This week’s email is a short one. Partly because the idea doesn’t need many words, and partly because I know it’s a reminder to myself as much as to everyone else consuming productivity-related content and it’s related to the often covered topic of procrastination.
More specifically, the version of procrastination which I find most interesting which isn’t the obvious kind – scrolling instead of working, or just not showing up. It’s the subtler version. The one where you’re doing lots of things that feel like progress like thinking, planning, refining, optimising but not actually starting.
And the reason I think that happens, for me, at least, is that starting feels premature when you don’t yet have clarity. So you keep preparing until you do. The problem is that clarity rarely shows up in advance. It tends to arrive once you’ve already begun. You don’t think your way in. You work your way in.
I’ve found this to be true again and again throughout my content and business journey. When I look back at the videos that have performed best on my channel, and the products that have had traction, almost all of them have one thing in common: I made them relatively quickly. I had an idea, sat down, filmed or built it, shipped it, and then improved it based on what I learned.
The videos I spent weeks overthinking, the ones where I rewrote the script like four times and kept reworking the structure and told myself I’d film once I’d figured out the perfect angle, those ones, more often than not, turned out to be a bit underwhelming. Not because I hadn’t put in enough time, but because all that time had gone into thinking rather than doing, and there’s a ceiling on how much better something can get through thinking alone.
The same has been true of products. The ones that have worked well were built, tested, and then iterated on the basis of real feedback. The ones that went through months of planning before a single thing shipped rarely ended up being as good as I’d hoped, and I think it’s because the planning phase, however purposeful it feels in the moment, is a fairly poor substitute for what you learn once something is actually out in the world.
I’ve come to think this is really what procrastination is about, at its core. It’s not a discipline problem or a motivation problem. It’s that most of us are waiting to feel ready or clear or sufficiently inspired before we start, when in reality those feelings tend to arrive after you’ve started, not before. You don’t think your way into action. You act your way into clarity, and sometimes into motivation too.
And I’m fully aware that none of this is particularly novel or surprising – as I said at the start, I’m partly writing this as a reminder to myself. But I keep coming back to it because it’s genuinely one of those things that’s easy to agree with in the abstract and then quietly forget the moment you’re actually in the middle of overthinking something, which I think makes it worth repeating (again).
The question I’d leave you with: what’s the one thing you’ve been sitting on this week, and what would the smallest possible version of starting actually look like?
Have a great week,
Ali xx