Just Wash One Spoon

“Just wash one spoon” is my friend’s mom’s technique for doing the dishes. The trick is this: if you want to accomplish something, and you set the bar so low that it’s as easy as possible to get over, well, that may not be an ambitious goal, but it can get you started. Sometimes this is all you need.

So my friend’s mom set her goal as: just wash one spoon. The trick is, you have to mean it. If you get up, and wash one spoon, and decide, “You know what, I’m done, I don’t wanna do anymore,” boom, you did it. You did it. You attained your stated goal. Maybe you get a minuscule hit of satisfaction. At the very least, that’s one less spoon to wash later.

But most likely, look: you’re already up off of the couch, you’re standing at the sink, your hands are wet; most likely you’ll do some more. Heck, maybe all of them. Not that you need to; you already hit your goal. Everything after the spoon is bonus, above and beyond.

This obviously isn’t just about dishes. As a writer, one of my favorite things has always been a marathon writing session: two hours, five hour, ten hours, all in a flow state. Hard to reliably do that every day, though. But for a writing session to really amount to anything, marathons aside, I still used to feel that an hour was really minimum. With my second book, though, I was blocked. Mainly just because I just didn’t reliably have those kinds of windows of time.

One day, though, I decided to just aim for ten minutes a day. Heck I could always find that. And as it turned out, more often than not, I kept going, and it ended up being… an hour. But it gets better. Because if I didn’t write for an hour, if I didn’t even manage a single sentence, if all I did was spend my ten minutes reading over the last page I wrote yesterday and thinking about what was coming next, well guess what: it stayed alive. Every day, in the back of my head, gestating. And when the next day came, I knew exactly where I was, and would hit the ground running. I wrote the whole book that way, with a daily goal of ten minutes.

Obviously, the just wash one spoon technique isn’t the answer to everything. It may only be the answer to one very small thing: how to overcome your resistance to starting a project that feels bigger than you feel like dealing with at the moment. But that resistance can be a killer. Sometimes getting past it is the golden ticket. And sometimes… it’s at least a little bit of a start.

Stay tuned for more. If you’re In California and looking for a therapist, or anywhere in the world looking for a coach, hit me up. I’m happy to talk about working together.