Sometimes You Just Need a Win

I was in a rut a few weeks ago and I just couldn't get out of it. You know that burnt out, tired feeling where you go on autopilot? Going through the motions of getting my daily chores done, but anything above that just seemed so heavy. Every day as I walked through my backyard to feed the pigs I passed the same area right outside my back door where the lawn was severely overgrown. For weeks we had a small pen set up there for Boris, a boar piglet that lived with us for about a month. Eventually the weeds grew up and even though I kept saying to myself that it needed to be dealt with, I was so used to seeing it that it had become a normal part of the backdrop. As I was walking by one day, I set down the bucket of pig feed and decided I just needed a win, so I started picking the weeds. That area was full of "pig weed" which pulls out super easy and pigs love to eat. In the end it took me three minutes to clear the whole area, a task that had been eating away at me for weeks. I took a bucket load down to feed the pigs along with their normal feed, making them happy and giving me a two-for-one win. On the way back to the house I could see through the fence and felt invigorated by my success. Wanting to harness my newfound productivity, I immediately went over to split some firewood. That small, three-minute task changed my entire perspective, took me from overwhelmed to at ease and ready to take on the day. The reason it worked so well is because it had three important characteristics: easy, immediate and visually obvious.

A rut can be different for different people, for instance I have OCD and what this translates to for me is difficulty with flexibility when confronted with disruptions to my plan for the day. I typically wake up and already have a loose plan for my entire day because I, like most people, have more priorities than I have time for. That makes time very precious and not something I want to spend willy-nilly. What this also means is that when I’m in a rut about productivity around the farm, I’m also in a rut creatively, socially, everything-ally (its usually all-encompassing). That’s why I want to be equipped with the tools I need when the inevitable happens – life gets in the way of my perfect plans and I fall behind into a rut.

So something unexpected happens and shoots right up to the top of the priority list. You drop everything else and deal with it. You then do your best to re-organize all the other tasks you have planned out and their follow-up tasks. Inevitably this results in something falling through the cracks. Not such a big deal, but these things compound over time. Typically, for me, the smaller, less urgent tasks get put off, and eventually, so many have gotten pushed off or a few have gotten pushed off so long they are no longer small tasks. Now I'm feeling overwhelmed, maybe shame or guilt and these feelings also compound which often makes the whole situation feel ten times worse. This is me in a rut, I'm looking around and I freeze. Procrastination sets in, analysis paralysis, maybe I get some anxiety or have burnt myself out trying to catch up. Either way, I need to break out of this cycle and start fresh.

This is the power of stacking wins, if you do it right. I got this idea from reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits. While stacking wins and building habits aren’t exactly the same, the concepts have some crossover when it comes to the power of visual cues. Here's how it works for getting out of a rut - do the smallest, easiest task that has the most immediate visual impact. Why? Because now you're not only able to tell yourself "I've been successful at that task I set out at" but every time you walk by that area you see it and are reminded that you are winning. The best way to lay the foundation to stack a win on top of your last one is by leaving behind an obvious win to stack on top of. So that when you are just existing in your space, you’re constantly reminded, not of all the things you haven’t gotten around to, but of all the objectives you fucking crushed. This re-frames your perspective from “I can’t do it” to “Look, I’m doing it!”. Being in a rut is demotivating enough so having those external, obvious, visual cues constantly being a source of motivation helps take some of the load off.

On paper it seems so obvious, and so easy, but if you’re really deep in a rut, the simplicity of a solution is only moderately helpful without the right framework to use it in. So while the idea of stacking wins isn't new, it is important how you implement it: easy, immediate and visually obvious. Now when I walk outside and see that my fence is no longer hidden behind the “pig weeds” I take a deep breath, roll my shoulders, and get ready to crush another day.

If you’re interested in seeing the process I have a short video about this exact moment where I pick the weeds and feed them to the pigs on my socials - @ram_seynolds on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube