#25 Steal Ernest Hemingway's Follow-Through Formula
===
Kelly: [00:00:00] Hello, welcome to the Productivity Genius Podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Fifield, and I hope the sound is amazing. I just recorded the podcast and I did it on my Blue Yeti microphone and it's all crackly. I don't know if my microphone is dying or what is up with that, but I'm recording it on a different headset and I'm not going to be frustrated that I have to do it over.
You know why? Because When you rerecord a podcast, it's always better the second time, at least that's what we tell ourselves, right? in this new and improved version of this podcast I'm gonna do an even better job of explaining to you this awesome tool you can use to help you Follow through on your schedule . Before I give you the tool though,
let me just make sure I'm super clear about this I want to say this in multiple episodes because I think it's so critical because I see this struggle with so many people and I want to share this with you. I don't like following through on my calendar I would say about 50 percent of the time about 50 percent of the time when I [00:01:00] see the next thing on my calendar, I don't want to do it and I am very good at planning.
I I set myself up for success. I micro step. I give myself buffer time. I have a really beautifully planned calendar. But unfortunately, along with my beautifully planned calendar, I also have a human brain that's always with me. And It would much rather go get a snack, take a walk, check Instagram, do anything but whatever the heck I have planned for the time, even if it's not that challenging.
So I want to repeat that in case you haven't heard me say that before, because I think very often people beat themselves up and think that they are just terrible at following their schedule and they're worse than everyone else and they don't know why they're so unmotivated or. They think there's just something wrong with their brain or something, and that's just totally normal to not want to do the things on your schedule is totally normal, even in ideal situations in this episode, I want to give you a tool that is going to help [00:02:00] make it less painful to follow through.
So I've mentioned different things that we could do, of course, for a schedule to make following through easier, but here's an additional tool we can use, and it's called the Hemingway Bridge. So I got this idea from the book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte.
If you haven't read it, you'll love it. Check it out. But he discussed in there his concept of the Hemingway Bridge, and I love this idea and this concept for scheduling. It's based on the way that Ernest Hemingway worked. So when Ernest Hemingway sat down to a writing session, he wouldn't end that session until the plot going forward was clear.
So he wouldn't kind of get stuck or confused about what comes next and say, you know what, I'll finish that next time. He would stop when he knew what was coming next. And that is such a beautiful idea for scheduling, and it will make scheduling and following through on your schedule so much easier in the future. .
It really does make both easier. It makes the scheduling easier because you kind of [00:03:00] already pre know what needs to go on your schedule in the future. And that makes following through so much easier and I'll explain why in a moment. But here's what we actually quite naturally probably do at the end of a work session,
So we're. working on something. And we either, these are the two most common things I see, we either work up to the very last second and try to cram in some last minute things before the last moment where we have to jump up from our desk and go do something else, attend a meeting, go pick up the kids, whatever it is, but we try to cram in as much work as we can, right?
And that's based on some of our ideas about time. But whatever, that's a very common thing to do. Try to cram it in and then just like drop it and like, just move on to something else when there's just absolutely no more time. So that's one thing that's very common to do in a work block of time. And then the other very, very, very common thing to do is to work until we get stuck.
Maybe you're go, go going and you're getting things done and then you get to a point where you're like, I don't know exactly what I want to do next [00:04:00] with this, or I'm confused, or this is too hard to finish in the time I have left, so I'll do this when I have more time. That is going to set us up for a really difficult time on following through on our calendar in the future.
Because if you think of either of those cases, the case where you just worked up to the last second, just dropped it and moved on, you didn't really, Give yourself the chance to pre plan what step comes next, right? And most likely we think, oh, I'll remember where I'm at. But the reality is the next day comes and then you return back to that task.
It's like, wait, where did I leave off? What, what needs to be done next? So when you see that time on your calendar in the future to continue that project, there's going to be more resistance because we're a little unsure of where we left off and what still needs to be done. So that's going to make it harder to follow through.
In the other instance where we stopped working when we got confused or it got hard, that's going to be really hard to follow through on, right? Like if you have time on your calendar in the future to figure that [00:05:00] thing out or to work on that really hard thing, of course your brain is going to freak out on you and give you lots of resistance to doing that because it does not want to do hard things.
And now we've made it super hard on our brain. by stopping right at the point where it got really hard. So it's like, Hey, future self, I'm going to stop here. And now you're stuck figuring this out. Right? So it's a really kind of mean thing to do to our future self to put that on our calendar in the future.
So what can we do instead? This is where the Hemingway bridge comes in. Instead. When you're working in your time block, if you are doing a good job of keeping track of the time and you're getting to the end, rather than cramming in that last minute or two of work, the much better, more efficient use of that last minute of time is to stop one minute early and then just jot down the next steps.
Jot down where you're at. It's like you're writing a note to your future self. Like, here's what we got done. Here's exactly where we are. And here's the next step that can take [00:06:00] anywhere from, I don't know, it could be 30 seconds to a minute. It's not going to take you much time, but it is going to pay off so huge for your future self when now you see it on your calendar in the future.
Like, Oh, that's right. I have time to continue on that project. And the next thing is this, When it's real simple and real clear what the next step is, it's so much easier to jump in and get that done. Now, sometimes, of course, things are going to happen, right? So, the school calls, your daughter's throwing up, you have to go pick her up.
You don't have that last minute to wrap things up. You don't want to delay, you're on to the next thing. Or maybe your boss comes to your desk and they're like, you gotta do this thing right now, and you don't have time to take an extra minute and plan those things out. In reality, probably most of the times you do.
But let's say you don't, or you just forget. In those cases, if you remember, That this is a practice that you're trying to get into the habit of, then as you're transitioning to that next thing, start thinking about that next step, make that decision on the next step, and then maybe even in that next time block, maybe you [00:07:00] get to that meeting Or your boss gives you the instructions, and before you actually dive into that next project, you just jot it down.
If that doesn't happen, and you get to the end of the day, and you haven't made all those next decisions, the end of the day wrap up would be a great time to look back over your schedule for the day, see where you left off, and if there's any loose ends that need to be Tied up if you're looking at any of those things and saying, oh, yeah, okay I haven't decided what's next here make those decisions at the end of the day.
Following through on your schedule is hard enough without making it additionally challenging by Ambiguity or by having tasks that start with figuring out confusing things. So, use the Hemingway Bridge to set your future self up to make it easier to follow through.
In our next episode, we're going to talk about those beautiful thoughts about time that are actually poisonous. They're like the thoughts that you could put on a Hallmark card and sound so lovely, but probably are actually [00:08:00] holding you back. Thoughts like, time is precious. It sounds so pretty, right? It even has the word precious in it.
How could that be bad? But when I say that to you, time is so precious, what emotion comes up for you?
I know for me, it's something like nervous, anxious, rushed. It's a worrisome feeling to me because it makes me think, when I think time is precious, I think I shouldn't mishandle it. I shouldn't waste it. And those are poisonous thoughts, right, when I think about I'm wasting time, I'm not using it correctly, I've lost time.
That feels terrible. in the next episode, we're going to look at some very common poisonous time thoughts that are very sneaky, that we could think are useful, but are actually holding us back. Once we can uncover those and get awareness of them, we can start working on creating new thoughts. That will actually serve us so much better in accomplishing our goals in the future.[00:09:00]
But until then, I hope you have an amazing week.
