Incremental Progress

In the last few days I have been exploring the power of making incremental progress. Last week, I identified several long-term projects or areas of activity that I wanted to complete and, since then, I have set about making one small piece of progress on each one every day. The projects include writing an entry on this blog each work day (6 in a row not including this one), progressively sorting out my office at work and completing a short set of core exercises each work day (7 in a row). Obviously I need to keep things going for longer before I can make a proper judgement about this activity and rate my success but I feel that the early signs are promising. I feel that I have already been working on these tasks long enough to begin to feel and see progress and can catch a glimpse of how things will be when I have extended my runs up into the 10s of days.

There is really something quite alluring about the idea that if I do something for, say, just 10 minutes every weekday for a year then I will have accomplished over 40 hours of activity in a year. If I consider what I could achieve if I sat down and wrote for 40+ hours or did 40+ hours of exercise or spent 40+ hours sorting out my office (of course I don’t think I will need quite that long…) then the possibilities are enormous. Obviously, there is a limit to the type of activities that can usefully be performed in this manner – if I want to write a novel then I probably need to lengthen the time spent on writing each day (but perhaps not). Nevertheless, there seems to me to be a lot to say for the idea of making slow, steady, incremental, progress. I liken it to being the tortoise racing the hare, and idea that often pops into my head when I am out on a long run. If I remember the fable correctly, in the end the tortoise wins the race…