Mastering the Unpleasant: How to Get Things Done Even When You Don’t Like Them
How I Transformed My Productivity: The 4-Step System That Changed Everything
You ever wonder how people manage to get stuff done even when they don’t feel like it? They show up every day and exercise right or grind through difficult problems, no matter how they feel. I always wanted to be one of those people. When I was younger, I failed calculus three times in university because I just couldn’t get myself to do the work.
Now, I’d done enough work in high school to get into a good university, but once I got there, studying and showing up in class weren’t really at the top of my list for things like English or sociology. I was fine, but calculus required me to actually show up, read the textbook, and learn things to pass it, and there was no part of me that wanted to do that.
I would look at those straight-A students and think, “I wish I had their discipline and their motivation.” But once I discovered how they did it, I realized those students weren’t actually more motivated; they just had these little tips and tricks that kept them going when they didn’t feel like it.
And once I broke it all down and pulled it into a four-step system, I was able to fix my procrastination, stop waiting for motivation, and get more things done. But to understand the system, you have to start with step one.
Step One:
Define the task. Step one is to clearly define the task. I had to pass calculus on my fourth try, so I started looking at it a little bit differently. I reviewed the textbook and realized if I could do all the sample problems, I’d know enough to pass the final. Now, I still didn’t want to do it, but at least I knew what to do. And instead of this general task of “I need to pass calculus,” I broke it down into “solve sample problems each week.” Then, when I sat down to study, all I had to do was solve those problems.
People are like task-completion machines. If you know exactly what to do, you are more likely to do it. But if there’s any confusion, if there’s anything that doesn’t make sense, your brain sends up this “does not compute” kind of error, and you won’t even get started. So you have to break down the big, scary goal into a simple task. I like to grab my journal and use a system called WHOOP from the book Rethinking Positive Thinking whenever I’m stuck on what to do next, but that’s for another story. For now, let’s just break the task down into a small, digestible chunk and get going.
Most of the time, when things aren’t moving forward in my health or my business, it’s because I don’t actually know what I’m trying to do or what the next task should be. So that would be step one.
Step Two:
Once you figure out the next task, then it’s a matter of getting yourself to do it. And that’s where step two comes in. Now, I knew what I needed to do to pass calculus, but that still didn’t mean I wanted to do it. I would sit on my bed looking at my bag with my textbook in it, thinking, “Ugh, I just don’t want to open that.” My roommate at the time used to just come home from class and get straight to work. Well, I would procrastinate for hours.
I asked him one day how he stayed so motivated, and he said, “I just commit to doing 30 minutes of work when I get home, no matter what. Even if I don’t feel like it, I’ll work for those 30 minutes. But most of the time, I kind of get things going, and I keep working until it’s done.” I thought it was brilliant, so I decided to try it. But I was not nearly as ambitious as him, so I grabbed an alarm clock and set it for 10 minutes and started working.
So that’s step number two: how I use a timer. Inertia is very powerful. This means that if you’re procrastinating on something, it’s more likely that you will keep procrastinating on that thing until something makes you change. A timer is a perfect tool to break things up.
I committed to opening that book and trying to solve the first problem in that 10 minutes. And once I got the first one, I started the second, and soon I was solving problems, reviewing the chapters, and actually studying. And that 10 minutes turned into 60, and soon I had solved all the problems for the week.
Nowadays, I use my phone or this fun little timer called The Tick Timer. I’ll write down a task, like “write an email to my list,” and set a timer to get started. I usually do three chunks of 25 minutes on and 5 minutes off, for a total of 75 minutes of work. And that’s usually enough to get through most tasks. When I was learning to play my guitar, I would only practice for 10 minutes per day for the first three months.
Part of the reason is because it was difficult, it made my fingers hurt, and progress was slow. So more than 10 minutes felt too hard. As I got better and became more fun, I bumped that up to 30 minutes and later an hour, and then I actually learned how to play. The goal of the timer is to remove the barriers to starting a task. And once it’s started, 80% of the hard work is done.
But even starting a timer requires motivation, and sometimes you’re just not feeling it. Besides, who’s going to notice if you don’t do it? You can put it off till tomorrow, right? That’s exactly what was happening with my calculus work. Soon, weeks were going by without me doing anything.
