Do the Hard Things First

Roots + Wings with Rory Feek

I am a creature of habit. I wake before daylight every morning and pretty much start my day exactly the same way. While my little girl is still dreaming away in her bed, I find my way downstairs, light a candle, make coffee, get out my fountain pen, and spend a few minutes journaling about the day before. This is followed most days by some Bible reading, and then I open my calendar and look at the day in front of me.

I’m also a serious list-maker. And I try hard to be a list doer. Often, I will spend an unreasonable amount of time making a comprehensive checklist of the things I need—or want—to get done today and put them in some sort of order.

Some days, I’m incredibly productive. When the evening rolls around, I feel great, knowing that I’ve accomplished all or most of the things I had hoped to get done. But sometimes—more often than I’d like to admit—when dinner rolls around, I realize that I have gone through the day and not once looked at the list I made. The day will have gotten away from me, and I completely forget every single thing I had meant to get done.

I’m ashamed to say that I usually blame the problem on my list system: the organizer I’m using or the app on my computer (or iPhone when I had one). I’ve wasted great amounts of time, searching for something that makes more sense or works better, rather than paying anywhere between 99 cents and thirty dollars for the thing that is truly, truly going to help me be more organized and get more done.

That will usually be followed a few days or weeks or maybe months later by an epiphany that whatever new planner or app I’m using isn’t actually helpful. I’ll decide that what I really need to do is simplify. And so, I’ll grab a single sheet of paper and start hand-writing a list. This new and improved list will suffice for a short time but then be followed by some other new tool that someone will have told me about. And I will order it, get it in the mail, open it up, and begin. Believing that this is the thing I have been lacking…

In the end—I mean the very, very end—I’ve come to realize that it all comes down to one thing.

Do the thing you’ve been dreading … first.

That’s it.

I’ve found that whether I’ve made a list or not, whether it’s digital or old school, if I make myself do the one hard thing that’s been on my mind for days or weeks, that I’ve been purposefully, or coincidentally avoiding … it changes everything.

As much as I hate to admit it, Nike may have said it best after all. Just do it.

Skip buying their new sneakers. Instead, do the thing you don’t want to do. And do that one thing, first thing. Somehow, everything else has a way of falling into place. I strangely find myself getting more done and having more fun doing those things. Maybe because my mind and heart are a little lighter. A weight that I’ve been carrying around has been lifted. And I see my day and my priorities a little clearer.

For me, a writer, one of the things that often shows up at the top of my "I need to do, but I don’t really want to do” list is writing or finish writing this column or some other creative endeavor that I’m excited about, but dreading. Yes, there are things we can love and dislike at the same time. I’ve heard people say, “Writers love to have written,” and it is SO true. It’s usually not the actual writing that is hard, it’s the sitting down of the writer’s butt in the chair that is tough to make happen. But … once I make myself sit down and begin, more often than not, I get lost in what I’m writing or making, I blink, and it’s done. I am proud of what exists that didn’t exist an hour before.

I’ve found that all things on our “To Do” lists are not equal. Some are harder to check off than others. They keep rolling over to the next day, and the next, and the next … There is a reason that hard things are hard. And it’s human to want to avoid making that call we dread making. Doing that work we really don’t want to do. Or whatever it is that subconsciously is weighing us down.

But there is something incredibly powerful about doing the hard thing first. About attacking and accomplishing difficult or scary things. I’ve found that most of the time, actually almost all of the time, they turn out to be not as hard as I thought they were. And I will invariably find myself thinking, “Why in the world didn’t I do this sooner?”

There is a sense of pride that comes from doing one hard thing that you won’t get from accomplishing twenty easy things. And when you do it once—do the hard thing first—and see the difference it makes in your day and in your life, you’ll find yourself excited to do it again tomorrow. And like all difficult things, the more you do them, the less difficult they become.

So the next time you have a big list of things in front of you that need done, start by doing the one on the list that you don’t want to do, first. And see what happens.

For me, at the end of the day, it’s not about how much I’ve gotten done, how many things I’ve knocked off my list, or even how productive I am. It’s about how much I’ve grown. Am I a little better today than I was yesterday?

Try it.

You won’t like it.

But then … you’ll love it.  //

- rory

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Rory Feek is a world-class storyteller, songwriter, filmmaker, and New York Times best-selling author. As a musical artist, Rory is one-half of the Grammy-award-winning duo, Joey+Rory. He and his wife, Joey, toured the world and sold nearly a million records, before her untimely passing in March 2016.