I have always struggled with starting things. Not because I’m lazy — if anything, once I’m in the zone I can grind for hours without blinking. The problem is that when I look at a task, my brain immediately tries to do everything at once. It wants to plan it, structure it, estimate it, figure out where to begin, which part to tackle first, what the dependencies are, and somewhere in that whirlwind of variables the task quietly triples in size and I haven’t typed a single character. So I don’t start. Or I start something else. Or I reorganise my to-do list for the third time that day, which feels productive but very much isn’t.
The split
At some point I realised that what I was trying to do was two fundamentally different jobs at the same time: thinking about the work and doing the work. These require completely different mental states, and mixing them is a recipe for paralysis.
So I started splitting them. Deliberately, almost mechanically. When I sit down to plan, I only plan. I map out the steps, break things into smaller pieces, note the unknowns, and leave breadcrumbs for future me. I don’t write a single line of actual output. The whole point is to reduce the variables to a point where each step is small, clear, and obvious enough that it barely needs thinking.
Then when it’s time to produce, I just look at the plan and execute. The barrier to start is nearly zero because the thinking has already been done. I don’t need to decide anything — I just need to do the next thing on the list. Within minutes I’m in the zone, and from there momentum does the rest.
Why it works
It’s all about reducing the barrier to start. That’s it. That’s the entire hack. James Clear nails this in Atomic Habits — if you want to build a habit, make it easy to begin. Remove friction. The planning session is the friction-removal step. It’s low effort on its own (you’re just jotting things down, not committing to anything), but it paves the road for the heavy lifting that comes after.
There’s also something about the planning step that sneaks you into engagement. More than once I’ve sat down to “just plan” a task and ended up doing the whole thing because by the time the plan was done, I was already warmed up. The planning was the on-ramp.
It applies to everything
This isn’t just a work thing. I use the same approach for workouts (plan the routine the night before, so when the alarm goes off I don’t have to think, just move), for meal prep (decide what to cook on Sunday, execute during the week), for writing (draft the structure and bullet points first, flesh it out later — this article started exactly like that).
The more I’ve leaned into this split, the more I’ve noticed that most of my procrastination wasn’t about the task being hard. It was about the task being undefined. Once something has a shape, even a rough one, it stops being intimidating. And once it stops being intimidating, starting is just… starting.