You're Not Lazy. The Step Is Too Steep. | Daily Essay

Show Notes

One line in my task queue said "set up an email address." It was really nine steps across two domains. Breaking a task into its real steps is what turns a stuck line into work you can start.

Featuring: Henry Ford, David Allen, Anne Lamott

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Creators and Guests

Host

Dru Riley

Founder of Trends.vc

AL

Guest

Anne Lamott

Featured in 2 Dru's Notes episodes.

DA

Guest

David Allen

Featured in Dru's Notes: You're Not Lazy. The Step Is Too Steep..

HF

Guest

Henry Ford

Featured in Dru's Notes: Willpower Is Finite (How to Do Hard Things Anyway).

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One mental model each day in a few minutes. Habits, business, building products and thinking clearly. From Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc.

"Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs."
Henry Ford

One line sat in my experiment queue for weeks: "Set up makemulti.com email address." What looked like a request for one new inbox was really email setup for two jobs: sending cold outreach from a separate domain and receiving customer email from makemulti.com.

The name undersold the work. I knew it, but hadn't written the steps down.

I wrote out the work as nine steps:

- Research inbox providers
- Provision the mailbox
- Configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC DNS records
- Buy a separate domain for cold outreach so the primary stays clean
- Provision a second inbox on that domain
- Configure DNS again
- Import into a warmup tool
- Update the sales tool
- Verify deliverability for both cold outreach and customer email

With all nine steps on the page, each had a first action I could take right away. "Research inbox providers" had an obvious next click. "Provision the mailbox" also had an obvious next click.

I could commit to the next step and leave the other eight on the page.

Breaking down the task lowered the resistance by replacing unknown work with a visible list. Choosing one step at a time lowered the resistance again.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen turns multi-step projects into lists of next actions. One task on a list can require several actions.

Write "set up email" and you still have to decide what to do first. Name each step and the first action becomes clear.

Anne Lamott's ten-year-old brother froze over a school report on birds after putting it off for three months. Her father told him, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

When you resist a task, check whether it takes several steps. Write out the steps, then choose one you can start.

Which stalled task could you break into actionable steps?