Concept
The starting system
The starting system is the one page on which this road's tools fit: an evening ritual of list, frog and desk; a morning ritual of start ritual, timer and frog first; an inbox rule for the day; a shutdown at night; and a weekly review, run for four weeks and forgiven on the days it slips.
Eleven techniques survive only if they have a shape that can be kept on a bad Tuesday, and the shape is a page with two halves. The daily half: last night's list with the frog marked and the desk set up; this morning's ritual, thirty-minute timer and frog before email; today's inbox for anything that arrives and the two-minute rule for the small; tonight's shutdown and the guilt-free play recorded on the Unschedule. The weekly half: one hour to empty the inbox, give every project a next action, check the reverse calendar and count the starts. What holds it together is the diagnosis that procrastination is fear: every line makes the fear irrelevant to the first step. And the last rule is Fiore's forgiveness, since self-criticism after a slip is the anxiety that causes the next one; write 'missed' without an adjective and do the two-minute version tomorrow.
A real-life example
A student's page, four weeks on: list and frog at night, timer at ten, inbox for everything, shutdown at six, football on Wednesday recorded as play, review on Sunday. She missed four mornings and wrote 'missed' next to each. Chapter one was sent as a rough draft in week two and came back with notes in week three.
How to use it
- 1Write the page tonight: evening ritual, morning ritual, inbox rule, weekly review.
- 2Run it for four weeks before changing anything; the first two feel artificial.
- 3When a day slips, write 'missed' without a verdict and start the two-minute version tomorrow.