THREE WAYS TO BEAT THE BUG
Anyone else feel the last two years have dragged? The worries, the rules, the new ways of working – the scratch of masks and the constant stop-startyness. These things can take their toll - it’s tiring just listing the lowlights.
Psychologists call this languishing. The feeling that we’re muddling along, ‘looking out at life through a foggy windscreen’. It’s a very real symptom of the bastard bug. But, just like getting jabbed and keeping our distance, there are things we can do to keep it in check. We just need a little physics.
Science from the apple guy
300 years before Steve Jobs started tinkering with tech, Sir Isaac Newton was also interested in apples. Sitting in an orchard, he noticed that stuff moves even when you don’t touch it. So he poked at this observation and knocked together some laws of physics.
Newton’s first law is relevant here. “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force”. Or, in other words, stuff stands still until you push it and keeps going until something stops it. There’s a secret in that science to beat the bug.
Three ways to beat the bug
The guts of Newton’s law is that it takes energy to get things moving. But it’s easy sailing once they’re rolling. That’s why the stop/start of COVID-19 wears us out. So here’s three ways to dodge the burnout and beat the bug.
Make it easier to start stuff.
Make it easier to keep stuff moving.
Make getting stuff done your measure of success.
1. Grab a two-minute head start
The hardest part of anything is getting started. Throw in a little COVID-19 and many of us can’t even be arsed trying to spell procrastination. It’s normal, right. And handy tips like ‘just get started’ are as useful as a home-made mask. But they’re also true. Enter David Allen and Getting Things Done®.
Allen’s idea is simple. Just scale down your challenge as a two-minute task – and do it. Reading a book becomes reading a page. Going for run becomes lacing your sneakers. Allen knows his Newton and they both know that starting stuff takes effort. So chunk it down into two-minute tasks and do it. Once the ball is rolling, it’s easier to roll that ball.
2. Put wins in your sails
Once the ball is rolling, the world will try to stop it. If not Covid, there’s always other friction. That’s the stuff that holds things back. So you need to keep a foot on the gas to keep things moving. In normal times it’s easy enough, but let’s not forget that we’re languishing. Stuff that used to be easy starts to feel hard, and hard stuff is harder. Yawn.
One counter-intuitive secret to beat the yawn is to take a look behind you. While standard advice is to set your sights on the finish line and just keep running, who’s got the energy, right? Languishing. So now’s the time to count the wins. How far have you come? What have you nailed? How awesome is the team to get to here? Add up those wins and write them down. All of a sudden gambler’s fallacy kicks in like that third coffee, fuel beats friction and the finish line feels closer than the start.
3. Challenge yourself with 2020-DO
When big stuff conspires to make small stuff hard, it’s time to reframe the picture. And COVID-19 is pretty big stuff. So cut yourself some slack. Ask not what you can do to ‘put a ding in the universe’, just ask what you can do to get something done. Because energy is infectious too. And once things start moving, they’re moving. Little things become big things and before you know it balls are rolling everywhere.
And that’s how Issac Newton can help us beat the bug. We know there’s not much we can do to beat the virus itself. But we can make sure it doesn’t beat us. Get started in two-minutes, get your wins in your sails and own the tacky rhyme in the date. Don’t let this be ‘year three of COVID-19’ – challenge yourself to make it 2020-DO.
That’s what I reckon, what do you think?
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