Spurt

Getting started when you don’t feel like it

Make the start small and specific enough that not feeling like it stops mattering. Choose a task that fits the time and energy you have right now, write down its first step, and commit to fifteen minutes instead of to finishing. Most of the difficulty sits in the moment of beginning, so that is the moment to make easy.

Updated 29 October 2026

Why starting is the hardest moment

Putting a task off is rarely a sign that you don’t know it matters. Piers Steel combined 691 correlations from studies of procrastination and found that some of its strongest and most consistent predictors were how unpleasant a task feels, how far off its payoff or deadline is, how confident people feel about doing it, and how impulsive they are (Steel, 2007). Sirois and Pychyl describe the same pattern from the inside: delay is often a way to feel better in the moment, and the cost lands on the person you will be later (Sirois and Pychyl, 2013).

Put those together and you have a familiar morning. The list holds a dentist booking, a tax form and a call you have been dreading. Each one is mildly unpleasant, none is due today, and leaving all three feels better for the next ten minutes. The task itself is easier to change than the mood you are in: make its first step clear and fit it to the moment.

Fit the task to the time you have

Most days have gaps, such as twenty minutes before a meeting or the half hour after the children are in bed. A gap is too short for the big task at the front of your mind, so it tends to go to email or the news.

A gap gets used when you can see, without searching, which tasks fit inside it. That takes one habit: give each task a rough length when you write it down, such as 5 minutes, 15, 30, an hour or longer. The estimate doesn’t have to be right. It has to be good enough to rule tasks out, so that in a fifteen-minute gap you are choosing between four tasks instead of forty. When in doubt, round up; a task you think takes ten minutes goes in as fifteen.

This is what the picker in Spurt is for. Tap the amber button in the middle of the tab bar, choose 5, 15 or 30 minutes or an hour, and one task from your list that fits appears, with Do it, Skip and Done under it.

Fit it to your energy too

A thirty-minute gap at nine in the morning and a thirty-minute gap at nine at night are different gaps. Some tasks need a clear head, such as writing something that matters or a decision with money in it. Others can be done tired: sorting the post, ordering a refill, putting the washing away, booking a haircut.

Mark the demanding tasks once, when you add them, and leave the rest unmarked. At the end of a long day you can skip everything marked and choose from what is left.

Spurt calls this mark Needs energy. In the picker, Easy ones leaves those tasks out and Anything includes them.

What that looks like on an ordinary evening

It is 7.40 in the evening. There is a call at eight, the list has 23 tasks on it, and you are tired. Twenty minutes rules out everything longer than fifteen, which leaves seven. Being tired rules out the three that need a clear head, which leaves four: order the birthday present, reply to Sam about the trip, book the car in for its service, water the plants. You choose one in a few seconds, because the time and the energy did most of the choosing.

Write down the first step, and when you will take it

A task written as a topic is hard to start because it doesn’t say what to do. Car insurance could mean finding the renewal letter, comparing quotes or cancelling a policy, and choosing between them is a small decision you face every time you look at the list. Rewrite it as the first action you can picture yourself doing: Find the renewal letter and note the price.

Then decide when. Gollwitzer and Sheeran combined 94 tests of plans written in the form “when this happens, I will do that” and found a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals, including on getting started (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006). The plan can be one line: “When I sit down after lunch, I’ll open the tax folder.” When the moment arrives, the decision has already been made.

Commit to fifteen minutes instead of to finishing

Agreeing to finish a large task is what makes it heavy. Agreeing to fifteen minutes of it is easy to keep. Set a timer, work until it ends, then decide again whether to stop or carry on. If you stop, the task is fifteen minutes further along and you know where you left off, which makes the next start easier.

Any short, fixed block works. Fifteen minutes is long enough to get somewhere and short enough to agree to on a bad day; five will do when fifteen feels like too much.

In Spurt, Do it starts a timer for the task. A job longer than an hour comes up in parts, as Do 15 min or Do 30 min, and the minutes you put in stay on the task, so the next part starts where the last one ended.

If you stall partway

Sometimes the timer is running and the next step is not obvious: a figure you need is missing, or two ways forward look equally good. Write the question you are stuck on into the task’s note, in one line, and either answer it now or stop there. The note becomes the first step of the next session, so that session starts on the question instead of on working out where you were.

When nothing fits

Sometimes the gap is five minutes and nothing on the list takes five minutes. There are two good uses for it. One is a setup step for something bigger, such as finding the document or writing the first sentence. The other is a rest, taken on purpose instead of drifting into scrolling.

If nothing ever fits, the list is made of tasks too big to begin, and the answer is to split them. Tasks you keep putting off covers how.

When nothing fits, Spurt’s picker shows how many tasks would fit with more time, for example “Nothing fits in 5 min. 3 fit in 15 min.”

On a day when even that is too much

Some days the smallest task on the list still feels like a climb. Amabile and Kramer studied some 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 people at seven companies and found that a sense of making progress on meaningful work was the single most important factor in how people felt about their day at work, with small wins nearly as effective as major breakthroughs (Nobel, 2011). So pick the smallest task anyway, finish it, and stop there if you want to.

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More: How many tasks to plan for a day