A benefit of “just starting”

It’s pretty common advice - just start. And people intuitively understand that in most situations, it’s actually really good advice. And yet, we typically don’t.

There are so many reasons why we don’t just start. A common reason is uncertainty. That’s the one I want to write about by sharing an anecdote from developing Lurnby.

Maybe you’ve experienced something akin to the following and you’ll find my story quite familiar.

You know roughly what you want to do. You see some future that you want. You might even see it quite clearly. But when it comes to figuring out how to get there, you draw a blank. Or even worse, you don’t draw a blank, you think up 23 different options. All of them seem possible, and all seem valid.

Ever experienced something like that?

This is one of the situations where just starting is one of your best options. Trying to think through all of that uncertainty requires a lot of effort. It’s a massive amount of “system 2” thinking and it’s highly likely that your brain is just gonna say - nah chill, I’ll think this through later.

Just starting bypasses that uncertainty with action. One of the nice things about action is that it changes things and starts providing more information. And our brain is an associative machine. It starts to pull up all related information and often the path forward becomes less uncertain and significantly more straightforward.

An anecdote from building Lurnby

This is exactly what happened to me the other day with Lurnby. For a while now, I had been thinking that I needed to add in a section of the app where users could manage their tags. But every time I started to think about this, I had no clear idea how to implement it. What should the layout be? How will I code the interactions? How would this fit in with the existing architecture?

Just thinking about this feature flooded my mind with so much anxiety and uncertainty that I just set it aside and told myself I’d get to it later. Lurnby is already something I work on in my spare time when I’m tired from other work. Dealing with anxiety and uncertainty wasn’t what I wanted to feel in my spare time.

But one evening after finishing an episode of Warrior Nun on Netflix (don’t judge), I got the feeling that I didn’t want to just spend my evening this way, mindlessly consuming content. I got fired up and decided I would just start building this tag functionality that I’d been procrastinating. With a surprising amount of energy, I opened up VS Code, loaded up my dev environment, reviewed my code, and then stared at my application for 5 minutes. I got stuck on the information architecture. Where should this live? Was it a part of the settings blueprint? Was it part of my main application blueprint? Did it need a new blueprint all on it’s own?

Sure enough, this was too early. This was too hard. What was I thinking?

So I closed everything down, opened Netflix back up and started watching another episode. This was a problem for another time. #typicalstoryright?

But this is why just starting is such an amazing practice to bring in to your process. When your brain starts thinking about a difficult problem, it doesn’t stop thinking about it just because you switched to another task. It keeps working it over in your subconscious. Slowly pulling up potentially relevant information and seeing if something clicks.

Sure enough. 15 minutes in to my Netflix episode something clicked. Thinking hard for 5 minutes about where to put this new feature jump started that subconscious process. I suddenly recalled my own mental model of the application and the different routes and knew exactly where this new feature should live.

“Strike the iron while it’s hot” is another thing people say. So I struck. I dropped my Netflix episode, opened VS Code back up and started hacking away. The next day it was deployed to production.

It’s far from perfect and will likely need changes in the future. But it exists. Which is significantly more valuable to myself and others than when it was something I was procrastinating in my head.

So trust in the process, trust in your biology, and just start.

Obligatory Lurnby Plug

Lurnby is a read-it-later tool for digital content like web articles, newsletters, and ebooks. By making it easy to highlight and take notes, it supports active reading and learning. It also makes it simple to start reviewing your content with spaced-repetition. That way, when you read something, you’re more likely to remember it.

If that sounds like something useful for you, I’d love for you to check it out. www.lurnby.com