When starting a task or project, people will often procrastinate if they don’t have a clear starting point or a logical sequence of steps to take. Don’t get all flustered about how or where you start. It’s often more important to simply start. Identify a starting point, even if it’s not the perfect starting point. Some people think that if they can initiate tasks at the just “right time,” won’t that be grand? For most tasks, objectively speaking, there is no “perfect” time, so get over it.

If it helps, seek an early, easy win — for whatever you’re seeking to accomplish, pick some aspect of it that you can complete quickly and easily. Take the easy “win,” which is an exceedingly easier approach to getting started than to tackle some difficult portion of it first.

Facing Challenges

What if you’re up against a project where everything about it is difficult for you. It happens. How could you get an easy win right off the bat? Open the file folder, review the contents, and seek something, anything that’s familiar to you. Often, that represents a fairly easy entry point. Sometimes merely organizing materials, allocating them to smaller file folders, paper clipping items, or shuffling their order serves a suitable early win. Now at least you’ve gained a better idea of the project.

Suppose you’re experiencing an unusually difficult time initiating a project. In that case, promise yourself that you will delve into it for only a grand total of four minutes. By the fourth minute, often you won’t want to stop! Strange how that works. If you have a large job, break it down into individual tasks, each regarded as a distinct entity. Make bite-sized pieces for yourself, which will be easier to swallow than contemplating the entire project at once.

When you tackle a 5 minute job, and gain the completion for having it all done, you have more energy, focus, and direction for say, another 5 minute job. Likewise, if you do five 5-minute jobs, each job fueling a sense of victory, however minor, you’re spurred on to the next and the next. In this manner, five 5-minute jobs can actually be easier than one 25-minute job.

Give Yourself the Edge

Toiling each day in a work setting overripe with unwelcome distractions does little to aid the person whose ability to concentrate is already strained. In far too many office environments today the noise and “hub-bub” directly contribute to procrastination. For virtually any task or project you’re working on, less distraction adds up to less procrastination!

Suppose you have many tasks to handle, each of which would only require about 5 to 10 minutes to complete. Singularly, none of these tasks would be that difficult to tackle. The thought of grappling with all of them, however, becomes discouraging.

As the roster of things you need to take care of grows, and you feel yourself slipping behind, they all seem to grow in complexity. Even the smallest step in pursuit of a desired goal is better than nothing.

Who Can Help

Action-oriented role models, fortunately, might be near by. Is there someone in your office who is a take-charge go-getter? Consider the value of closely observing the behaviors of the action-takers around you. Alternatively, is there someone in reach who is seeking to finish the same sort of task? If so, you may have the ideal partner to join you.

Whenever you can identify someone who’s facing the same challenge that you are, you have good potential for getting things done faster and easier.

Bust Ruts with Regularity

When you’re well-rested and well-nourished, you have the best chance of doing your best work. Conversely, when you don’t have enough sleep or haven’t eaten well, even the simplest of tasks can loom much larger than they really are. Half of the time, when you can’t get started on something, it is due to fatigue.

Approaching the Ruts

Here is a variety of rut-busting approaches, one or more of which may prove to be effective for you on any given day and in any given situation:

• If you face many things competing for your attention, and these days, who doesn’t, trade one project off against another. Suppose you have to do project A, and you’ve been putting it off. Along buy generic soma comes project B. It’s more difficult, more involved, much scarier. So, all of a sudden, A doesn’t look so bad. Now, tackle A headlong. You’ll still have B to worry about and that may just keep you humming along on A.
• If you have somebody waiting for your results, or waiting to hear about your progress, you significantly increase your ability to get started and stay on the task at hand. One of the reasons that you don’t procrastinate at work as often as you might at home is that at work you generally report to a boss who is waiting for the results of your efforts and who pays you based on your efforts. If you don’t return your work, there are identifiable penalties.
• Often, simply having too much in your visual field is an impediment to getting started on something. When you have one project or one task at hand, your odds of maintaining clarity and focus increase dramatically. This works even better if you’re not in your own office but at a conference table or at some other post where you only have the project materials at hand.
• Suppose you know you have to tackle a project on Monday, and you’re dreading it. How can you make the project more palatable days beforehand? A very effective maneuver is to review the project contents on, say, the Friday before. Over the weekend, you don’t have to do anything. Unbeknownst to you, by reviewing project contents on a Friday, you’re already in the germination state. When it’s time to start the project on Monday, you find that you can actually get started with greater ease than you anticipated. The early preview you gave yourself on Friday was the key.
• Suppose your car conks out on the side of the road, and your battery gets a jumpstart. All of a sudden, the engine is revving and this is certainly not a time to turn the car off. You want to keep it on for a good twenty minutes. Sometimes a mere gesture of turning on your computer, popping a DVD into the player, or flipping on your pocket dictator is enough to get started on a task that you have been putting off. In essence, flipping on the switch to your PC, having it boot up, and perhaps taking it to the appropriate folder and file, is analogous to jumpstarting your car. Once your PC boots up and your hard drive is humming, you may experience a jumpstart in your ability to delve into the project.
• Pain is a great motivator, perhaps the greatest of all. What are the consequences of not getting started? If you can identify the pain — what you will experience as a result of not doing the task or not starting the project — that may be an incentive for you to get started.
• Sometimes the only way to get started on a task is to dive into it headlong, cold turkey, not allowing yourself the opportunity to stray. Surprisingly, when you practice the cold turkey approach to procrastination, it’s not nearly as upsetting as it sounds. In fact, it can be a great relief.

Capitalize on Your Progress

COO or newly hired, the more items that vie for your time and attention, the larger or even smaller projects can loom perceptually. Who among us does not feel the crush of what he needs to get done, even when the accomplishments may be nothing but the mundane? In perspective, much of what you face requires only a few minutes to complete.

For any given task, at any given time, if you have difficulty starting, you now have many techniques to draw upon. Not all techniques work for everyone all the time. Still, employ one or another, or another, until you get rolling.

If you still have trouble getting started, think about all the times you had trouble getting started in the past. What happened once you finally got started, and how good did you feel once you accomplished what you set out to accomplish? If you can evoke those same feelings of satisfaction, happiness, and the sheer joy of accomplishment, you may just have the winning formula for getting started right here.