I was destined to fail a fourth time, and I probably would have given up unless one of my classmates at the time tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I wanted to join her study group.
Step three:
I’m not overly social with strangers, but I knew I was in trouble, so I decided to go. It was one of the best decisions I made in my University career. Do it with somebody else. It’s also step three of the system. Humans are social creatures. Even if you are a basement-dwelling gamer, you’re probably playing games online with your friends. It’s more fun, you take it a bit more seriously, and you get further into the game when you have people to do it with.
My study group wasn't made up of a bunch of geniuses. In fact, I thought I was way behind some of them in the book. But it turns out I was ahead of some of them in the book.
That weekly group gave me a reason to open my book, work on those problems, and show up somewhere to share what I learned. We taught and learned from each other, and our collective knowledge was more than any one person had on their own. I’ve since used this trick to get myself to work out, write, do breathwork, track my food, do cold plunges, and do all sorts of other things.
My favorite way of doing this now is to just text a friend or coworker and say, “What do you want to accomplish in the next 25 minutes?” If they’re working, they’ll say something like, “I want to schedule all my meetings for the next week,” and I’ll say, “I want to write the subject and outline of my weekly email,” and we’ll set a timer for 25 minutes. In 3, 2, 1, go! Just that little bit of accountability is enough to get you moving. You don’t want to be the one who lets the other person down at the end of the 25 minutes, so you just focus and get it done. There are also services like Focusmate or Flow Club where people work together online to get things done.
So now you have a clearly defined task, a timer, and a friend to do this with. This can get you going for the short term, but I found this little secret that unlocks unlimited motivation in almost everyone I’ve tried it with, including my seven-year-old.
It’s so good that multi-billion-dollar industries are created around it. If you’ve ever watched a football game, what’s the first thing you look at when you turn it on? Uniforms, shoes, field, the crowd? Nope, it’s probably the score. In fact, you probably wouldn’t watch the game if it didn’t have a score. Football is a billion-dollar industry, a multi-billion-dollar industry, based on one team beating the other on a scoreboard. So why don’t we use that for ourselves?
Keep scoring. People are naturally competitive. You’re always looking to see how you compare against other people. If you’re ahead of them, you’re happy. If you’re behind, you’re either discouraged or you feel like you have to do something about it.
One of my old coaches told me “men will die over points,” and in my experience, that is totally true. When we were doing the practice problems for calculus, we would keep track of how many we got right and how many we missed. We weren’t necessarily trying to beat everyone else; we all wanted to pass, and we kind of rooted for each other. But if you were falling behind, you felt it, and you wanted to fix it.
I’ve seen this play out in school, in fitness, and in business. We keep grades, we look at the scale, and we check our bank accounts. There are scores everywhere. So when you’re trying to get yourself to do hard things, you want to find a way to measure success. How many minutes did you work? How many tasks did you get done? How many emails did you respond to? How much weight did you lift?
For calculus, I’d score myself on how many questions I got right, how I did on the tests, and my overall grade at the end of class. And I ended up passing with an A-minus after failing that class three times. Now, I’ve since used this system to lose 100 pounds and build a million-dollar business. In fact, at my gym, we’ve been coaching all four of the steps in every session we coach with over 9,000 people over the last 15 years.
Step one: define the task. We have a big whiteboard where we write the workout of the day every day.
Step two: Set a timer. We have a timer we use to get people started, and the workout is measured by how much work you can get done in a certain amount of time.
Step three: Do it with someone. We almost never do one-on-one sessions because people work better when they share their suffering with others.
Step four: Keep scoring. We write the results on the whiteboard and celebrate any milestones people achieve.
You can use this system to get anything started without any motivation. But what if you’ve tried and failed so many times to get yourself going that you’ve started to give up?
Conclusion
You’ve now got a four-step system to conquer procrastination and tackle any task, even when you’re not feeling motivated. Remember, the journey starts with clearly defining the task at hand. Break it down into manageable chunks to eliminate any confusion. Next, set a timer to create a sense of urgency and get the momentum going. Partner up with someone to share the workload and maintain accountability. Finally, keep scoring to measure your progress and stay motivated.
This approach helped me pass calculus, lose 100 pounds, and build a million-dollar business. It can work for you too, whether it’s for studying, working out, or starting a new project.
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