The decision

Everything so far has been explanation. This chapter is the practical one. It's short on theory, because you have the theory now.

The decision is about how you treat work that matters from here on. It isn't a vow never to leave anything late again, and chapter 13 is about what to do when you have. It comes in six parts.

Start it badly on the day it arrives. Fifteen minutes, a timer, and a bad version of the whole thing in the real document. If the day it arrives is impossible, do it the next morning. For anything already waiting, today counts as the day it arrived.

Leave yourself a next step. Before you close the document, write one specific line saying what comes next. This is more than tidiness. In the Masicampo and Baumeister studies from chapter 4, the intrusive thoughts from an unfinished goal stopped when people made a specific plan for it. The people who were freed from the intrusions were the ones whose plans were earnest enough that they later carried them out. A written next step with a booked time is that kind of plan. It's what lets you close the laptop and have your evening.

Book the next session before you leave this one. Give it a day, a start time and an end time. Then put it in a when-then sentence, a form that has done well across a large body of research on following through. "When I sit down with my coffee on Tuesday morning, then I open the proposal and do the line at the top." The point of the form is that the decision gets made in advance. On Tuesday there's nothing left to negotiate.

Decide the size and the hours. This is from chapter 9. Does this one need to be excellent, good, or simply done? Estimate from your record and not your hopes, as in chapter 7. Put the hours in the diary.

Promise an early version to someone. Pick a date two or three days before the real one, and give it to a real person.

Make the first five minutes of every session bad. The swerve doesn't retire after the first session. It can turn up at the start of each one, especially after a gap, and especially when the next section is the hard one. The same move works at small scale. Begin each session by writing a bad version of the next bit for five minutes.

You will still feel the swerve. The plan doesn't remove the feeling. It changes what you do in the ten seconds that follow. When it comes, notice it, and name it if you can, as you did in chapter 1. Then remind yourself what's being asked of you, which is five bad minutes. The proposal and excellence can wait. The feeling is a forecast about a big judged task, and that isn't the task in front of you. Then start the timer. You don't have to win an argument with the feeling or wait for it to pass. It can come along. My expectation is that it fades once you're a few minutes in, but it doesn't have to fade for you to type.

An urge to swerve isn't a command. It doesn't mean the method has stopped working or that something is wrong with you. It's an old habit firing, one that has been rewarded for years. Expect it to keep turning up for a good while, more weakly as your own evidence builds. I can't promise it goes away entirely.

A few things to expect in the first weeks. The first bad start will feel slightly silly. The second session is often harder than the first, because now there's a bad draft to face, and the judge wakes up and reads it. Remember what that draft is for. Your job in session two is to fix the worst thing in it. You don't need to be dismayed by it. Expect a strange feeling around day five as well, when you're ahead and the old system tells you it's safe to stop until the panic. Keep the booked sessions anyway. And expect finishing early to feel odd, almost like cheating. It isn't.

Start with one piece of work. Leave the rest of your life as it is for now. Use the piece you thought of while you were reading this.