One of the repeating items on my to-do list is cleaning off my office desk. It’s something I committed to recently, to try to keep my working area tidy; so long as I keep on top of it every few days, it only takes a few minutes each time. But I’d found myself putting it off for several days, and yesterday I decided to figure out why.

It didn’t take much detective work. We’ve moved most of our stuff into the new place now, but we’re still unpacking and organizing it all, and a lot of things don’t have places to go yet. One of those things was presently-unused computer cables and parts, which comprised the majority of the items on my desk.

Once I determined what to do with them, it was child’s play to clean off the desk. Total elapsed time: less than five minutes, including the time needed to set up the place.

Why is this worthy of a blog post? Because it’s a common productivity trap: you repeatedly procrastinate on something because you don’t know something about it, when it would only take a few minutes of thinking or research to figure it out. It’s easy to do once you realize that that’s the problem, but it can take some time to achieve that realization.

To reiterate the mantra of productivity:

1. Identify your goal and determine the measurable outcome that embodies it;
2. identify the next physical step toward that outcome that’s small enough to accomplish;
3. execute that step;
4. repeat steps 2 through 4 until the goal is achieved.

Or, in the oversimplified words of the shoe company Nike (named after the Greek goddess of victory): just do it. 🙂