A different way of looking at tasks

I talked in the past about how useful it can be to break difficult goals into multiple small ones in order to have a better understanding of what you need to do in order to achieve whatever you want, and to make that difficult goal seem easier to achieve.

The same mentality can be applied to not so difficult tasks as well, in order to make things look a lot easier than they are.

For example, you know that for a while now I've been using my old method of writing 10 articles at the beginning of the week, on Monday, in order to be done with this task for the rest of the week so I can focus on other things. It's particularly easy because on Monday I'm full of energy and I'm excited to work.

While that's a really good strategy and I recommend it to everyone who feels like they can write a lot in one single day, there is a problem I always have to deal with, one that every writer experiences at some point - lack of ideas.

Writing 10 articles in one day is really not a difficult tasks. However, coming up with 10 ideas for those articles can take quite a lot of time, and unless you have several ideas already prepared, then you're gonna have to spend quite a lot of time thinking and trying to find interesting topics to approach.

That's why, thinking that you need to come up with 10 ideas for those articles may demotivate you and make you wanna procrastinate. Even if you do find a few interesting things to talk about, the fact that you'll still need 7 or 8 more ideas is gonna seem like a lot.

So, one thing I do is look at all those 10 articles and separate them into two groups of five. After all, I publish 5 articles on Medium and 5 articles on Steemit. So, instead of thinking "I need 10 ideas", I'm just thinking "Well, I need 5 ideas so I can write 5 articles for Steemit" and when I'm done, I just think "Now I need another 5 ideas so I can write 5 articles for Medium".

It doesn't sound like a huge change, like something you can do to make your work easier. To be honest, it isn't. The final amount of ideas you'll need is still 10. However, the simple fact that you look at the problem in a different way, and you just give your brain the impression that there's a lot less work to be done than there actually is, somehow helps.

You'll feel like the task is actually not that difficult, like you can actually do it. And before you know it, you'll realize that coming up with two sets of five ideas is a lot easier than coming up with 10 ideas.

It's such a simple method, yet it somehow works. I guess our brains are simply really easy to trick. Try this little strategy and see if it works for you as well. If it does, then maybe you just found the perfect way to work more, without feeling like you need to invest a lot of time and effort into what you have to do.