How do I get so much stuff done? I’ve been asked this a lot lately. Right now I’m currently working on three different web contracts, starting my own business, dealing with multiple court issues, maintaining an active fitness lifestyle, and building my relationship with my girlfriend. Yet, among this sea of commitments I am excelling and achieving great things while letting nothing fall behind. How do I do it all? There are two secrets that actually work for me, and they seem to be working for my friends and colleagues as well, and now I’m going to share them with you…

The Problem

You have a massive amount of shit you want to accomplish, in your lifetime, this year, hell, even this week. And yet nothing happens. Regardless of all of your wants and desires, all of your self-knowledge and motivation, you can’t make anything happen. Or even if you can start something with gusto you don’t last more than a week or two until you’re back on your couch marathoning Netflix.

The reason you fail is because you are focused on the end result. You want to start your own business, you see an office with employees and an address book full of clients; you want to start that fitness regiment and you see 90’s Arnold Schwarzenegger (or if you want to be lean you see Bruce Lee).

The point is seeing the end of a lifetime of hard work is overwhelming.

Your brain can’t even comprehend how something like that is possible and it shuts down. It’s easier to watch an episode of House of Cards than it is to have your own business or look like a body builder.

You might even reason to yourself you don’t really want those things – these wants are implanted by tv, you’re much more content playing video games. While this is true in the short term, when you go to bed at night without the distractions of media, you realize deep down inside that something is missing in your life. You were meant for something more. You want to live a life worth living. Like Socrates said,

The unexamined life is not worth living.

We all know this is true, deep down in the core of our being. But the modern world with all of its amenities has shackled us to our ego. There is a way to break free, two very easy things you can do now to get shit done today, immediately…

I. Excessive Granularity

This is the biggest secret I’ve ever stumbled upon, and it just works. When I say excessive granularity, I mean breaking down your task into a multitude of small individual tasks, and then break those down even further, until you have a huge list or multiple lists of very small actionable items.

For instance, it took me over a year from the time I bought this domain and wrote my first article to actually finish the series of articles I initially wanted to launch with and the website design and development. What changed was instead of seeing what I wanted to launch, I understood I had to break down that accomplish into a series of very small action tasks. Example:

TODO LIST (BEFORE):

Write exposé on resumes

Get better blog template or design one myself

Implement SEO, performance, and analytics stuff

Make the site work on mobile

At first glance the above list looks very good. If I accomplish all of those tasks I’ll have a working website ready for the world. That is the folly of the human brain. It gets tricked into thinking abstractly when we need to take action, thus preventing us from taking action at all.

On closer inspection you realize everything is vague. This list only describes the “what” that needs to happen and not the “how”. Every good to-do list should really be a description of the how:

how am I going to write my exposé on resumes? what are the missing topics?

what’s wrong with the current design? what needs to change in the new design? what specific aspects of the blog need to be worked on and how will they be changed?

… I’m sure you get the picture. So much missing information.

Aside from the missing information just seeing a big task like “Write exposé on resumes” is daunting. That’s four more articles I need to write, and I’m not even 100{afe0c0c2f5c2699791a2ca22abff7dd94de217b9afeebf1de9bdaa562a48e3bc} sure what they should be. Reading that first line gets me demotivated fast… I’ll just watch something on Youtube and come back to it.

Instead, we can break down that list into multiple lists of very fine granularity, making them filled with very easy 1-5 minute tasks we can check off.

TODO LIST (AFTER):

Article To-Do’s:

Make list of the initial resume topics you want to cover

Write a title for each topic

Write a description for each topic

Write articles: Resumes Are Not Forms Resume Consciousness Baiting The Callback What Can This Person Do For Me

Look up creative commons images

Figure out how to automatically add and correctly attribute images to posts

Add creative commons images to articles Article 1 Article 2 Article 3 Article 4

Share each article on Facebook

As you can see, this giant to-do list was hidden inside of that very first bullet point of my previous to-do list… No wonder I was overwhelmed! If you don’t break down your goals and tasks into super tiny subtasks, you’ll always feel overwhelmed and depressed. Doing this exercise frees your mind. You’re now capable of taking action on any one of those tiny tasks. Writing a list of topics? I can do that write now! … Write a title for each one? Maybe that’s too much thinking for now so I break that bullet down even further to “write a title for the first topic.” Or maybe I’m feeling like starting the article without a title so I change the to-do list.

