I was recently listening to my friend Cal Newport’s excellent new podcast, Deep Questions, and particularly appreciated his advice on procrastination. While he covered a bunch of points, one was that people only fully commit to a plan when they really believe it will work. Which, he observes, is one of the reasons why athletes have coaches: if you can find someone you trust, and let them tell you what to do, it’s then far easier for you to (per Nike) just do it.

Over the years, I’ve learned that even works if you’re coaching yourself, at least so long as you can erect enough distance between your coaching and doing selves. When I first started programming my own workouts, I would chart out each day’s workout that morning. But, it turned out, I was far too much of a wimp to make that work; imagining how horrible an exercise or conditioning circuit would be later that day, I would inevitably scale back to something more palatable, and I pushed myself far less than I could have in result. So, instead, I started programming increasingly far in advance, eventually reaching where I am now: programming two weeks ahead. At that gap, future Josh’s suffering seems far more abstract, and I’m apparently willing to subject him to pretty much anything. Conversely, when I’m actually doing the workouts, past coach Josh seems distant enough as to be beyond question. “Well,” I’ll think, “I don’t really want to do this workout, but he says I have to.” And, weirdly, that’s enough to get me to do it.

Recently, I’ve also discovered a similar, albeit much faster, trick for daily productivity. As I’ve written before, when my to-do list reaches too great a length, I’ll reach a point of overwhelm sufficient to grind me to a halt. Instead of just choosing something and chipping away, I’ll stare at the over-long list, and not do much of anything at all.

But, this week, facing an unexpectedly long lineup of obligations, I instead took my list and randomly sorted it, then started at the top, and worked my way sequentially down. Small as it may seem, taking the choice of next task out of my own hands has been enough to get me going. I no longer was choosing to do something; I was just being told (albeit just by a stochastically scrambled version of myself) what I had to do. And, dumb as that sounds, it seems to have worked. (Witness this post, as blogging was otherwise on the list of stuff I was studiously not getting done.)

As a general principle, then: either get someone you trust to boss you around, or boss yourself around at a (temporal or technological) distance. Amazingly enough, it totally works.