Beat Procrastination by Taking the Smallest Step Possible

I don’t know about you, but I’m a serial procrastinator.

My procrastination is so bad, in fact, that when I started writing this article I managed to get the headline set, I uploaded the image I selected for it, and then I went on to doing other things. I completely jumped from the “set-up” to the finale, while skipping the meat and potatoes of writing the actual post.

If you find yourself caught in the grips of paralyzing procrastination like this, what can you do? How can you possibly beat it?

My advice would be to take the smallest step possible to move forward.

For example, when it came to writing this article, I wrote the very first sentence.

Go ahead, scroll back up and look at it again. I’ll wait.

As you can see, it’s nothing too impressive. It’s all of ten words long, and it merely states the obvious — that I’m a serial procrastinator. It took me a few seconds to type it out. And almost as quickly as I had it typed, I had already jumped back to something else, continuing the procrastination. However, when I switched back over, it was easier to write the next sentence.

Once I had two sentences done, it was even easier to continue writing more. Once I had a page of text done, I was on a roll!

So what happened here?

Well, there’s a few things. First, staring at a blank canvas is daunting; in fact, it’s downright terrifying. I’m also a bit of a perfectionist, so seeing the blinking cursor staring back at me gives me anxiety. I wonder if I’ll make any typos, or if I’ll write something that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Aiming for perfection certainly doesn’t help, in fact, it exacerbates my procrastination. When you have nothing to judge, then it’s impossible to say it isn’t perfect.

But you know what they say…

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Share on X

That’s right. By taking that infinitesimal first step, I accomplished something much bigger than just writing a single sentence. I set into motion, well, motion. And if you’re familiar with physics at all, then you’ll recognize that, simply stated, Newton’s first law of motion is “an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion.”

When I was procrastinating, I was at rest.

By writing the first sentence, I started moving. And once you’re moving, it’s much easier to stay moving.

It’s the getting started that is hard. So if you can make that first step as tiny as possible, or better yet, make that first step impossible to not do, then you’ll find that your procrastination starts to dissolve. And once you’ve taken a step forward, it’s hard not to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

To sum it all up, here’s the key to putting an end to procrastination. First, determine what the smallest first step you can take is. If your overall goal is to get healthy and fit, then start by doing one push-up. That’s it. Just one. It’s so infinitesimal that you can’t not do it. And yet, it sets the wheels in motion for doing so much more.

Once you’ve taken that first step, keep moving forward. In keeping with the push-up example, do two push-ups next. Before you know it, you’ll be moving forward at break-neck speed, and procrastination will be a thing of the past.