hard things are done within limits
i was recently feeling overwhelmed in writing my thesis chapter, submitting another assignment, preparing for a social club, writing submissions for reviewer meetings, all while deprioritizing exercise, good meals and cleanliness.
the meetings come and pass, and your reputation take a hit or not, you get second chances, and you keep moving. but the most important thing is that you keep trying to make some progress towards your goals, and in a week an small respite appears on its own.
during this reset period, when i wanted to catch up on my sleep, my dad told me to finish the small assignment which is due in 6 hrs first then take a nap.
although its tempting to take a nap and gamble on the quality of the submission 6 hrs later, i came to realise that, the advise from my dad hold's a conceptual formula for doing hard things.
hard things normally require long term persistence. how much ever you try, you cannot finish hard tasks in one sitting - within a hour, within an afternoon nor within a day. they take weeks, months and sometimes even years. for example having a goal to lose 10 Kg weight - it takes months or even a whole year.
So, what is this conceptual formula for doing hard things. Its understanding that time is inherently limited. if you accept that you dont have enough time to do the hard thing, and thats by design, then you need to understand that the goal is to maximize what you can do within the time you have.
this is where choice or free will comes into play. for doing a hard thing, you have to decide on two limits. first limit is how much time you want to dedicate to the hard task today - now? 1 hr? good, decision made. Second limit is what is the portion of the task you can complete now? if its weight loss, then how many burpees can you do in 1 hr or how many Km can you walk on the treadmill now? or for say an academic assignment, where you are not sure what you can do within an hr, just chose an abstract goal - write 10 lines on a page about this assignment. Thats it.
Once you set these two limits, one - how long you want to work on the hard task now, and two - what is the minimum you can do on this task now. Suddenly you are not climbing Mt Everest every day. You are just climbing up the stairs to the other room - thats not daunting is it?
one another small secret that ultimately helps complete hard things is consistency. Climbing the stairs today once is fine. but if you climb the stairs everyday once then in 365 days, you would have climbed a building 365 stories tall - that's 3650 ft or 1.1 Km high mountain.