Focus like a laser on what really matters, learn how to actually get yourself to do it so you can accomplish your goals.
It’s HARD to get started, but this video will show you some tricks and how to get ready for taxes.
Taxes is the biggest, baddest to-do item on the block for most people; myself included.
Watch the video above for some tips to get started. Below is a transcription of the video:
Let’s give each of these a little triangle on the right, showing how big it looks while you’re looking at your to-do list. Visually, they all look the same size. Your brain is not fooled. It knows that taxes is not just a little thing. It’s more like a mountain!
Okay, let’s bring you in. Nice cape, very nice. A big project like file your taxes isn’t actually hard, lots of can make ourselves do hard things, the problem is that it’s vague. We don’t know what we have to do next and when it’s unclear we freeze up and we don’t do anything at all.
It’s an interesting effect called the Ellesburg Paradox, after Daniel Ellesburg. It goes like this; Imagine you have 50 red balls. Let’s put them into this container and now let’s add 50 white ones. If we grab a ball at random you probably don’t have a strong preference for which one we’ll get because the odds are 50/50. Let’s add a second bucket here and this one you don’t know how many red or white balls are in it. You can choose from either of these two buckets and you have to bet on the outcome that we’re going to pull out a red ball. You want us to pull out a red ball. Which bucket would you rather choose from?
If you’re like most people, you’d rather choose from the one on the left where you know the odds are 50/50 even though the other bucket could have 99 red balls and one white one. Basically, people don’t like to make decisions when they have no idea what their chances are. It paralyzes us. If it was clearer and you could sort of see inside this mountain, it’s really just a bunch of small steps. Do these steps and your taxes are done.
Alright, Let’s bust out of here and see what the taxes look like on the to-do list. Before we had file taxes. Now let’s imagine it broken down into smaller steps. Notice, the first few steps deal with finding receipts. We’re actually listing out each of the four different places to look for receipts. We need to look in the medical folder, the car, the desk and then grab the box in the hall closet. Imagine if all of those were under just one to-do and it was called get receipts. That makes sense. The problem is when you go to do that one and you start by checking the car and then you get interrupted. Now your brain has to remember that this to-do item is just ¼ done. If everything is broken down into its own line, you don’t miss anything and you also get a feeling of moving quickly, so everything is more fun.
Quick summary. You want to-do’s to be as small as possible. You don’t want any container to-do’s holding up the other ones inside and everything should be on the to-do list, in front of you, nothing is held back in your head.