Using the DO IT Tool to get going on your work
Dr Paul Duignan
You can always find this page at PaulDuignan.consulting/doit.
Despite having good intentions, and wanting to get on with their work, a number of people find it hard to actually start a work task. If you have this type of difficulty, be assured that you are in good company. Something like half of all students report problems with this. Many of the geniuses of the world have also had a similar problem. For example, there are many great writers who talk about struggling with writer’s block. The good news is that this is a well-understood issue and there are well-developed solutions for it.
It is easy to understand why anyone can end up wanting to avoid their work. As a person walks towards their desk, or sometimes as they just start thinking about going to do their work, they can become anxious. This is not a question of people being lazy or of them being poor workers. In fact, the more conscientious they are about doing their work, the more people can be worried about the pressure of needing to do a great job. So, the closer they get to actually sitting down to start their work, the more their worry increases.
In response to this increasing anxiety, some people just get up and walk away from their desks. Others find that when doing their work and coming to something a little hard, they put their work to one side and just start browsing the net. Interestingly, what happens when they do this is that their anxiety about their work starts to reduce. This is because they are no longer thinking so intensely about their work. What happens next is that this reduction in anxiety acts as an internal psychological reward for them having avoided starting, or continuing with, their work.
However, they still end up with an ongoing low-level worry in the back of their minds about the work that has been left unfinished. This is despite having reduced their immediate high levels of anxiety about starting, or continuing their work.
This means that they are, firstly, internally rewarding themselves for not starting their work. Secondly, they also miss out on the positive internal reward and psychological satisfaction that incentivises people who routinely finish their work and that helps such people maintain their ongoing good work habits.
The Paradox of the Conscientious Worker
As has been discussed, conscientious people who are the keenest to do a good job can end up turning in sub-standard work because their worry prevents them from starting a work task. As a result, they paradoxically can end up handing in a hurried, and lower quality, job.
Another psychological twist to this is that such conscientious people, by only giving themselves limited time to complete their work, always have a ready-made excuse for handing in poor quality work. Their excuse for such sub-standard work is because they had to ‘do it in a rush’. They can also tell themselves that, given the length of time available for them to do it in, what they came up with was really something of an achievement. This protects them from ever having to test their belief about the quality of work they would be able to produce if they ever allowed themselves a sufficient period of time in which to do it. So the origins of finding it difficult to start your work often lie in emotional processes that are taking place inside you such as the ones just described above.
The Solution
So if in spite of having tried a number of times, you are still having significant problems around starting your work, you might like to start by having a few sessions with a psychologist or counsellor to work on your underlying emotions and ‘rules’ or beliefs about your work. A psychologist or counsellor will be able to help you deal with such emotional issues and with the internal rules or beliefs that you have about work that can end up meaning that you try to avoid it. In these sessions, they are likely to use an approach such as that set out in the RULES Tool that I regularly use with my clients.
If you have a reasonably high level of general anxiety then there are other things that you can do to lower your level of anxiety and doing these may ultimately feed into you being more successful at getting started with your work. For instance, you can use Progressive Muscle Relaxation on a regular basis to reduce the overall amount of tension you hold in your body. You can also use the Accept Your Feelings Tool as a part of a regular mindfulness meditation practice to get better at experiencing worry without letting it determine your behaviour.
The DO IT acronym
Regardless of the emotional and belief basis for you avoiding work, the DO IT acronym below sets out a general four-step approach that anyone can use become better at starting, and continuing, their work.
D - Divide up your work into smaller pieces
O - Optimise your Approach to work
I - Work in intervals with rest periods
T - Treat yourself for success
Most people use a To Do List. The first trick is to give your To Do List more power over what you do. How you do this is to have a category in your TO DO List of ‘must do’ (MD). Mark up selected items on your TO DO List with MD. What this means is that if you put MD next to an item in your To Do List, that you will actually do it that day - even if you have to stay up all night! When establishing this rule you will need to only put MD next to items you are certain you will complete that day. Start off by selecting items that you are at least 80% certain you will do on that day. It is important that you do not ever put MD next to something that you will not do. If you have the automatic rule that you will do whatever has an MD next it it, then you avoid an ongoing struggle with yourself trying to use your willpower to force yourself to do these tasks. With this approach it is not a matter of exercising willpower each time in regard to each MD item, you just do not allow yourself any choice over whether you will do it or not.
