5 steps to start the work you keep avoiding.

In my last post, I wrote down my blockers and ranked them. The biggest one was clear: nobody knows my product exists, because I’m not doing enough of my chosen outreach.

I knew that already. Deep down, I had known it for months. Knowing didn’t make me start.

A ranked list tells you what to do. It doesn’t help you begin. For that, I need the task to stop feeling big, vague and uncomfortable. Here is the method I’m using. I call it the five S’s for now.

1

Specify

One narrow thing. Not a fog.

2

Study

Learn just enough.

~4 h cap

3

Simplify

A plan that's easy to start.

4

Save

Track output and results.

5

Switch

Change what doesn't work.

then go again

1. Specify: what exactly are you doing?

“Do more marketing” is not a task. It is a fog. You can’t start a fog.

Pick one thing and make it narrow. Not “outreach”, but “LinkedIn outreach to one type of lead”. One channel, one audience, one action.

You don’t need to know everything. You need to know something. Specify is where you choose the something.

Research backs this up. In decades of studies, Edwin Locke and Gary Latham found that specific, hard goals lead to better performance than being told to “do your best”. A vague goal gives you nothing to measure against, so it’s easy to drift.

2. Study: learn just enough, with a cap

Going in blind is a waste. You make beginner mistakes that an hour of reading would have prevented.

So I study the task for my purpose: who the target is, the order of the steps, what to expect, and what success and failure look like.

But studying has a trap, and I fall into it. I find it hard to start until I feel prepared. Before I launched, I rebuilt my website at least four times. “Getting ready” can turn into the new way to avoid the real work.

So the study step has a cap: about 4 hours, depending on the task. I write the cap down before I start. Enough to not start blind. Not so much that learning becomes putting things off. The rest I learn by doing.

The cap: about 4 hours. Write it down before you start.

Enough to start

Preparing becomes avoiding

0 h2 h4 h6 h8 h

Before the cap

The target, the steps, what success and failure look like.

After the cap

Learn the rest by doing.

3. Simplify: make it easy to start

Turn what you learned into a plan that is as simple as possible. Easy to start. Hard to overcomplicate. Hard to feel overwhelmed by.

The better the plan is organised, and the clearer it is, the easier it is to start, and to keep going.

There’s research for this too. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran reviewed 94 tests of simple “if-then” plans (for example, “when I sit down at 9am, I send the first message before I open anything else”). The plans had a medium-to-large effect on whether people reached their goals. A plan that says when and what removes the moment where you decide whether to start.

4. Save: keep the numbers

Track your output and your results. What’s working. What isn’t.

This is the step I skipped before, and it cost me. I once did LinkedIn outreach for a few weeks. A good share of people replied, and multiple partnership proposals were sent. It was working. But I wasn’t tracking anything, so I couldn’t see it. With no visible progress, it felt like failure, and I stopped.

Numbers do two jobs. They give you early signals, so you know if you’re on track. And they show progress towards the real goal, which keeps you going when the work gets repetitive.

5. Switch: change the small parts, or the whole test

Look at the numbers and adjust.

Most of the time, you switch a small part: a different opening line, a different time of day, a different type of lead. Sometimes the numbers tell you the whole approach isn’t working. Then you switch to a different test.

That’s why Study includes “what does failure look like?”. If you decide it before you start, switching is a decision, not a mood.

What I don’t know yet

This is my own method, and I haven’t tested it properly yet. It comes from looking at what went wrong before: I prepared too long, and I didn’t track what worked. Each step is a fix for one of those mistakes.

I’ll use this method on my next experiments. Follow them on my experiments page to see how it works in practice, including when it doesn’t.

What is the one task you keep avoiding, and what would it look like in one specific sentence?