How To Harness Inertia to Boost Productivity

This is a guest post by Brett Hagber@DaretoExpress

If you’re anything like me, you may be a serious procrastinator. You dread and dread doing whatever it is that needs to get done, and you keep putting it off with favorite distractions like Facebook, Twitter, the TV, your friends, talking on your phone, and just about anything that lets you dodge responsibility and not do what you really need to get done. Eventually, you realize that you’re running out of time to get that task done, so you drop everything and rush the job. Sometimes, you do just fine and finish with time to spare, but other times, you don’t perform your best because of procrastination. We need to take a lesson from those times where we procrastinate and lose – so we don’t procrastinate ever again.

However, inevitably, we lapse into procrastination from time to time – I know I procrastinated on writing this post by managing my comments on my blog and posting on Twitter. Yes, I’m mortal too, guys.

One interesting thing I found is that if we just sat down and started to do, without breaking focus, our productivity goes through the roof. Once we set the ball rolling by just starting, it seems like we can get things done with lightning speed. The gains in productivity only go higher if we kept taking action on whatever it is that we feel needs to get done. That is – if we JUST start and don’t let ourselves stop, our productivity will be the highest it can ever be.

When you start and keep going, you are harnessing your inertia. You may know the law of inertia from your high school physics class – any object at rest will continue to be at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. It also stated that any object in motion will remain at a constant speed unless acted upon by a force as well. This can be applied directly to productivity by examining how much more efficient we become when we actually decide to start a task, focus on it, and get it done.

I’m sure you’ve been in a situation where you procrastinated on a task for awhile, then decided to start it. After you started it, you became intensely productive and focused, which resulted in getting the job done well and quickly, to boot.

In that situation, you used your inertia to get things done. By simply starting our tasks, they get done much more quickly and efficiently than if we procrastinated and if we rushed.

Why?

If we procrastinate, we tell our minds that it’s okay to break focus and not do what we’re supposed to, even after we’ve started a task. By sitting down and just starting, we apply the force that makes the object at rest move. As long as we don’t stop ourselves and act as the outside force (I guess you’d call that friction) that brings the object in motion to rest, we can keep going on our tasks and get everything out of the way in one fell swoop. The idea is that, since you’re doing, unless you make an effort to not be doing, you’ll continue to do. All you have to do is keep going, which is easier said than done, I know. You just have to make a habit at it.

Guide to Inertia

Using your inertia’s really simple. There are 3 steps:

1. When you have a task in front of you, just start it. There aren’t any excuses you can give – just do it!
2. Whatever you do, keep going and keep your focus on the task at hand. Allow the motion you got from starting to carry you through doing your task.
3. When you’re finished, IMMEDIATELY start a new task. This is where a to-do list or action plan comes in handy, so you can jump into doing a new task right after you finish the first one without giving yourself time to get distracted while you think about what you want to do next.

That’s all there is to it, folks. Try utilizing your inertia to your benefit the next time you do anything.

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