My Productivity Hack: Build Ladders, Not Staircases
How to stop spinning your wheels and reach your goal faster.
Have you ever put in lots of effort towards your goal and realized that it seems to be moving further away?
Many times I have sat up past midnight, spending all my emotional energy and time on a task, without making progress.
I did not realize that the biggest chunk of my time went into frolicking around the task or tinkering at it, as I shied away from tackling the core. I then carried around me an air of disappointment as if I had been wronged.
I allowed my mind to work in a strange manner. One time when I wanted to set up an extra TV in the basement, I spent the whole day slogging there without success. I had some fear about my ability to mount a TV on a wall but I felt that the priority was to clean and organize the basement for me to watch TV there.
I visualized a perfectly neat and clean basement and went into overdrive… I went into so much detail that I started organizing old extra pencils inside boxes by color! I then moved on to other “important” tasks — organizing and untangling thread spools, trinkets, give away clothes, etc.
This happened even though deep down, I kind of knew that I would probably never use any of this stuff in my life and most likely would…
