Emily McDonald explains how breaking tasks into tiny time chunks, like 10 or 30 minutes, makes starting feel possible. She wrote her book in 30-minute bursts and coached a student to start an email with just two sentences. The trick works because dopamine and momentum kick in after a few minutes, so you often keep going past the limit.
How can you make the task that you are avoiding as tiny as possible? For me, when I was writing my book, it was, let's just go write for 30 minutes. 30 minutes. That's it. Made it so much easier. It, it minimized the barrier to entry so I can go start. 'Cause that's a lot of times the hardest part is to start. For my one student, it was sending an email and I said, well, how about you just tell yourself that you're gonna go? And write the first 2 sentences of that email. How can you break down your task into something smaller? If it's cleaning the house, let's do it for 10 minutes. One thing that I know to be true is that the dopamine does not come until after the first 10 minutes. I love this hack because motivation doesn't come before you start. Dopamine is increased when your brain perceives evidence of progress. And when you break it down and you start small and you send it, I know damn well that when I sit down and I write for 30 minutes, it's going to start feeling good after about 15, 20 minutes. And then I'm not going to want to stop when I hit that 30-minute mark, and I'm going to keep going. I know that, but I'm not going to tell myself that. I'm going to tell myself, all you need to do is sit down and do it for 10 minutes. Just do it for 10 minutes. You've got this.
