On the Tuesday-est Tuesday of the year, you find yourself staring at your to-do list in frustration. Not sure what to work on next. Tired. Desperate for a break. You finally have to admit defeat. Defeated by a piece of paper, or a text file, or an app or whatever, you slump back in your chair staring a thousand yards past the prioritized items. Some of which have sat on the list as high priority for a couple of weeks in a row.
I’ve been there. So have you probably. Maybe you just took a break to scroll and escape your version of the undying to-do list and found this page.
When this happened to me the first time, I did something almost embarrassing to admit. I completed the task "reply to client email," crossed it off the list and called it a day. That evening, for the first time in weeks, I didn't feel guilty about not getting enough done. I had done something. Just one thing. And it turned out that was enough.
To-do lists are a double-edged sword. Keeping track of priorities, crossing off or deleting what's done, that's the easy part. Before I went digital, I crossed them off on the page itself. Whatever wasn’t done at the end of the day got rewritten on a fresh page the following day. New items were added below. When unrelated thoughts would surface mid-task, I'd jot them down and get back to work. Broken things, missing pieces, whatever I needed but couldn't get right away, all of it went on the list too.
The to-do list became useful for knowing what to work on next. Useful for prioritising what I needed to get done. Really useful for helping me forget intrusive tasks and keep concentration but ultimately the to-do list always replenished itself. There was always more to do. As a colleague of mine used to say “Shane. Work is not a rabbit, it will not run away.”
Sometimes all you need is one win a day.
One Win Can Be Enough
Modern productivity culture talks about achievement. The early morning routine. Waking up at 5am. (And then there’s the people that claim they wake at 4am or earlier!) Ten habits before breakfast. Even just reading about morning routines gets on my nerves. I’m happy with others having a perfectly optimized morning routine. It’s not for me. If your calendar looks like a Tetris board you should ask if you’re spending more time on organisation than the tasks themselves. Against that backdrop, "just get one thing done" might sound a little insulting.
I think I have written more than a few times about motivation being a by-product of doing rather than waiting. Your brain doesn't find inspiration because you wrote a beautiful list of goals. It believes you're capable because you did something and watched it work. Momentum comes from action. It comes from starting! This is why on the days when you’re just not feeling it or need a break or need to admit your are burnt out, that finishing one task and walking away often does more for tomorrow's effort than ten half finished ones.
This Is Far From An Original Thought
Unfortunately for my ego, and despite me finding this out for myself, this idea is far from new. Maybe I’m just dressing it up as a modern “life hack.” Organizational psychologist Karl Weick wrote about "
small wins" just before I was born in January of 1984.
Weick argued that massive social problems start to become solvable only when broken into achievable chunks that produce visible, positive results. He was trying to explain why some movements and organizations made progress on enormous problems while others stalled out entirely.
The pattern he found was consistent across different areas in life. People and institutions that won, even modestly, kept going. Aiming for total transformation and nothing else usually received nothing tangible in return and ended up quitting or failing. Scale this down to your to-do list and you’ll find that the mechanism is identical. Your nervous system doesn't know the difference between solving world hunger and cleaning up your newsletter subscriptions. It just registers: something got done and rewards you with some dopamine for completing the task. If you repeat that practice daily, you will develop a habit and build a different relationship with effort itself.
How To Do It
Knowing about this method and living by it are two different things. This can be particularly true if you measure your self-worth in completed checkboxes. If you get to a point where just one thing would really help you, you’re probably also stressed to the gills and under a significant amount of pressure. None of this requires a system. Just a few small habits.
See if there’s a win in your current to-do list. Something easily solvable. Do this before you get stuck into the day. You could even do that the night before. A vague intention is going to get steamrolled by whatever fires are burning when you are in the thick of it. Put it at the top of your to-do list and do it first.
Don’t worry about the impact or how easy it is to complete that win. Choose one that’s embarrassingly achievable. The win should be so small that skipping it feels more effort than doing it. Once it’s done nobody can take that away from you. The rest of your day can completely fall apart, you’ve still got a win.
Note it somewhere. Leave a little pile of post-it notes or keep a file that tracks your wins. Don't just check the box or cross it out or delete it and move on. Give yourself a pat on the back or a small reward.
Track your win streak. Five days of small wins will in time beat one day of a heroic effort followed by four days of zero. Consistency will build the habit, intensity will kill it.
Once you have your win in hand, you can get on with the day. But if it turns out that you can’t, you can walk away from it guilt free and do something to help yourself. “I finally washed the dishes in the sink” can turn into an afternoon in the park. Actual touching grass instead of figuratively…
It’s Not About The Dopamine!
The goal of tracking "small wins" isn't to feel good. Feeling good is a pleasant benefit. This is really about showing yourself you are "someone who follows through." Even on days when your actual output is near zero.
Most advice about small wins frames them as a confidence booster, a little dopamine hit to keep you motivated. That's true, but it's also the less interesting part. The more important thing a daily win does is to stem the growth of burnout and to prevent a bad day or two from widening into something you can't recover from. If you are burnt out, a single win a day can help as part of your recovery.
A single small, completed task each day isn't really about productivity at all. It can work as solid evidence to show that you’re not allowing burnout to grow. A very different job to "boosting motivation," right? One win can outlast more elaborate habits or productivity systems that will fall apart when life gets hard.
Take It One Tuesday At A Time
Big ambitions are worth having. But ambition without proper foundations tends to collapse when things get complicated, and not to state the obvious but life is reliably and remarkably complicated. One win a day isn't a smaller version of success. It will make the bigger wins possible, one Tuesday at a time.
What's the one thing you could finish today, something small enough that there's no excuse? Do it now. Not for the mood boost, but for the proof that you follow through. Drop a “Win!” in the comments if you did.
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