The Barriers to Get Started on a Big Project

How many projects or big ideas are sitting on your to-do list right now? Be honest — everybody has at least one. Maybe you have three – or thirty!

No matter how many you have, I would bet that 90% of them are un-started due to one of three key barriers to starting – the three reasons we have so many un-started, unfinished ideas and projects lying around.

The first is Temporal Discounting (“Hey, it’s not due ’til next month, so, uh…” Or worse, if it’s our own big idea, there’s no deadline at all!).

The second barrier is Fear of Failure. Quoting productivity guru Peter Bregman:

“We procrastinate on that big project precisely because it’s important. So important, in fact, that we’re too scared to work on it. ‘I’m afraid. Afraid that I’ll fail. That I’ll spend a lot of time on it — while other more immediate things don’t get done — and it’ll be terrible, anyway.’”  

But the biggest barrier on the bigger, more complex ideas, projects and tasks is Not Knowing Where to Start. We just think about starting it and, because it’s got a lot of moving parts or requires the help of others, we get a feeling of overwhelm and paralysis.

And then we say, “Ah…Ya know what? I’ll figure it out later.”

Which is understandable, because a common characteristic of all “Big Things” is that their structure is big, complex and often, unclear.

But all three barriers – temporal discounting, fear of failure and not knowing where to start — tend to mix together in a powerful cocktail of Resistance: “I don’t know where to start..."

 In Crusher?TV: Episode 108 I shared three solutions to beat procrastination and crush these barriers: A brain hack, a powerful tool you’ve probably heard of, and a no-brainer physical hack.

Click here to read more.