I’m sure you’ve experienced this before: you’re tired, exhausted, stressed out… You have too much on your plate and feel like you’ll never get everything done.

You’re staring at the car keys to drive to the gym…

Or at the blinking cursor on your keyboard where you’re writing your next post…

Or maybe it’s the pile of stuff in the corner you’ve been meaning to organize and put away…

Or that stack of books you want to read but just never get around to…

And every time you look at it, you get hit with a wave of anxiety. You just don’t see how you can do it all. 

And because you can’t do it all, or you can’t do it all perfectly, you don’t do ANY of it.

I’ve been there. There have been days where I just didn’t feel like dragging myself to the gym. Days when I had no desire to write another blog post…

But I learned from my Precision Nutrition coaches how to get out of the f*** it mentality and make steady progress. The secret?

Just do 1% of whatever it is.

If I don’t feel like exercising, I tell myself “I’ll just do my warm-up and that’s it.” I don’t even tell myself “I’ll see how I feel.” I just do the warm-up. 

I’d say 80-90% of the time, I end up doing the whole workout. But there have been times when I just did the warm-up. And you know what? That’s okay.

It’s so much better to do 1% of something every single day than it is to do 100% of something 3 days in a row… And then burn out, not doing ANYTHING for the next two weeks (or two years in the case of me exercising at one point…)

It’s the Kaizen method, the Japanese practice of tiny improvements over a long period of time that lead to massive gains in effectiveness.

You can do this with anything that’s overwhelming you. Just take the next right step.

• Have a book you need to read but don’t have the motivation to tackle it? Just tell yourself you’ll read one page… Or one paragraph… Or one sentence
• Need to declutter or clean? Put away exactly one thing or sweep one corner
• Just write one sentence instead of feeling obligated to write an entire blog post

Doing that small step is better than nothing at all. And if that’s all you do, you still did better than zero. 

But chances are, you’ll do that one thing and feel motivated to keep going. If you do, then run with it! 

But if you don’t, feel satisfied knowing you did something. And that you’ll do something again tomorrow. 

(H/t to James Clear for reminding me about this practice. Read his post on the subject here.)

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