In case you haven't heard, my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity is now out and it's actually a New York Times and also Sunday Times bestseller. So if you've ordered a copy, thank you so much. If you've read the book already, I'd love it if you could leave a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked out the book, you might like to consider checking it out.

When I was writing the book, I rediscovered Newton's law of inertia, which I first came across in secondary school or something. The law says an object at rest stays at rest while an object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an external imbalanced force. The law of inertia applies just as much to productivity as to physics. When you're doing nothing, it's easy to carry on doing nothing. And when you're working, it's much easier to carry on working.

So in this bonus episode of Deep Dive, we're going to play a snippet of chapter six of the audiobook for Feel Good Productivity. This chapter is all about how to overcome inertia when you just don't feel like getting started. In 1684, Isaac Newton embarked upon his most ambitious work yet.

Over the next 18 months, he would work through the night, often foregoing sleep and food, to complete his magnum opus, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. When the Principia was published in July 1687, it represented the first scientific attempt to explain how objects move through space.

At its heart was a simple observation, pithily summarized in Newton's first law of motion, often called the law of inertia. An object at rest stays at rest while an object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an external imbalanced force. In other words, if an object is still, it will remain still. If an object is moving, it will continue moving unless another force, like gravity or air resistance, prevents it from doing so.

By the time Newton died four decades later, many of his contemporaries realized that the Principia was a masterpiece, the greatest ever attempt to describe the physical properties of the natural universe. But what they probably didn't realize is that Newton's first law describes one of the core curiosities of human behavior too. Because here's the thing, the law of inertia applies just as much to productivity as to physics.

So far, we've encountered two major blockers that make us feel worse and procrastinate more. Uncertainty, which makes us confused about what we need to do to get started, and fear, which makes us so anxious that we don't feel we can begin. But our third and final blocker is perhaps the trickiest of all, inertia. As Newton recognized, it takes way more energy to get started than it does to keep going.

When you're doing nothing, it's easy to carry on doing nothing. And when you're working, it's much easier to carry on working. When you feel like you've tried everything to properly motivate yourself, but you're still procrastinating, you need one final boost to get started.

Inertia flattens our emotional landscape. It makes us feel helpless and stuck, and saps our feel-good emotions. But it can be overcome. I like to think of the principle of inertia as a literal hump on a road. Imagine you're about to cycle down a hill. You've got your helmet on, your gears are well-oiled, and you're itching to get started. There's just one problem. You need to cycle uphill a little before you get to the long slope down. It's going to take a burst of energy to get over the hump, and exerting that energy might not be the most pleasant thing in the world.

But once you've overcome it, you'll be cycling downhill, the wind in your hair, feeling better than ever and gliding on home. And here in the supplementary PDF, you'll see a little cartoon of a cyclist on a hill and there is a hump on the hill with the phrase, let's get over the hump. You don't really need to look at it because I've just described it in reasonable detail, but hopefully you get the idea. Key idea number one, reduce friction.

So how can we get over this hump? The first method involves looking at the world around us and trying to work out what's making it so difficult to get started. You might find that some little tweaks to your environment make all the difference. To see what I mean, we can turn to the work of Marleen Hytink, a researcher who led a Dutch study into the psychology of vegetable shopping. Hytink and her team had been tasked by a supermarket chain and several public organizations to come up with cheap ways to improve population health.

To do so, they developed a simple method to explore how our environment affects our shopping decisions. On some days of the week, treatment days, the researchers added a green inlay in the shopping trolleys that covered half of the bottom of a trolley. The green inlay indicated a space where shoppers would place their vegetables. The inlay also had a message printed on it, informing them about what other people in the supermarket do when it comes to buying vegetables.

One message read, the three most popular vegetables in the supermarket are cucumber, avocado, and bell pepper. Another read, most customers pick at least seven vegetables. On other days of the week, control days, the researchers removed the green inlays. The researchers wanted to test whether these subtle and crucially cheap tweaks in our environment, like the green inlay and the message in the shopping trolley, would change shoppers' behavior. And indeed, they did.

On the days with the green inlays, shoppers on average included over 50% more vegetables than those without. We can think of these changes as reducing the amount of energy it takes to get started on a task. They eliminate the friction that stands between us and the goal we seek. If you're constantly being reminded to buy veg, it takes much less energy to remember to do so. And if you've been told which are the most popular vegetables in your community, it takes much less energy to decide which ones to choose. Experiment number one, reduce environmental friction.