The second To Do List trick is to divide your To Do items up into micro-tasks. So if you have a task like ‘Work on Project X’, thinking about the whole of the project may well be enough to trigger your anxiety. So you take your ‘Work on Project X’ item and divide it up into a whole lot of much smaller items, any one of which is so small that, on its own, it does not trigger much in the way of anxiety.
It is worthwhile heading up a page with the heading: Micro-Tasks. Then you just take the very first one of these micro-tasks from the ‘Work on Project X’ item, for instance, ‘Open Gmail’. As you are doing this, try to not think of anything about the wider project, just focus on your immediate task of opening Gmail. Once you have done this micro-task, cross it off your list, put a big tick, and congratulate yourself for doing it. The next task might be ‘Search for the email from Susan’. Do this one and again tick it off. The next one might be ‘Open email from Susan’. What determines the size of these micro-tasks is whatever size is small enough to not trigger much anxiety. Forget whether this seems like a silly thing to have to do, the point is to do whatever is necessary to get yourself working.
There are several ways in which you can optimise your approach to work. The first is to make your workspace and work setting a pleasant place in which to work. Make sure you have a coffee or whatever you like to have when you start to work. Turn on some appropriate music. Make sure that interruptions will be at a minimum. Turn off your phone if that is possible. Close Facebook.
Second, you can develop a ‘work persona’. This is a persona different from your normal self who is happy working away efficiently. Mark that you are adopting this persona through something like wearing a watch, or a ring, or some other marker. Put this on and move into your work persona. If you feel that you are no longer working in the way you want your work persona to work, then take off whatever it is that marks that persona and continue doing your work as your ‘normal you’ mode. Over time increase the amount of time you are in your work persona.
Thirdly, slow down. Some people also find that, because they put off work and have to always do it at the last minute, their whole experience of work is that it is always rushed. Always experiencing work as something that is rushed is another disincentive for sitting down and starting to do your work. If this is the case for you, and you are in a work situation where you can decide on your pace of work, decide that from now on you are going to work at a somewhat slower pace. You will get less done in any particular work period. However, because you are likely to be able to work for longer periods of time, you will actually end up getting more done. In addition, the time you spend working will also be more enjoyable. Most of us are going to have to spend a lot of time working throughout our lives, so we might as well figure out how to make the experience as enjoyable as possible.
Only work for a limited period of time, particularly at the start of the process of training yourself to be someone who can just sit down and do their work whenever they want to. For instance, you might decide to only work for twenty minutes. Or it might even be for only ten minutes. Whatever it is, it is a hundred times better than not starting your work. Get up and give yourself a break after you have done your first session of twenty minutes or so. You can allow yourself a five or ten-minute break at that stage. Set a timer so that you are not going to have to look at your phone all the time to see how much time has passed. Get into the pattern of working for twenty or thirty minutes at a time (or whatever period suits you) with five or ten-minute breaks. Later, you can increase the amount of time you spend working versus having a break.
If you are having problems starting or continuing with your work, you are currently rewarding yourself for not doing your work by the reduced anxiety that arises when you start to do work. The idea is to replace this internal reward that you are currently giving yourself for not working with a positive reward for starting to do your work. Think of a reward that you can treat yourself with when you start to become more successful at commencing your work. This could be something like: watching something; eating something you enjoy eating; or just talking to your family or friends.
As you start to apply the four steps in the DO IT Tool and start doing more work, you are likely to find yourself gaining momentum because your anxiety is reducing because you are actually starting to get work done. Remember you can always find this tool at PaulDuignan.consulting/doit.
Please note that when you are dealing with issues around child rearing, relationships, dealing with stress of any type or doing psychological or self-development work, if you find yourself feeling overwhelming emotions, troubling thoughts or actions, you need to talk to a health professional.