What did you do today? Like… actually? What specific objectives did you achieve, what to-do items did you accomplish? How many things did you intend to complete, or talk about completing, that ultimately did not get done. Why is that?
Being hard on yourself about it only makes it worse. The first step to changing this is letting go and forgiving yourself. After that, it is simply to practice improving your bias for action. From there it is a simple game of habits and consistency. I will be discussing each of these.
In this series I will contemplate the hurdles we face every day in organizing our lives, accomplishing what we set out to do, and achieving our loftiest goals in life.
There is a term I heard a couple of years ago called “Bias for Action”. Bias for action is someone’s propensity to take action on an idea. As I have grown and continued to focus on self-improvement, I have begun to realize that this is one of the most effective metrics for predicting the success of any period of time in my life. When I feel like I am in a success rhythm (the opposite of a rut), I can almost always look back at my day and see a bias for action in all my decisions and inputs
Try it for a day. Tell yourself, tomorrow I am going to act on every productive idea I have. This is different from being impulsive. It is the opposite of procrastination. When you finish your meal, clean up immediately. When you remember that cupboard that you have been meaning to clean for six months, just clean it out (I promise it doesn’t take long). When you tell yourself that you are getting off social media after one more video, just get off now. Just do. You will be so surprised what you get done in a day versus a typical day of thinking, planning, and putting off for a later date.
Bias for action is a muscle. It requires intention, practice, and consistency. Try it for a day and see how you feel. See if you can keep it up for a week, month, lifetime. Better to do too much now and trim the fat, then look back in five years and wonder why you never started.