By Leo Babauta
What a year we’ve been having — if you’ve been following along, we’ve established a foundational mindfulness habit, then worked on health habits of exercise and eating, then on creating lovely space in the mornings.
Now it’s time to dive into procrastination and productivity!
The challenge for this coming month (starting on May 6) is called Dive Into Important Tasks.
It’s about picking out your high-impact, high-priority tasks every day, and then diving into it, letting go of the urge to go to distractions, the urge to procrastinate, the uncertainty that comes with these meaningful tasks.
This is about overcoming our age-old habits of procrastination, and diving into our meaningful work.
Here’s how the challenge works:
- Week 1: Pick 1 meaningful task a day and do 10 minutes of it first thing in the morning (or whenever you start working).
- Week 2: Do 2 sessions of 10 minutes your meaningful task first thing when you start working each day. Break up the two sessions with a 5-minute break. We’re training our ability to stay focused on what’s important, but in doable sessions.
- Week 3: Pick 2 important tasks each day, and do 3 10-minute sessions. Two sessions can be for the first task, then the third for the second task. Sessions have a 5-minute break in between. Again, we’re further training ourselves to stay on task and not put it off.
- Week 4: Pick 3 important tasks each day, and do 4 10-minute sessions. Split up the 4 sessions however you like between the 3 important tasks. You can take a longer break between them if needed, so that you don’t have to spend a consecutive hour doing these sessions but can spread them out in the beginning part of your work day.
We’ll go more into how to do the sessions and pick the important tasks in each week. This will be doable! And bonus: you should start to tackle the important tasks that have been lingering on your todo list for awhile now.
Two more huge bonuses:
- You’ll start to get good at starting on things.
- You’ll start to train in staying in the uncertainty of meaningful work.
- And maybe even launch a project you’ve been waiting your whole life to launch. Your love song to the world.
If you’re up for this challenge (we start on Monday, May 6), commit to it in the #important-tasks challenge channel on our Slack community (join the Sea Change Slack community here)!
Our Live Webinar
Our live video webinar was held on Wednesday, May 8:
The Articles
Here are the articles for this challenge: