Thursday, September 24

Do it badly on purpose

If you keep putting something off, lower the bar until it is embarrassing and then do it.

Key takeaways

Pick the task sitting longest and set a timer for twenty minutes
Write the email in three sentences and send it before rereading
Clean one shelf instead of waiting for a full Saturday to organize

TL;DR

If you keep putting something off, lower the bar until it is embarrassing and then do it. Bad and done beats good and imagined.

Lower the bar and move

You know the list. The email you have drafted in your head nine times. The closet. The call to your dad. None of it is hard. What is hard is doing it at the low quality you are actually capable of today.

Watch what you avoid

Look at what has sat untouched the longest. It is almost never the difficult thing. It is the thing you decided has to be done right. The garage will get organized when you have a whole Saturday and a system. The letter will get written when you find the words. So the garage stays a mess for two years and the words never come.

Avoidance dresses up as standards. You are not being careful. You are protecting yourself from seeing what your actual effort looks like. Because a half-cleaned garage is proof you are a guy with a half-cleaned garage, and an imagined garage is proof of nothing, which feels better.

Photo by Liam Truong on Unsplash

Make the first pass ugly

Give it twenty minutes and no standard. Write the email in three sentences and send it before you reread it. Clean one shelf. Call and say you only have a minute. The ugly version teaches you things the plan never could, because now you are touching the real thing instead of the idea of it.

And here is what nobody tells you. The ugly version usually gets finished. Momentum does not come from motivation. It comes from having something in front of you that is already started and slightly annoying to leave unfinished.

Today

Pick the thing that has sat longest, set a timer for twenty minutes, and do a deliberately rough version.

Go deeper

There is a strange freedom in being allowed to do things poorly. You were not built to arrive finished. You were built to be worked on, which means the half-done thing in your hands is not shameful. It is the normal condition of a man who is still being made. He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion sits in Philippians 1:6, and notice the tense. Began. Not finished. If God is patient enough to work on you over decades, you can be patient enough to hand him a rough draft today.