The most important step in any strategy is the first one. There is always inertia involved when you begin something. It’s the inertia of “why bother?” and “I’ll just watch TV instead.” If you can get past this first step and just keep moving forward day after day, you WILL have success eventually, that’s just how it works. The real trick is making sure you only have to take that first step once. To help with that, we’ve got Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity secret, one that’s boosted our cheap SEO service and is sure to work on any project you may be working on.
The technique is called Don’t Break The Chain. You see, Seinfeld wanted to be the best comedian around, and he knew that to accomplish that, he had to write new material every single day. He had trouble starting, but worse than that, he would drop off for a few days then have to get back into the groove all over again. To combat this, he came up with the Don’t Break The Chain method and has been using it ever since.
Here’s how it works:
First thing you do is get a big calendar, one that has the whole year on one giant page. You take that sucker and you put it somewhere next to your desk. Next thing you do is get a big magic marker, red tends to work the best (I don’t know why, ask a psychologist.) Finally, you decide exactly what your goal is. It can be anything from writing to working out.
Every day that you successfully complete the activity, you draw a big red X over that day. After a few days, baby, you got a chain going. Now you have a new job, and it’s nice and simple for you: don’t break the chain. That’s all you have to worry about, is keeping that chain intact. The red Xs will start to stack up and suddenly your results don’t seem so nebulous. You can glance up and see that big calendar full of red and have an immediately tangible record of your work.
I promise you, once you get that feeling, you won’t even dream of breaking that chain.