Remember, these lists are living breathing documents. They should constantly be changing as you evolve and gain new insight into the tasks at hand. First instance, I decided I wanted to have a Facebook page and Twitter account to share to instead of just a regular Facebook share. So that bullet point evolved to it’s own to-do list that was focused on setting up accounts and email address for my new social media accounts and then syncing them up with my website.

I.I Celebrate the Successes, no matter how small

One fatal flaw almost everyone makes (I did), is that when you cross something small off your list, you compare it to the end result and how far away you are. This will demotivate you and send you back into Netflix land. The trick is, you need to celebrate your successes. A good friend told me

Even if you just go 1{afe0c0c2f5c2699791a2ca22abff7dd94de217b9afeebf1de9bdaa562a48e3bc} towards your goal, that’s 1{afe0c0c2f5c2699791a2ca22abff7dd94de217b9afeebf1de9bdaa562a48e3bc} closer to your goal than you’ve ever been before in your life! Celebrate that 1{afe0c0c2f5c2699791a2ca22abff7dd94de217b9afeebf1de9bdaa562a48e3bc}!

I specifically remember while I was designing this site, I made a font change and crossed it off my list. It took about 5-10 minutes to get the font just right. I specifically remember crossing that item off my list and thinking, “what a small and insignificant thing I just did”. Then I slapped myself in the face and told myself, “You just changed the font! YOU CHANGED THE MOTHERFUCKING FONT! That font wasn’t going to change itself, and now you’re one step closer to launching your website! One step closer than you were yesterday! At this rate we’ll launch within a week!” And you know what? We did.

I.II To-do Software

I recommend you use a piece of software specifically for making lists. They should be easily synced across all platforms (web, mobile, tablets), and should be simple to use and, if possible, it should be very fun to click things off your list.

For this I use Wunderlist. It’s very easy to use, you can login with Facebook, and easily make multiple lists and keep track of your items. There are lots of to-do list apps out there, here’s a list of some of my favorite to-do apps. Don’t get overwhelmed though, just pick one you think looks pretty. That should be enough to get you started.

II. Uncomfortable Investment

There are some things you’ll have a hard time breaking down because they’re on a schedule, they just need to be done, or you just don’t feel like doing them. My classic example is going to the gym. I go to the gym consistently three times a week for 1-1.5 hours a day. My track record is amazing. I’ve been going for two years straight and the only days I’ve missed have been because of illness or appointments that I couldn’t reschedule. I’ve never missed a day because I didn’t want to go to the gym.

My secret is that I made an uncomfortable investment into the gym. My friend is a personal trainer, and one day after a lot of self discovery I decided I was done being fat and lazy. I was going to allow my friend to train me. However, the price I pay for him every month to train me makes me uncomfortable. I’m not going broke because of it, but it’s enough where every month I hesitate writing the check, even if just for a moment.

This level of investment makes it hard to walk away from that commitment. I’m also investing in my friend and his time. I respect him as a man and as a professional trainer. He is amazing. He’s a genius when it comes to knowing how the human body works and also the human spirit. His name is Martins and you can train with him too. He’s just started his own company called Big Bang Fitness and is looking for clients. However, because he’s my friend and I respect him, this adds another level of investment to my gym commitment.

Once you’re this invested into a venture it’s hard, nay… it’s almost impossible to just walk away.

I did the same thing with my website. I invested more money than I needed to to get this thing running giving me even more incentive to, as they say, “shit or get off the pot”.

I’d love to hear some of your motivational tips or success stories in the comments.

If you really want to get motivated I suggest you take a look at my suggested reading page. These are the books that helped shape who I am today.