An Exercise for Building Willpower
Saturday, April 3, 2021 at 9:07 “Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential.” Winston Churchill
Just about the most useful skill anyone can possess is the ability to do what one sets out to do.
I’m not talking here about the ability to carry out massive projects, but rather the ability to deal with one’s email, to keep the office tidy, to produce a report by the due date, to maintain the house properly, to go for a run every morning regardless of the weather, and so on - the thousands of little tasks which form the essential background to our lives. If we can’t rely on ourselves to do these, then we are not going to be able to rely on ourselves for the big stuff either.
So here is an exercise for building this ability. It’s not intended to be a time management system, though I think it might make a very good one. But if you practise this enough, you’ll be much better at working with any time management system - or none. And best of all, you’ll be able to rely on yourself more and more to do what you need and want to do.
It’s a development of an exercise contained in my first book Get Everything Done. Some of you may remember it in its original form.
Instructions
- Write down one task.
- Do it.
- Write down two tasks.
- Do them in the order in which you wrote them down.
- Write down three tasks.
- Do them, again in the order in which you wrote them down.
- Continue in this way, increasing the set of tasks by one each time, for as long as you can.
- See how long you can continue. Your score is the number of tasks in the longest group of tasks you have completed.
- Once you fail to complete a group of tasks, start again at 1.
Your aim is not to keep going for ever, but to keep increasing the average size of the group which you manage to complete.
Example
I am writing this blog post as the second task in a group of 6. That means I have already completed sixteen tasks (1+2+3+4+5+1). If I succeed in completing this blog post but fail to complete the next task, what would be my score? Answer: 5 (which is the number of tasks in the largest group I completed).
A few points:
- You must complete each task according to how you have defined it, e.g. First Draft of Blog Post; Read “War and Peace” for 15 minutes; Walk 2,000+ Steps; Call Mike re January Figures.
- You must not do any discretionary tasks other than the ones on the list.
- You may do non-discretionary tasks, e.g. your boss tells you to do something immediately; scheduled meetings; meal times; emergencies, unavoidable interruptions.
I’ll post here everytime I change my score today:
5
6 (including a five mile walk)
7
8
9
10
11
I think that’s about as far as I’m going to go this evening. A score of 11 doesn’t sound very much. But that’s 66 tasks not only worked on but completed in the order in which they were written down. That’s something which I don’t think I’ve ever done before, let alone in one day.
Since I’ve successfully kept to it without a mistake, I shall be starting tomorrow with 12 tasks. How far can I go?
4 April
12
13
Reader Comments (4)
The results have actually been quite surprising to me. It was intended only to be an exercise, but I'm seriously wondering whether it could be a time management system in its own right.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/21/effort/
Nor, for that matter, did he say the sentence under the heading "To Think About" ("Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision").
https://richardlangworth.com/quotes-churchill-never-said-2
Sorry to nitpick, but the quote is actually "unlocking our potential", which originally referred to Britain's war time effort, not to your and my puny efforts as individuals.
Quote investigators check texts available on-line. Churchill was a prolific author and speechmaker, and most of his texts are not available on the internet.
But see http://markforster.squarespace.com/forum/post/814385#post815364