There’s a lot of advice out there about how to ‘Get Things Done.’ Some of it is very useful, some of it is very specific to people in certain situations, but everybody agrees if you want to accomplish a goal, you need to develop habits that help you reach that goal. Seems obvious, but I see a lot of people try to brute force their way into doing something, and while that can work once in a while, it’s really hard on the person who tries doing it that way.
So, developing habits. I have a different definition of a habit than other people do. Most experts define a habit as something you do regularly without having to think about it. That would be great if it could happen for me, but for neurodivergent people it just usually isn’t possible. I don’t do anything automatically except convert oxygen to carbon dioxide. So, for me a habit is a behavioral building block that helps me accomplish and over-arching goal. I constantly need to write them down and make myself do them. What you do, even if they never become automatic, is through repetition remove your natural resistance to them.
When you want to accomplish something big, like write a book or build a piece of furniture, or weave a tapestry, or get yourself in shape, the habits you build are very important. And research is clear on how to make yourself follow these habits. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, writes about how habits that really become ingrained over time are things that become part of our identities. You don’t just write regularly or exercise every day. You become the type of person who writes every day, or the type of person who goes to the gym three times a week. It is a fundamental way of viewing yourself that is the most helpful.
And when trying to implement a new habit, you need to start small. If you want to build a habit of writing every day, do nots et the goal of sitting down for four hours. That will seem overwhelming. Start with a goal of sitting down for ten minutes, once or several times a day. If trying to start a gym habit, make yourself show up but tell yourself that you only have to stay twenty minutes and then if you feel like it you can go home. That establishes the habit of starting the activity, which is the hardest part of all of this. Most likely, you’ll stay to finish your workout or find your ten minutes of writing turns into an hour before you even realize it.
Most of being a creative or accomplished person is just making yourself do the thing. That’s the hardest part. Our brains do not like doing the thing, even if we really enjoy it. Your brain will throw up numerous roadblocks to doing the thing and excuses for not doing it. But you can build signals for yourself that tell you when it’s time. And eventually, even if the activity doesn’t become automatic, your resistance will decrease, and it will become much easier.
I’m writing about this because I’m really struggling with it right now. I’m to the point where it’s not a struggle to sit down and write. I do that with a minimum of resistance right now. There are other things, however, that are much more of a struggle. I’ve had a manuscript in need of simple revisions for a month and a half. I need to add a couple of paragraphs of character development and a couple of lines of intense emotion reaction to a scene. This is not hard. I could do this in my sleep, but for some reason I’m feeling a lot of resistance to actually accomplish it, and sadly, I’m giving in to it way too often. This needs to be done so I can send it to the proofreader and have it ready to publish in March. I know once I open the document and settle in, that doing the actual work will be easy. I just need to make myself do it. Sitting down and opening the down at the computer and opening the document, with no expectation that I will change anything yet, would be a good start.
I’m having a similar problem actually showing up to the gym, and what I need to do is make that first step easy and as automatic as I can make it. The problem here is the first step is driving to the gym. So, that part can’t be a baby step. But I can make just showing up the entirety of the goal for a week or two until I am back in the habit. It’s likely once I’m there I’ll want to go ahead and put in a full workout. But overcoming the resistance needs to be step one.
Overcoming resistance is the hardest part of every project, but it’s the key to doing the thing. It’s easier if we make doing the thing part of our own internal sense of identity. And it’s easier if we make the first step something easy, to ease ourselves into the activity. It sounds simple, but it’s not. But it’s also not that complicated. We just need to make ourselves start, and then our forward momentum will carry us along. Starting is the hardest part, but it’s how you do the thing.