Snippet of the good part of the evening in a nutshell: Hennessy XO; my favorite recliner chair in the living room; feet up. Good book in the left hand, Tiffany’s thumb-print glass in the other.

The book is Managing Humans by my vastly-respected author Michael Lopp, a.k.a. Rands in Repose. As Joel “On Software” Spolsky says, “If you found this book on a friend’s bookshelf, steal it immediately. You don’t have time to get to a bookstore, and you can always make new friends later”.

Rands is unbelievable. Funny, very psychological, more humble than Joel, much more of introvert.. This one chapter from the book – called Trickle Theory – shook up my evening. It’s probably the best essay on productivity I’ve ever read. And yes, I do subscribe to LifeHacker, Zen Habits and such.

The number one advice, no matter how stupid it sounds, no matter how many times you’ve heard it before – just freakin’ start. Don’t contemplate. Before you make a decision on whether something is too hard, you must start. And heck, it’s likely that you don’t have much choice on whether to do it anyway, so as Nike says… really…

Complain later. To-do list is not enough. Just don’t be afraid to start.

Somewhere, after I read these words, I had an epiphany: this is indeed the formalization of how I get stuff done. And no, I’m not bragging. There’s just no other way to be effective.

Begin. Go read the first bug. Don’t think about how many are left. Go to the next one and watch what happens. In just a few minutes, you’ll have made something resembling progress. Two more bugs and it’ll start to feel like momentum. Progress + momentum = confidence. The moment you see yourself tackle the smallest part of the impossible task, the quieter The Critic becomes because you’re slowly proving him wrong.

Inertia is the killer of initiative; that said, there’s positive inertia – the mass of movement will help you keep going, because at some point, you’ll look back and see that 20% of the work is done… And now it feels bad to just abandon it here, because of all the time you already spent on it…

And this is where the third advice comes in: when you feel like you can’t do it any more, switch to another item on your todo list. Don’t kill yourself; there’s always another Pri 1 on your list that needs to be done yesterday. Switch over, give your brain some rest. You’ll be more effective in the end.

..when you’re facing an uphill mental battle with yourself regarding the impossible task, it’s time to choose another battle… that isn’t a battle.

Start. Iterate. And don’t forget to mix it up when you’re sick of it.