The Journal

Why starting is harder than doing

A job can be small, familiar and entirely within your power, and still sit on the list since April. Often the problem is not the work. It is that the line on the list names an outcome, and not a single thing you could do next.

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A heading is not an action

Sort out the car insurance is a heading. Underneath it sits a stack of moves: find the renewal letter; write down the current premium; get two comparison quotes; ring the insurer with the lower figure in front of you. Each is something a person could do in the next few minutes, in a place they could name.

A list made of headings looks organised and behaves badly. A heading cannot be started, only opened. You look inside it, find that the first move has still not been decided, and close it again. The heading survives the encounter unchanged and comes back the next time you look.

A useful test: can you say where you would be, and what would be in front of you? If not, the line is a heading, and there is nothing in it yet to begin.

The same job, described two ways

In 2008 Sean McCrea, Nira Liberman, Yaacov Trope and Steven Sherman published a set of studies in Psychological Science. Students had three weeks to return a questionnaire by email. Everyone got the same deadline; only the questionnaire differed. One version asked how one would go about a list of everyday activities, the other what those activities said about a person.

The first study split 34 students between the two. Of the 17 given the concrete version, 16 returned it before the due date and one never returned it. Of the 17 given the abstract version, 11 returned it before the due date, one on the day itself, two late, and three not at all. Counting the hours between handing the questionnaire over and the reply arriving, with the people who never replied entered at the longest delay recorded plus a further two weeks, the concrete group averaged about 176 hours and the abstract group about 504.

What did not differ is the part worth keeping. Rating the task for importance, difficulty, pleasantness and convenience, the two groups answered the same. The job had not become easier or more appealing. Only its description had changed.

A plan you have not carried out yet

E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2011, divided 73 students into three groups. One group named two important errands they had not done and did not yet know when, where or how they would do. A second named two such errands and then wrote down, in detail, how, when and where. A third described errands already finished. All of them then read the opening pages of a novel, one word at a time, interrupted now and then by a prompt asking where their attention had been.

Those carrying unfinished errands reported being distracted by thoughts of them while reading, and answered fewer questions about the story correctly. Those who had written plans did not: their intrusive thoughts and their comprehension scores matched the group whose errands were already behind them. They had done no actual work on the errands. Deciding how, when and where was enough.

The form of a plan matters too. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran call the useful shape an implementation intention: a cue paired with a response, so that meeting the situation brings the action with it. Their 2006 meta-analysis, summarised in a chapter written for the US National Cancer Institute, pooled 94 studies and reported a medium-to-large effect on rates of goal attainment, d = .65, and one of similar size on failures to get started, d = .61.

The cost is paid at the start

Piers Steel's 2007 review in Psychological Bulletin gathered 691 correlations from the research on delay. Among the strong and consistent predictors is the plainest one: the more a task is disliked, the more effortful or unpleasant it is found to be, the more it gets put off, at around r = .40. Several traits often blamed for delay come out weak, including neuroticism, rebelliousness and sensation seeking.

That is not the same as saying the task is all there is. Steel's list of strong predictors also includes impulsiveness, self-efficacy and conscientiousness, which are properties of a person rather than of a job. The narrower and more useful point is that the task is one of the parts, and it is the part that a line on a list can be rewritten to change.

Whatever a job costs in reluctance is charged at the beginning, in full, before any of the relief of having done it has arrived to set against it. Agreeing to begin is the expensive part.

Which is the practical use of five minutes. Five minutes is not a technique for finishing a large job; it changes what you are agreeing to. You are not agreeing to sort out the car insurance, you are agreeing to five minutes with the renewal letter. That is small enough to accept in the middle of an ordinary evening, and concrete enough to picture. To be exact about the evidence: the studies above concern concrete description and cue-based plans. None of them tested a five-minute rule.

Four ways to make a line easier to begin

Write the move, not the heading. One line, one action, phrased so that a stranger could carry it out without asking you what you meant.

Say how, when and where. That is the level of detail the planning research used, and it is more than a line like sort out the car insurance carries on its own.

Give the move a cue. An if-then shape — when the kettle goes on, I find the renewal letter — is the form the implementation-intention research tested, and it works by handing the decision to a moment you will meet anyway. Choose a moment you will actually meet.

Write it down and keep it where you will pass it again. The participants in the planning study wrote theirs out. A plan you only think about leaves nothing behind to show that it was ever settled.

When the job belongs to a house

Between 23 September and 1 October 2023 the Office for National Statistics measured how people in the UK spent their days. Women spent an average of 3 hours 37 minutes a day on unpaid work, meaning housework, caring for others and volunteering; men spent 2 hours 43 minutes.

That is a measurement, not an instruction. How a house divides its work is its own business. The narrower point is that a household holds a great deal of work, and that a job nobody has been named for cannot have a next action at all, because a next action needs someone to take it.

Naming turns a heading into a move: a person, and a date. Offering is better than assigning, because an offer can be answered. If the person it lands on can decline and give a reason in writing, the rest of the house knows where the job stands, rather than waiting to find out whether it was refused or simply forgotten. And a job that rotates in a fixed order arrives already settled, so there is nothing left to negotiate when it comes round.

Where Barriers fits

Barriers is a household planner from IV Technologies Ltd, a UK company. Some of what is described above is in it.

The task list is free and unlimited, and stays that way. You can mark a job a five-minute job; the app then asks "Got five minutes?" at a point during the day, and you can complete it straight from the notification. A chore sent to someone else in the house is offered rather than dumped: it carries a name and a date, the person it lands on accepts it or declines it with a written reason, and a repeating chore rotates through the household.

No account is needed, and what you write stays on the device unless you turn on family sharing. No ads, no tracking, no analytics SDKs. A first household is free; a second is part of Family. The money and receipts side is free to try for fourteen days, then a one-off purchase that never renews. Only Family is a subscription. It runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Android, in 19 languages.

One line, tonight

None of this requires an app. Take the oldest line off your list tonight, the one your eye has learned to skip, and write underneath it the first thing a person could actually do, and when, and where. Headings are for the newspaper. Moves are what get made.

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