Summary

Try to shift more of the work of any particular task to its early stages.

Content

When using Pocket, I used to include a time during my weekly review to go back and tag all the articles I had read that week. This took time and I always felt reluctant to do it. However, an update to the app made the tagging of articles in advance of reading much easier - meaning I now have different 'playlists' of articles ready to read without noticing the effort it took to make those lists. Spreading the effort of tagging out to the moment of saving any particular article meant that there were no longer any extended times of tagging, thereby reducing the friction it takes to have a well organised system.

By taking this sort of 'do the small jobs now' attitude, any job has be made to seem smaller and less significant by preventing the task from building up.

Related to:

Working in bite size chunks