Productivity hack: turning your face towards a task

By Liz

Original photo by Wilhelm Gunkel

There are some tasks that are big, complex and important but not urgent. They easily fall to the bottom of your to-do list because they can’t be done in one go and they tend to hang around for a long time. It’s easy to start getting despondent about ever feeling the rush of crossing that sucker out.

We have a saying at Pomegranite to ward off the despondency. We focus on the act of making small but consistent efforts to work through the task. We use the phrase “turning your face towards” a task.

This framing helps you not only to acknowledge the task’s existence, but also to commit to making incremental progress, however humble. It makes the job, as a whole, less daunting and grating, and it allows you to embrace the mini-victories that ultimately create a pleasing sense of momentum.

Sometimes it’s more that a task feels huge so you keep wanting to put it off but when you just turn your face towards it (keeping things ever so casual), you actually see that it’ll only really take you 15 minutes and you unexpectedly end up getting through it in one go.

So the next time someone asks you about a long-term project (be it a report, a budget or sorting out the garage), you have the perfect response which (added bonus) makes you sound like a Bridgeton character.