I’ve been coaching a client who was struggling with an ever-growing pile of ‘to-dos’ next to his computer. He wanted to be Getting Stuff Done, but the pile always won – the bigger the pile got, the less he wanted to tackle it. The obvious wasn’t working; he ignored  ‘getting stuff done’ time in his calendar, even after we added an alarm to the reminder. Today, however, he was ecstatic; we had finally found the trigger that worked for him!

The key is to tie the activity to something else you do regularly. In his case, that was a daily walk, something he enjoys very much. In last week’s call, he agreed to spend thirty minutes, AS SOON AS he returns from his walk, on getting stuff done. And today he reported that, not only had the trigger worked, but the pile was reduced by half after only one week, and he felt terrific!

He explained that the large pile had made him feel out of control, constantly behind, and in overwhelm. Having that lifted off him made him, in his words ‘almost manic’.

We expanded our getting stuff done discussion today to the five-minute rule, i.e. if you pick something up and it will take less than five minutes to complete, it will take you less time to do it now than it would to come back and do it ‘later’. But we went beyond that to add a second question that needs to be asked “Do I need to do this at all?” Sometimes your biggest boost in productivity comes when you let things go.