Eating the Elephant: Find your Trigger Action

Quick tips for folks who find motivation, focus and organization challenging

Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash

In other pieces I will talk in more depth about how motivation depends on breaking and building self-reinforcing systems of behavior, but today let’s talk about a simple technique that I’ve found useful for overcoming anxiety around task/information overload and getting started.

In the past, when life got busy and demanding, I’d find myself overwhelmed by all the things that needed doing, my mind would churn and circles and I wouldn’t know where to start. I’d end up like a deer caught in the headlights, frozen and unable to help myself.

Lists weren’t useful (not to start with anyway) — they just gave me even more anxiety and guilt about all everything I had to do, and get down on myself about how much I was avoiding doing any of it.

I’d succumbed not just to inertia, but resistance as well, in the form of escalating anxiety, whenever I thought about or tried to tackle a task. In short, I was stuck in the mud.

Something that I accidentally found useful when I was feeling the panic of not knowing where to begin, was to use mundane tasks as Trigger Actions to break the inertia and get…