This Productivity Hack Helps Me Crush My New Year’s Resolutions

There are many ways to trick myself into achieving my goals, such as offering myself various rewards and punishments or outsourcing my progress tracking to apps. In general, I’m a deeply goal-oriented person and am, for better or worse, obsessed with “winning,” which I always thought made me an ideal candidate for complex productivity techniques like detailed to-do lists filled with prioritized tasks. Although I love good technique, I decided to change things up last year when I became concerned that I was spending so much time prioritizing and planning that I wasn’t devoting enough time to it. TO DO. So I focused on doing it and it worked. Here’s what I mean and how my brilliant idea helped me crush last year’s resolutions.

Adopt a “do it now” mindset

I’ve covered many productivity hacks for Lifehacker and the two I liked best, both in theory and in practice, were the two and ten minute rules. The idea is that if a particular task takes less than two (or 10, depending on your preferred approach) minutes, you should simply knock it out early in the day. It’s smart because it leaves little time for deliberation or excessive planning, but even when I was using it for 10-minute tasks, I wasn’t convinced it was effective enough. Some tasks take more than 10 minutes. I felt like the “do it” mentality was helpful to me, but could be more useful. So I started thinking more in terms of just “do it now,” and not in terms of the time limit.

Sitting down every morning to write out a to-do list and figure out how long each responsibility will take, which ones are most important, and which ones will require the most resources works well for some people, but it’s too tedious for me. Since adopting the “do it now” mindset, I don’t do that at all. When I think of something, I do it, no matter what it is or how long it will take (within reason). If for some reason I can’t fit it in when I come up with it, I add it to a note on my phone, which I also consider doing now, although the “it” adds the task to the list.

How it helped me

My goals for the last year largely revolved around my health and fitness, as well as my living space. I wanted to become healthier and better, which meant more time at the gym and having a clean, organized house to relax in. My “do it now” mindset helped me in both cases, especially when I was starting my resolutions this time last year. I didn’t force myself to workout at a certain time or try to fit exercise into a structured daily schedule. Instead, I just firmly told myself that I would go when it came to me and not deliberate or make excuses. I found myself at the gym during lunch breaks, Saturday mornings and weekend evenings. As soon as I thought about it, I went for it (or worked out at home, usually on my Peloton) and it worked. The more I did this, the more training became a normal and expected part of my day. Notably, by the fall, I had developed such an affinity for my hour of physical activity each day that I did start planning it and were able to wake up every day before the sun to just knock it out. I don’t think this would have happened if I hadn’t tried my new motivation-driven approach.

The same was true for cleaning. There are many cleaning techniques and approaches and, to be clear, each of them works well for a certain type of person. I’ve tried them all and nothing has been as helpful to me as just cleaning something the moment I thought about it or saw it needed to be done. If I see a dirty baseboard, I don’t save that information for “living room cleaning” day; I jump off the couch and wipe it. Getting into this habit has been a challenge, because it’s easy to drop the can later and decide to complete these tasks during designated put away times, but once I got the hang of it, I noticed something: I don’t necessary set aside a Saturday afternoon for cleaning. There was nothing to mass clean because everything was fixed whenever a problem arose.

This time around, my goals for the new year are to maintain the momentum I’ve gained from working out and cleaning, but also to improve my finances and achieve some professional accomplishments that I’ve been putting off during the year I spent on personal development. As soon as I finish this, I’m going to call one of the companies that oversees one of my 401k accounts to check my rollover status, something I would have procrastinated on before entering my “do it now” era.

Different things work for different people, but you can get caught up in thinking too much and doing too little. My technique doesn’t come from a book and, I admit, sometimes has to be abandoned when there are serious, large-scale projects that need to be broken down and tackled systematically, but the beauty of it is that it leaves time and mental energy to do it when I have to.