Improve your starting ritual

Published on March 11, 2023

You often do many different things in a day. Getting started is an important part of that. The easier it is to start, the more enjoyable and productive your day becomes.

Starting can bring up quite a bit of resistance, especially with things that are more difficult and only pay off later.

Improving your starting ritual makes everything easier.

How do you start something?

Perhaps you have never thought about this, but how do you start something?

When you really look forward to something, you often do not think about it because it happens naturally. But when something is really difficult, we often assume that our thoughts about the task are true. You then tend to regard something as “tricky,” “boring” or “hard.”

Are you really aware of what makes something enjoyable for you, and whether the things that create resistance are actually true?

There are different ways to start something, each with its own emotional weight and resistance, or lack of it.

Here are a few examples to help you with your starting ritual.

Being “forced”

We all know this from work or studying, of course. You do not really feel like doing it, but the deadline keeps getting closer.

It is really a kind of external “motivation” that gets you working on something anyway. Hardly ideal, because you often put it off until you absolutely cannot wait any longer. You then often start reluctantly, with the “handbrake” on. A huge amount of resistance, in other words.

The opposite is something enjoyable, something you look forward to.

Something you look forward to

It is often easy to start this. But not always: sometimes you still have to get off that comfortable sofa and head out into the cold or rain.

Once you are there, though, you happily get on with it.

You immediately know how to begin, and thoughts about the how and what often pass through your mind during the day too.

You are intrinsically motivated. You move into action of your own accord, without the threat of a negative consequence.

It is not always possible to approach everything this way. But the closer we get to this description, the easier it becomes to start something.

So what is the difference between these two ways of working?

The difference is your “opinion”

You may have noticed that I always referred to the “object” in the previous section as the task or the action. That is because it does not matter what the task or action is. What matters is our thought about it, the attributes we give it. Something I might describe as difficult can be very simple for you. The task itself does not change.

What makes something easy or difficult is your opinion about it.

A starting ritual is an important tool for bringing this paradox together.

A starting ritual as the solution

A starting ritual is an extremely useful tool.

It helps you explore where resistance comes from and how you think about something. That lets you adjust your view so it comes closer to the truth: nothing is difficult if you make it small enough.

A starting ritual makes sure you keep doing what works for you. You always have a structured, step-by-step plan to fall back on.

A starting ritual removes a large part of resistance in the short term. That is because you shift your focus from “this is difficult” to “oh, let me do this first.” Whatever you focus on eventually becomes your personal truth.

How to develop a starting ritual

Now you know how important a starting ritual is, and how much the emotional weight and thoughts about a task matter, you can begin creating one.

Examples of starting rituals

I will give you a few examples of starting rituals I use myself straight away. Then you can compare them with the principles that follow.

Starting ritual for programming

1. After I put my tea on my desk, I open yesterday’s notes in Obsidian.

2. After I open my notes, I bring up the Jira ticket, my work item.

3. After I open the work item, I open the code editor.

4. Optional: put on some music on YouTube.

Starting ritual for washing the dishes

1. After I get up from the sofa in the living room, I take all the glasses I can see to the kitchen.

2. After I get to the kitchen, I put some music on my phone.

3. I take the largest pan and put it in the sink.

4. I start washing and drying that pan.

These are two simple examples, but they are extremely effective when you are dreading something. All the principles I discuss below are actually hidden in these starting rituals.

Can you spot them?

Introduce anchors

Habits do not exist in isolation. They always develop in a broader context. You might do certain things in certain ways at your parents’ house but not at your own.

“Anchors” are part of this. An anchor is essentially a “previous action,” or something in your surroundings that sets a particular habit in motion. Sometimes you see something lying around, or walk past somewhere, and suddenly think: “Oh yes, I still need to do that too.” This is the system you can use.

A starting ritual begins with a starting point. That is your anchor. An anchor should be as specific as possible. So rather than “after I shower,” a better anchor is “after I pick up my towel.”

An anchor is often tied to a location too, but you will discover that soon enough when you reflect.

Examples of good anchors:

1. After I put my toothbrush away.

2. After I hang up my coat at work.

3. After I get up from my chair.

4. After my feet touch the floor in the morning.

Anything can become a new anchor, really. Your creativity is the limit. You can even apply this during training or meetings.

Now you have an anchor, you can attach more small actions to it. The funny thing is that each of those actions is itself an anchor too.

Lots of “small” steps

It may feel unnecessary, but especially for difficult to-dos, it can help enormously to divide the whole task into the smallest possible steps. Steps you know for certain you can do.

You do not need to break down the entire task straight away, either. The aim is to start; the answers will come naturally as you work on it.

Think of starting Microsoft Word when working on a school assignment, for example. You can first fill the blank page staring back at you with a list of bullet points. That is manageable too.

That way you work toward the complete assignment step by step, without feeling resistance.

Different tasks, different rituals

The next step is to experiment with these starting rituals.

What works well for a boring administrative task might be less suitable for something that requires your complete focus.

Sometimes it is nice to have music on, and sometimes it is not.

We are not robots, so it always remains a matter of finding out what works and what does not. Sometimes you just have to try something and adjust it later.

Become aware of what works

That brings us to the next point: becoming aware of what works.

I use a very simple format of three questions for this:

• What went well: three things?

• What is one thing that could be better?

• What is one thing I will do differently to achieve that?

This format also forces you to pause and consider what went well. Some people, including me, occasionally forget that.

Keeping the improvement to one action lets you keep seeing the connection between what you changed and whether that was what worked. If you start doing ten things differently, you no longer know which of those ten led to the result you wanted.

Develop a strategy for distractions

Your starting ritual can also account for distractions that pull you out of your flow.

If you are already working in small steps, putting your phone on airplane mode can easily be one of them. You can still enjoy your phone once you are finished, but not while you are working.

Which “rules” do you want to follow, and how will you follow them? Include those in the starting ritual too.

There are more principles you can build into a starting ritual besides avoiding distractions. Making things comfortable and enjoyable can also be included in Tiny Habits, or small steps:

Make yourself comfortable and make it enjoyable

Forcing yourself to do something may work in the short term, but it is really no fun. There are good ways to make things more comfortable and enjoyable than forcing yourself.

Forcing yourself to do something only reinforces the idea that it really is difficult. In the future, that will only make it harder. It is much better to take something difficult apart a little at a time. This builds your confidence, and you eventually climb the “mountain” too.

Before starting something, you could make a lovely warm cup of tea, go to a café or coffee shop, or head to the University of Twente library to work, for example.

Whatever it is, consider what you enjoy and add it to your step-by-step plan.