Little secret of great happiness - to do all the most unpleasant in the first place
A Life / / December 19, 2019
If you want to be happy and enjoy life, you need all the difficult and unpleasant to do immediately. So psychologists say. Entrepreneur and blogger Sean Kim explained how to apply this technique in my life. Layfhaker publishes a translation of his article.
Kim Sean (Sean Kim)
A well-known blogger and entrepreneur. He writes for publications such as Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, TIME.
There are several good reasons not to put off unpleasant things until later. Firstly, we have a limited supply of willpower. Performing the most complex cases in the first instance, we will calmly proceed to lighter duties.
In addition, according to the scientists, the prefrontal cortex (the department responsible for our creative abilities) is particularly active right after waking up. But the parts of the brain that control the analytical ability is activated later.
In addition, it is just more convenient. In the morning in the office less staff and you have not started to divert the numerous calls and messages.
eat a frog
Popular writer Brian Tracy (Brian Tracy) calls this approach - the implementation of the unpleasant situation in the first place - "to eat a frog." He believes that business and the challenges that we usually want to wait for later (our "frog"), just the most important and in any case can not be ignored. And so they do not darken our lives, we must quickly deal with them (ie, "to eat").
Simplify
Here are some interesting data were collected with the help of productivity applications iDoneThis:
- we always remain unfulfilled objectives;
- tasks that we still perform normally do not require a lot of time;
- often we do not what was originally planned.
Why is this happening?
- We have too much to do. Psychologist Roy Baumeister (Roy Baumeister) and journalist John Tierney (John Tierney), the authors of the book "Willpower: reopening the most powerful human ability"They write, that each person is usually about 150 different tasks. Naturally, this causes congestion.
- We always something distracting. This can be phone calls, e-mail or unplanned meeting.
To cope with this problem, you need to simplify your approach to business.
- Reduce the number of tasks that are going to perform.
- Select only the most important tasks.
On the first point, everything is simple enough. Plan on 3-5 day tasks. This will help you a variety of applications, eg One Big Thing. In it you can record your plans and made to celebrate.
But the second point is more complicated. Not so easy to choose what would be most effective to achieve our goals. For each person such problems are individual, and, most likely, they will vary from day to day. Here are a few examples.
- If you want to sleep better, do not use electronic devices for two hours before bedtime.
- If you want to build muscle, do multifunction exercises (squats, deadlifts, bench press).
- If you want to learn to speak a foreign language, go in with a native speaker.
Initially, these tasks will seem very difficult, but with time you will notice that you get better and better.
conclusions
The concept of performing most unpleasant primarily applicable not only for everyday activities, but also to achieve long-term goals. Of course, in any case, for the first time it is hard, no matter what you want to do: open up your business to lose weight or learn something new. But after some time, your results will improve, and this, according to psychologists, and make you happier.
Sacrificing short-term pleasures in favor of long-term goals, we make choices in favor of future happiness. So, if you want to be happy, stop to avoid the difficulties and begin to overcome them now.