Is this familiar?
You have so many things you need to do but nothing to do right now. Like, all these things are the future me’s job, that retched soul constantly paying for the mistakes of their chronological adversary. I am in my last year of high school (here in Australia), year 12. My exams are in no less than two months. I keep putting studying off, like I know the exam date is coming but I can’t get myself to start doing anything. That’s why I have adopted this technique, the Power of 3 (a sexy name I know) to boost my productivity through the roof.
What is the Power of 3?
The Power of 3 is all about incremental gains James Clear talks about it in his book Atomic Habits (great book by the way, if you haven’t read it and you like this productivity stuff check it out). Clear talks about incremental gains and the way things add up over time;
If you can get 1% better each day for a year, you’ll end up 37 times better by the time you’re done
James Clear- Atomic Habits
So that got me thinking, massive projects like writing a book or studying for exams are giant tasks made of tiny little efforts. For example in studying, tiny efforts are stuff like opening your pencil case, making a plan of what you need to do, and doing 1 question. This reframe gets me to look at tasks by the many little turning cogs they consist of. This is where the power of 3 comes into play. I decide on a task or an activity that takes 3 seconds to do, or not very much time that just gets the ball rolling, that will lead me to do another task, and another, and another, and suddenly I have reached the end product.
How You Can Use The Power of 3 to Supercharge Productivity
It’s simple, just think about the goal you want to accomplish and start with the tinies little part. Let’s use writing a book for example. I haven’t written a book, though I have seen many a book in my time, so I imagine it is just made up of sentences, lots and lots of sentences, so task yourself with just writing one sentence, one sentence that’s it, anyone can do that. That’s the magic in the this technique it’s so simple. The technique has really helped me get momentum on my projects and ultimately boost my productivity.
In Conclusion. . .
So what we’ve learned to day;
- Goals are made of tiny tasks and lots of em
- If you’re finding it difficult to start a large task use the Power of 3
- Distill your goal down to the tiniest little tasks and take action on that
Don’t forget, whatever you’re doing, make sure you’re doing it for fun. Thank you for reading, have a great day 🙂
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