Welcome to Glow-Up Friday’s #2.9

Hey Besties,

It’s totally been a while (like a solid 3 weeks oopsie🫢) but you know what, I’m going to pick this up again and continue to hold myself accountable to helping others live a better life.

But you know, keeping yourself accountable is not an easy thing; even I start falling off on habits I know I should be doing.

So the question is: how do we hold ourselves accountable to doing hard things?

Continue reading and you’ll find out the 3 tactics I used to start writing this newsletter (after procrastinating for literally 3 weeks).

Tactic 1: Just do one.

This is a pretty simple tactic I’ve learned from going to the gym.

By telling yourself that you’re only going to do one, you drop the mental barriers and open up the possibility of doing more than you intended.

When you do it once, you gain momentum.

After you do one, you’ll realize that it’s not even as bad as you thought it was and you’ll continue to do more (usually).

That’s exactly how I got about writing this current newsletter. I told myself: ‘Write 1 sentence’. So I wrote 1 sentence.

Then I wrote 2, 3, 4.

And now I’m enjoying this process once again and realized how much I missed writing.

Tactic 2: Make it your first task.

Another tactic that’s useful: start your day off with that task (another tactic from the gym).

Make it (the thing you’re procrastinating on) the first task of your day. This will most likely be in the morning (assuming you wake up early enough).

If you made it the last task of your day, then you wouldn’t have enough motivation or energy to get going. You would’ve already spent it on the 100 million other tasks that you needed to do that day.

Once again, the example with me writing this newsletter: I’d been sticking the task of me writing my newsletter towards the end of the day. We can now see how that turned out; 3 weeks of no writing, no nothing.

This would mean that I needed to start my day off by writing this newsletter or else I knew that it was never going to get done.

That’s exactly what I’m doing now; it’s 7:30 am.

Tactic 3: Write down each step.

If this is a task that you’ve never done before and it seems really big and scary (which is why you’re probably procrastinating on it), then write every single little step.

When I say little, I really mean little.

For example, if I had to write my first post ever and I’d been procrastinating on it because I never did it before, this is what I’d do:

1. 7:00 am: Sit at desk

2. 7:02 am: Turn on laptop and open chrome

3. 7:05 am: Login to beehiiv

4. 7:07 am: Click on ‘New Post’

5. 7:09 am: Write one sentence

If you’ve never done something before, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the idea that you have in your head. What you have in your head is too general, vague, and intangible for you to execute on. That’s why laying out these small steps makes it easier for you to do that hard scary task.

So if you’re reading this and procrastinating on something, try out these tactics and see what happens.

That’s all this week, I’ll see y’all next Friday 🤍 

-Crisha

Hey Bestie!

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