A series of small tasks

Since a couple of months ago when I tried to (almost) give up social media and generally spend less time on the internet, I’ve been watching a lot of TED talks. While there have been several that have stood out enough to be bookmarked one I watched this evening that particularly stood out was a talk by Stephen Duneier about how anything you might want to achieve can be broken down in to a series of small tasks and that you can achieve amazing things by just making small adjustments to your daily routine. He started on this path when he was in school and struggled to get good grades because he couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than 5-10 mins at a time. As soon as he stopped trying to fight his nature and broke everything down into small tasks that he knew were short enough for him to complete, he started to do much better, and has continued to achieve great things using this method throughout his life. As someone who has always struggled with procrastination I found this really inspiring. It’s really worth 15 mins of your time.

So my first change to my routine which I hope will help me to get more exercise, was to park my van about a mile from my house. The plan is that I’ll keep parking it in the same place and cycle to and from it. Although this will only directly result in me getting a little more exercise, the idea is also that when I want to go somewhere that’s not for work that I’ll be forced to cycle, or at least that it will be less of a faff to just cycle rather than cycle to the van and drive. I have a lot of trouble parking my van near my house anyway, and often can’t remember which street I parked it on, so at least this way I’ll always know where it is.

By coincidence, a couple of hours later (after I went to the pub for a pint of cider before cycling home) when I was looking for something else that had little to do with achieving my goals I discovered a blog post by Jeff Attwood where he advocates achieving success in your life by writing a blog regularly to a schedule that’s realistic for you, hence this post. I was especially encouraged by him saying that it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you’re doing just write something and you’ll get better at it the more you do it.

How long my van stays parked away from the house, time will tell. Maybe writing about it on here will help me stick to it.


So, what do you think ?