The first way these frictions slow us down is in our physical environment. Even when we know we really should do something, we often find ourselves in places that make it needlessly difficult to get started. Back in 2018, when working full-time as a doctor, I struggled to make practicing the guitar in the evenings a habit.

I'd occasionally think I should probably do some guitar practice, but I'd always end up procrastinating instead. I'd sit in the living room on the couch, scrolling social media on my phone or watching TV. My guitar was hidden away behind my bookshelf in the corner of the room to the point that I almost never saw it. It was only when I read James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, that I realized the obvious solution. Put the guitar in the middle of the living room. Suddenly, picking up the guitar became dramatically easier.

We can think of actions like this one, or of the Dutch shopping study, as engineering our environment. The objective, reducing the friction and so making it easier to get started. In particular, this involves focusing on what behavioral scientists call our default choices. This is the automatic outcome if you don't make a choice actively. In the case of those Dutch shoppers, the green inlay dedicated to fresh produce made vegetables the default. It required no real thought to load up a cart with fresh produce.

What does this look like in practice? Well, the trick is to tweak your environment to make the thing you want to make a start on the most obvious default decision.

and in turn to make the things you don't want to do the more difficult decision. For example, practicing the guitar. Moving your guitar stand into your living room makes it the default choice. Now the obvious decision is to pick up the instrument without thinking whenever you need a 10-minute break. Another example might be if you're struggling to concentrate. Keeping your study or work materials organized and visible by, for example, having a notebook right next to your laptop makes studying the default choice. Now the obvious decision is to start revising whenever you're at your desk.

And our final example, reducing phone usage. Turning off notifications stops picking up your phone being the default choice. Now the obvious decision is no longer checking your phone. Adjusting your environment helps tilt your actions towards the right decision, the one you actually want, not the bad decision you take without thinking. Experiment number two, reduce emotional friction. It's not just your environment that makes it difficult to begin a task, of course. It's also your mood.

So far in this book, we've talked a lot about the large, often stressful emotional obstacles that prevent us getting started. Ambiguity about what we're doing, anxiety about what a task entails. But there's an altogether more prosaic obstacle. In my home country, Britain, this is usually referred to as CBA or can't be arsed. There is, to my knowledge, no equivalent phrase in American English that captures this idea quite so pithily.

which is a pity because it's a very widespread sensation. I CBA to write that essay. I CBA to learn guitar. And I really, really CBA to work on my book. CBA is the most common and most paralyzing obstacle to getting started. But it can be easily tackled using one of the wisest, most ancient of productivity hacks, the five-minute rule. The five-minute rule is a simple but powerful technique that encourages you to commit to working on a task for just five minutes.

The idea behind this rule is that taking the first step is often the most challenging part of any task. During those five minutes, you focus solely on the thing you're avoiding, giving it your full attention. Once the five minutes are up, you can decide whether to continue working or to take a break. In my experience, the five-minute rule is weirdly effective. Usually, imagining yourself doing the thing that you're procrastinating from for only five minutes isn't as horrible as really committing to it, especially when, in our heads, that commitment feels like doing that thing for the rest of my life.

Around 80% of the time, after those five minutes are up, I just keep going. Once I've started filling in the paperwork, nodding my head to a string quartet cover of Concerning Hobbits from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, I find that I'm starting to enjoy myself, or at least realizing it's not as bad as I'd built it up to be.

It's crucial, however, that you don't force yourself to carry on working. Otherwise, the five-minute rule would become a misnomer. So the remaining 20% of the time, I genuinely do allow myself to stop after five minutes. Yes, it might mean I put off completing my tax return until another day, but hey, at least I've made five minutes of progress on it.

And the fact that I do allow myself to stop means that I'm not outright lying to myself. If I told myself I was only going to do something for five minutes and then felt obliged to continue, the five-minute rule would lose its magic. I hope you enjoyed that little snippet of my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity. I had so much fun recording the audiobook in a studio in London. It was a lot of hard work, but quite a lot of fun. And so if you fancy listening to the entire book, it is available to purchase wherever audiobooks are sold. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode of Deep Dive.