Using Power-Multiplier Tasks

As simple as it may seem to fill out your Today Card every day, it can also be very difficult. We often find ourselves with so many things to do each day it can be difficult to decide which things are the most important for us to tackle.

Yes, the top items on your card should be the most important. And while in many cases important can also mean big and difficult, that’s not always the case. Sometimes, small, quick tasks can make just as big of an impact—if not a bigger impact—on your goals.

Once you identify this phenomenon, it’s a game-changer. You can begin to leverage small amounts of time and effort, while getting huge results.

Luckily, there are certain kinds of items that can go at the top of your card in almost any instance, and in doing so, they actually make your day more productive. I call these “force-multipliers” because doing them tends to multiply important aspects of your productivity. You can put in relatively little effort, but get much more in return.

Here I’ll run through a few examples of these force-multipliers, why they work, and what to look for in your own work to find and leverage them.

Talking With Someone

Remember that old AT&T slogan “reach out and touch someone?” Perhaps I’m dating myself with that reference. But it’s actually a helpful thing sometimes to simply reach out to someone—you know, converse for a bit. It may not seem like the kind of thing that can break through productivity barriers or help you make progress on a tough project, but it’s happened for me enough times that I stand by the practice of putting an item like “reach out to X about Project Z” on my card from time to time.

There’s something about having a conversation with someone that can help you get back to where you need to be—whether it’s on a specific project or just in general. It helps, of course, if you can talk with someone who knows or is involved in the project you’re working on, but even that’s not necessary. You can simply talk with them about work in general, and maybe drop in some talk about a specific project you’re struggling with.

A power-up of this strategy can happen when there’s someone who’s involved in a few projects on your list. It could be your manager, someone who reports to you, or just a frequent collaborator. But if you can schedule some time with them, or just drop them a line, and hit on 3 or 4 tough projects you need to make progress on—that can be huge. It can work kind of like a turbo boost—where you get re-motivated to work on those projects again after talking with someone about them.

The Minimum Time Block

Sometimes you’ve got this big, hairy, intimidating task or project—but it’s so intimidating that you can’t even muster up the energy to figure out what your next action is—let alone make progress on it. You feel paralyzed. You can’t even think of the next thing to do.

In the past, I’ve found myself procrastinating about the task or project in question. I’d put it off in favor of work on other stuff—easier stuff. As a result, that big, intimidating thing would simply never get done. And since many of the most important things we want to do are big and intimidating at times, that meant I was really never getting meaningful stuff done to reach my goals.

What I found helpful as I began using the Today System was to put items like “spend at least 30 minutes on project X” on my card. If it’s an important project, I put it near the top of the card, so my score will suffer if I don’t get around to it. And it works.

The approach works because it straddles a line between being too vague and too specific. This minimal time block is vague, in that it doesn’t force you to do something specific about the project—which is usually difficult because you haven’t thought through it or were stuck anyway. But it’s also specific enough about what you need to achieve. You simply need to spend a certain amount of minutes working just on that project. Set a timer, sit, think, mind-map, whatever. Just spend time on that project. More often than not, it works well enough to break through whatever blocks were there, and provides much-needed motivation to make future progress on that project.

The Hunter/Gatherer

There’s another trick like the minimum time block that works well for making progress on projects that usually intimidate you. I call it the “hunt/gather” task. It allows for a bit more direction than time-blocking in terms of what you need to do, but it’s still somewhat open-ended.

Basically, I’ll put an item like “find 5 resources (articles/videos/podcasts) about the subject of project X.” And my intention is to simply get prepared to do research on the topic of that project. I don’t even task myself with reading or watching or listening to the resources. I just task myself with hunting and gathering.

It tends to work as a way of tricking myself into getting more psyched up and less anxious about a project. In many cases, what makes me anxious about a project—and thus put off doing anything definite about it—is that I’m unclear on it. I know I need more information, but I’m overwhelmed by having to gather than information, consume it, analyze it, the make decisions and plan my actions. But if I just task myself with doing the very first of those things: gather.

Because I’m not burdened with having to do anything with the stuff I gather, for some reason I’m more willing to actually start using it to think and plan anyway. It’s weird, I know, but a lot of us are this way.

If we put pressure on ourselves to do something that intimidates us—we talk ourselves out of it. Yet, when we take the pressure off and task ourselves with just doing the rudimentary first steps—we usually get those done quickly and easily. So we end up going a bit further, and getting more psyched up. It’s crazy how that works sometimes.

Find Your Tricks and Exploit Them

These are just 3 tricks I’ve found helpful to get me unstuck and make progress on tough things. But I’m sure there are more you can discover. And each person will respond differently to different ones. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

The key is to try different tricks to getting something—something simple—done on the big, intimidating projects on your plate. Try the approaches above, see if they trick you into making progress. Always go with your gut. If a task repulses you as you look at it, it’s unlikely you’ll overcome that resistance and get it done. So find a way to formulate the tasks so that they attract you, or simply aren’t intimidating.

As you get these easy tasks done, you’ll gain the confidence to keep going. And before you know it, you’ll have made some significant progress on the projects that used to intimidate you.