Productivity Flywheel

Making progress on complex tasks is hard. Framing how you complete it makes all the difference.

To break from perpetual procrastination, all you need to do is something small towards the bigger task in order to chip away at it.

I’ll use a contrived example of porting a 10 tonne pile of soil to the back of your house (speaking from experience). If you timebox 5 minutes work or commit to moving 2 wheelbarrows, you’ll find that once you start, it’s pretty easy to carry on the task — the flywheel is in motion.

I find this pattern emerging all the time with exercise (commit to running for 5 minutes and I tend to run for over 30 minutes), DIY (commit to painting one wall and I tend to complete a room), programming (commit to fix one small bug and I’ll get on a streak of fixing 3).

What’s particularly interesting is the flywheel metaphor. All you need to do is apply the smallest amount of effort and each incremental push feels easy and starts to feel hard to stop.