The fourth thing that tends to make people procrastinate is when something is not chunked down. It’s not broken down into bite-sized steps. There is the fear of taking on something too large without seeing how it can be done step by step.
There’s a saying that I heard years ago that says ‘by the mile it’s a trial but by the inch it’s a cinch’. The first time I heard that phrase it was from Glenn Turner, a motivator and businessman I met. ‘By the mile it’s a trial, by the cinch it’s an inch.’ For instance, a lot of people say, “Gee I would love to write a book but I just don’t know if I can do that.”
Do you think you could write a book? For instance, let’s say you have some topic area that you’re interested in. What are 12 things about that topic that you’re really interested in or believe would be of value to someone else? Those become your 12 chapters.
Now, let’s say that each chapter is going to be 10 pages long. Are there 10 things you could say about each one of those main topic points? Those become your 10 sub categories for each chapter, one per page for instance.
Once you’ve got the 10 sub categories broken out inside of each category. To fill up a page all you really need is about five paragraphs. So five paragraphs go under each sub category. In each of those paragraphs you only really have to have three or four sentences to make a paragraph.
Well let me ask you a question. Can you write one sentence? If you can write one sentence then you can write two, three, four sentences. Huh, guess what? You have a paragraph. Well if you can write one paragraph you can write another. And after you’ve written five you’ve got a page. And after you’ve written 10 of those pages, you have 10 subcategories filled, you’ve got a chapter. If you think about it and you break it down in its component bite sized steps you could write a book.
See, this is really no different than planning your career, planning a vacation, building a house. It’s all one chunk at a time; you do it step by step. Procrastination can be absolutely destroyed—eliminated—one chunk at a time.
It goes back to a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. You take that first step. Then you take another step, and another, and another. And, you just keep moving. Then over time, you can accomplish incredible things because there are no limitations on you except the ones you put there.