I wrote briefly in this post about a friend who helped me realize that I was overestimating how long it would take me to learn a certain job skill. The same friend once made a related point about how the biggest obstacle to doing almost anything is the first ten minutes. If you can get through that first ten minutes, he thought, you usually get into a rhythm and can focus on anything.
I thought this was a very useful insight. It’s really challenging to start something and on the surface that's what he’s talking about in those first ten minutes. But the more important concept is hidden in the background – as hard as it is to start doing, it’s even harder to stop doing. The key is to know how to summon the energy of starting so that we can leverage the difficulty of stopping to our advantage.
The ‘first ten minutes’ idea is of course arbitrary and reflects a bias toward tasks. Getting through the first ten minutes might be a good way to think about tasks like doing your homework, cleaning the bathroom, or exercising at the gym. From my experience, once I’ve focused and started such things I’ve found it about as hard to stop as it originally was to start. I’m sure the broader principle applies for things with a longer time commitment and it might be reasonable enough to assume that the equivalent of ‘the first ten minutes’ expands in proportion to the size of the overall time commitment. I’ve heard it takes most people a couple of weeks to establish a new habit or routine but knowing that most habits are hard to kick I think that initial level of effort to establish the right new thing is well worth the investment. And thinking about it in these terms might make a daunting task seem much more manageable. If you want to establish a new routine for the rest of your life, it’s not a question of gathering the motivation to do it every day for the rest of your life, it’s really a matter of gathering the motivation for the next two or three weeks because once that habit is locked it, you’ll be able to continue doing it without much extra effort at all.
