complete a task, you get a little hit of dopamine, that highly addictive neurochemical that keeps you doing more of whatever generated it last time. That’s how the valedictorian gets there — she’s just chosen a different drug than the stoners.

However, as we learned from Stephen Covey, what is urgent is not necessarily important. It’s possible to get so into knocking out mundane to-dos that we never get to the things we really care about: Starting the business, writing the novel, or getting in shape.

Why are the big important things so easy to put off? For one thing, they’re projects. As defined by David Allen, a project is anything that takes more than one task to complete. You can’t just do a project — you can only do a task. To get anywhere, you have to break the project down into tasks. This means that you must devote time and energy to project planning before you even start. Not very dopamine-friendly.

Further, the tasks themselves are often nebulous and unknowable until you do them. You don’t know exactly how long they will take, and you might not know what task is next until you complete the one before it.

Knowing and understanding this can give us more compassion for our struggle to move projects forward. It can also help us to find solutions.

Though the project itself may be too long-range to give us much satisfaction, we can deliberately build in milestones along the way that we can feel good about. In other words, though it will be a long time before we can celebrate the completion of the project, we can celebrate the completion of each component task.

If we struggle to define individual tasks (“write the next chapter” is still a project, not a task), we can change the way we measure our progress. We can track our effort in ten minute increments. We can write down the tasks after we’ve completed them so that we can cross them off (one more cold call in the books). We can take pictures of the three healthy meals we made. Anything that will help us to see that we are doing the work, even if the work was staring off into space for ten minutes trying to think of what to do next, can help to keep us motivated.

If we want to accomplish something big, we need to understand that managing the project will take planning, creativity, and flexibility. Sometimes, we’ll work for three hours and have no visible accomplishments to show for it. It’s enough to make you want to go back to sending emails and paying bills, where results are easy to measure. However, if we expect this and make room for it, we may find that it is easier to accept. Those three hours did move us forward, for they’re behind us now.

Productivity looks different on a long-term project. Sometimes, progress is two steps forward and a step back. Embracing this uncomfortable reality, day by day, will allow us to achieve our biggest goals and feel good about ourselves as we undertake the journey.