Activation energy.

Stephen Duneier, in his TEDx Talk, talks about breaking down big goals into small doable actions.

Like instead of focussing on reading 50 books, he would focus on reading a book for only 5 minutes. That’s it.

He says, “After that, I’ll shoot some hoops, do this or that, and maybe come back for 5 more minutes of reading, which may not necessarily be the same book.”

What this does is reduce the activation energy of doing something meaningful.

Since we are going to read or workout for only 5 minutes, what’s the point of procrastinating it?

Since it is already imperfect, and can’t possibly be perfect, we kind of get over the perfectionism we bring it with such tasks.

Do these 5 minutes tasks enough, and you’d be done with more reading and more workouts and more whatever you want to do than otherwise.