How to Approach an Icky Task

Growing up, I always wanted to skip ballet class. And then without fail, I’d feel great afterwards and be glad I had gone.

I haven’t changed much: I still feel like skipping my workouts a lot. (I have an especially tense relationship with Leg Day.) But I do know now that the feeling that I’m going to hate working out is not a reliable predictor of the reality.

So what’s the best way to start doing something that you feel “ugh” about?

The common advice: just do a little of it

Common advice for how to break through procrastination is to just do a little bit of your task. Do one squat. Write for five minutes. Sit on your yoga mat. Then see what happens — maybe you’ll keep going! 

People give this advice because:

• it reduces the intimidation factor. Fear is a major cause of procrastination, but there’s less to fear about five minutes of work.
• it helps you keep up a habit. Consistency helps to build habits, and once you have a long streak, you’re more motivated not to break it.

But there’s another reason it works that I don’t hear people mention enough, and I think the technique becomes even more effective if you know this reason. The reason is:

You don’t actually know how you’re going to feel when you start doing the task.

You procrastinate when you think you know how you’re going to feel, and you think that feeling is going to be awful. You might predict that you’ll be bored out of your mind, or mired in the awareness that you’re not good enough at this skill. Or, you might even predict that you’ll simply draw a blank and make no progress whatsoever. In my case, I predict that I’m going to feel defeated when it’s hard to do deadlifts with proper form no matter how much I follow all the right advice.

But often, our predictions of how we’ll feel are just wrong. We remember the times that it felt bad so strongly that we forget all the times it felt just fine, and we filter out the memories of how it also feels really good to be engaged, to move, to accomplish something.

This calls for an experiment!

When you have a prediction and you’re not sure if it’s accurate, it’s time to do an experiment. (See? I knew I didn’t get that PhD for nothing.)

So your five minutes of trying out the Icky Task can be viewed, not just as a tiny habit, but as an experiment to find out if your prediction is right.

This change in perspective means it’s no longer about tricking yourself.

If you think to yourself “if I tell myself I only need to do five minutes, I’ll actually do an hour,” you start to run into a problem: you can hear that. You start to anticipate the desired full hour and so you might start to avoid the five minutes even though you claim that five minutes really would be enough.

Who are you trying to kid? Deep down, the goal-oriented part of you wants the full activity done.

But if you view the five minute tip as an experiment, an exercise in humility and curiosity, then you don’t have to avoid looking at the truth for it to work. Instead, truth-seeking is what drives you to try the five minutes. You’re doing it FOR SCIENCE.

Try it out!

Do a five-minute experiment on any task you feel like putting off today:

Before you start, write down your hypothesis of how you think it will make you feel.

Then try it out for five minutes.

Then journal about your results — how it actually did make you feel.

In fact, I made a journaling template for this you can grab at the end of this post, so you can fill it out like a real experiment.

Facing the truth

If it turns out you didn’t mind or even enjoyed the activity, spend some time comparing that icky “I don’t wanna” feeling you had right before the task with your actual reaction to doing the task. This can help you reconsolidate your beliefs about what it feels like to do this thing.

But what if your results are that you really did feel awful, after all? That’s okay. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the goal here is still to trick yourself, that it only works if you realize everything is fine. It’s even okay if you think your feelings were irrational, and that you should be fine with it, but you’re just not.

The first thing to do is give yourself a pat on the back. You did something hard, and you deserve to be proud of yourself for that.

The second thing to do is to process this information. This task makes you feel icky, even if you don’t think it should. A lot of people will tell you to ignore that truth, but it’s actually more powerful to face it. The better you understand the situation, the more equipped you are to change it.

These feelings can change, but it’s going to take more than a five minute experiment. Fortunately, you’re in the right place to learn more about how to resolve emotional blockers to productivity. Make sure you’re getting my emails; you might even want to book a Strategy Session with me to get personalized input on how to deal with your particular emotional block.

The Five Minute Experiment journaling template

Sign up for my newsletter and then check your email for this template. You can print it out or type right into it. If enough people fill it out and email it back to me, I’ll publish a Journal of Accomplishment blog post with your findings!