Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

As part of writing my Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding course, I’ve been researching other people’s advice about procrastination, and one of the commonest pieces of common sense about it is, “Break down your tasks.” After all, often we put off the tasks we’ve set ourselves because they’re too big and intimidating, right? So you need to break them down.

Well, I assume a reasonable level of intelligence in my readers, and it seems to me that you’ve probably thought of that already. So if that piece of obvious advice isn’t working for you, perhaps “break the task down” is itself a task that needs to be broken down and turned into a method. Or even a game…

Let’s play the Task Digestion Game!

Digestion is a complicated thing.

You actually have a small second brain to run your digestive system. There are more nerve cells in your digestive organs than there are in your spinal cord, plus a whole vocabulary of signalling chemicals – many of which also occur in the brain in your head. It’s tricky being an omnivore.

And breaking down your big goals into achievable steps isn’t always easy either.

One of my key goal-achievement processes is what I call “two-level goals”, where you start with the things you really want to achieve and end up with the steps you can take right now to move you closer to them. I’m going to use a digestion metaphor to describe some steps to get from those high-level goals to those concrete steps or tasks, and I’m going to do a worked example using one of my own goals.

1. Chew it over

The first step to digesting your goals is to take firm hold of them and chew them into big pieces, just small enough to swallow.

One of my goals is “Live a profitable life of service to my Right People”. Let’s chew that up. Let’s break it into three parts to start (I like threes).

“Live a profitable life, of service, to my Right People”.

And let’s chew those three into three parts each, starting with “by”:

“Live a profitable life”: by doing some good, making some money and enjoying the process.

“of service”: by connecting people to resources, teaching them skills, and showing them that they can be glorious.

“to my Right People”: OK, “by” doesn’t fit here, so I’m going to say “people who appreciate what I provide them with, take action, and share the results with others”.

You could keep on breaking down into further threes (and you could use twos or fives), but you get the principle. You’ve given yourself a certain number of slots and declared that your goals will break down into that many slots, and then a number of sub-slots. Just start ad-libbing it and you’ll be surprised how it flows. It’s like impromptu theatre: if you commit, keep moving, and don’t second-guess yourself, creativity results. (I just signed up for an improv class next year, so you’ll be hearing more about that in the future, by the way.)

2. Get it damp and soft

Another thing that happens in your mouth, besides chewing, is that the food gets mixed with saliva, which does a little bit to break down some parts of it but mostly just makes it easier to get down your throat, to the next stage.

Let me introduce you to a concept that just struck me a moment ago: the Smear Chart. This is like the love child of a brainstorm and a mind map (and is nothing to do with papilloma viruses). You know how in a brainstorm, you put up a whole lot of concepts more or less randomly, without censoring or critiquing? And how in a mind map, you make a beautifully ordered chart of concepts that connect and branch from each other? Well, a Smear Chart is somewhere in between. To make a smear chart of my work so far, I write out the three main concepts (profitable life, service, Right People) on a piece of paper, then write the three next-level breakdowns around each concept (without overlapping, but with no other layout rules).

Then I do the smear: start free-associating and slapping down words, approximately clustered around the nine concepts I already have, but again, without being rigid about it.

Like this (click to embiggen):

You’ll see that I’ve used different colours to distinguish the three levels – the free-associated words are in red.

3. Add solvents and churn

Once the food hits the stomach, its muscular walls get to work and mix the food into the stomach acid to form a substance called chyme. (Look how educational this post is.) Also mixed in there is bile, which helps to break down fats.

These substances start to break down the larger molecules so they can be absorbed later on in the process.

How would you break down the lowest level on your smear chart so that you get closer to actions?

What about some good questions? Like this:

• Have I succeeded at anything like this before? How did I do it?
• Who else has succeeded at this? How did they do it?
• Can I get anyone’s help?
• Is there a course or a book I can learn from?
• What’s the most obvious next step?

4. Absorb the easy stuff

Once the chyme leaves your stomach, nutrients start to be absorbed through the walls of the intestines, which are specialised for the task – their surface is arranged in such a way that there is a great deal of it in a very small space.

The things the body can use straight away, like glucose, go directly into the bloodstream.

So go and do some of the stuff you came up with that you can act on immediately.

For example, if I decide that I want to do more speaking, I might book into a public speaking class.

5. Reconfigure for the current situation

If you change your mix of fats, carbs and protein dramatically, it takes a few days for your gut to reconfigure itself so it can digest most efficiently. (In the meantime you may notice a slight “upset stomach”.)

If you’re changing your approach to be able to head towards your goals more effectively, give yourself a little time to realign your life accordingly. Figure out what a person who’s succeeding at that goal does, what their day and their week looks like, and make changes that bring you closer to having a day and a week like that.

I’m experimenting with this at the moment as I focus on the “enjoy the process” part of my “live a profitable life” goal. I’m introducing a rhythm of work and rest that is getting closer and closer to an enjoyable, sustainable process.

6. Crack the hard stuff

Some of the nutrients need further processing before they can be used. For example, fruit sugars have to go through the liver to be broken into their component parts before they can be used.

Use the “chew it up” exercise again on the bigger, harder tasks that come out of the chyme, to break them down until you get to something you can do immediately.

Then go and do it.

7. Get rid of the crap, after you get the juice out

After all the nutrients have been pulled out by the small intestine, the large intestine’s job is to reabsorb the water that has helped to break everything up so it’s easy to reach, and expel what remains (dietary fiber, dead cells and other unrequired odds and ends). At the end of this process, what you have is, quite literally, crap.

There will be some crap that results from breaking down your goal. There will be things you thought you had to do that you really didn’t have to do. There will be false starts and learning processes, including the kind where you learn not to do that again. There will be the equivalent of dietary fiber: Something that’s not actually a valuable product in itself, but is essential to the process, like an administrative spreadsheet. There will be things you need to get rid of in order to clear space for achieving your goals.

Reabsorb all the juice – the process itself and all the valuable stuff you learned from doing it. Then get rid of the crap.

So there it is. It’s a game. It’s a metaphor. It’s fun, educational, perhaps mildly disgusting in an amusing way – and helps you get creative about your big, important goals, so you can come up with some useful steps towards them.

For much more like this, sign up now to the preview list for Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding. I’ll let  you know when the course is ready (and give you a discount, too.)

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