So, maybe you have an aspiration to do something – maybe you want to write a book, maybe you want to start a side hustle.

You’ve probably gone looking for advice on how to get things done, because, as it turns out, getting things done is hard. Unbelievably hard. Ridiculously hard. You might work to carve out an hour in your hectic day, and then boom – your kid throws up, and that’s that.

If you go looking for advice, you’ll find one of three models for getting things done.

Model 1: Naïve Optimism

You go looking for advice, and you see cheerful self-help advice from…single (or divorced) childless people who are blessed with good health and a seemingly uncomplicated life. 

“If you really care about your dreams,” they’ll tell you, “you’ll find time to work on them. Why only yesterday I woke up feeling really unmotivated, but I still found time to knock out a 36-hour day working on my dreams, You can, too!” This is unhelpful. There are many days (or many weeks) where, no matter how much you care about your ambitions, you can’t find hours of time to work on them. You might be able to encroach on your sleep, but that’s not a good long-term plan, especially since you’re waking up with the baby. Maybe you could find time in the evening, but you’re falling asleep because you’re working two jobs. This kind of advice works if you’re an unmotivated college student with vast swathes of wasted time, but for most people, “If you cared enough, you would find time” is unhelpful at best, and supremely frustrating at worst.

Model 2: Whale eating

As the joke goes, how do you eat a whale? One bite at a time. Whale eating looks like this: Make progress towards your goals on the side, 5 minutes, 10 minutes at a time.

It’s true that you can find 5 minutes in your day no matter what’s going on, but there’s a fatal flaw with this approach: For most people, if you sit down and work for 5 minutes, you’ll get nothing good done. If you string a week of 10 minute work days together, it adds up to something less than a focused hour of work. Trying to eat the whale leads to bad, incomplete work: we need focused blocks of time to work deeply, so the idea that we can write Crime and Punishment on 5 minutes a day is ridiculous. 

There’s a seed of truth in this approach, but it’s incomplete. We’ll come back to whale eating.

Model 3: Sprinting

This model is all about waiting. Life is busy, but at some point you will have a few hours you can work. At some point, you’ll have a free weekend. At some point, the stars will align, and you’ll be able to get a huge amount of work done.

You wait at the starting line patiently, the thinking goes, and at some point you’ll be able to take off and run like an unburdened gazelle.

I’ve been in thrall to this kind of thinking before. It doesn’t work.

There are two big problems here: First, all this waiting around, making no progress, tends to make you frustrated and resentful. You start to quietly blame your kids, your spouse, your circumstances, whoever or whatever you perceive is standing in the way of your work. Your life quickly becomes a misery while you’re waiting at the starting line.

Second, when you do finally get a big chunk of unbroken time, you’ll often self-sabotage and get little or nothing done. Why?

Because the hardest part of work is beating the self-sabotage, and you’re out of practice.

While you’ve been waiting at the starting line, your muscles have been atrophying and stiffening, so when you take off on your sprint, you usually cramp up and fall flat on your face. You spend all day on YouTube, scanning Facebook, poking around in Google Maps trying to get a better grasp of geography. You take a short break which turns out to be 2 hours long. You wanted to get work done, but somehow the time just gets away from you. It’s self-sabotage. Sprinting is required if you want to get things done in a busy life, but it’s not sufficient.

So, what do we do? Clearly none of the models above work for people with complex lives.

Let’s go back to whale-eating. If you’re focusing on how much you get done every day, then whale-eating is a terrible model. Why? Because you almost certainly won’t get anything substantial done on a day-to-day basis. If you’re measuring yourself on how much of the whale you’ve eaten, you’ll feel defeated every day – working a few minutes every day isn’t so much like eating a whale a bite at a time as it is going back to the same well-chewed fin and trying to bite through it again. You won’t get anywhere, and you’ll get more and more frustrated and overwhelmed: If it takes you this long to make so little progress, then you’ll never get the project done. You’ll feel like a rat on a wheel.

The whale-eating is where we’re going to start, but not because you’ll get anything done.

You’ll get nothing done on a daily basis, and that’s OK.

To show you why, let’s talk about whale in the room: The Fear.

THE FEAR

You’re deathly, deeply afraid of the work you want to do. Why? Because it’s so important to you. It’s precious. You don’t want to sully the beauty of what you’re trying to do with your imperfect hands. Whatever you aspire to do, wether it’s painting, writing a book, designing a game, you’ll do almost anything in your terror to avoid doing it. You’ll rationalize. You’ll self-sabotage. You’ll procrastinate. 

You might be thinking that you’re not afraid, that you’ve got reasonable reasons why you can’t reasonably be expected to work on your dream. You’ve got a job. Kids. Life is crazy.

If this is you, I can prove to you right now that you’re deeply afraid. It’s five minute exercise, and it will make clear to you how afraid you are of the work you’re avoiding.

The five-minute exercise

This only works if you actually do it. Before you read the steps below, commit five minutes of time to this process. It might even take less time.

Here it is:

1. Think of that work that you aspire to do. Bring it to mind. Maybe you’ve been dreaming about being this for years. Maybe decades. Maybe life has always been too busy.

2. Get up, set a timer for five minutes, and work on that work. For five minutes.

Here’s what happened: All the justifications in the world popped up in your head.

You’ll want to check Facebook, you’ll want to get a snack. You discovered all the reasons why you can’t work on it for five minutes: it’s pointless, it won’t do any good, something just came up. You have five minutes, of course you do. But it’s not all the plausible, reasonable obstacles that are really keeping you from your work, it’s not your kids, it’s not your job, it’s not your spouse: It’s the fear. You self-sabotage, and blame it on things around you, because it’s so difficult to admit that you’re afraid.

You are afraid. You’re terrified. That is way you fail.

Now, I’m not slipping into “if you cared enough, you’d work 200+ hours a day”. You already care. You care so much that it terrifies you.

But life happens, and even if you care, you can’t magic up two hours every day. True. I’m going to share with you my solution – it’s hard, but it will work in your life, and no amount of hectic scheduling will stand in the way. You can be a responsible parent, good spouse, and keep up with everything, while still making progress.

My model: Facing the fear.

My model is simple. Do the five-minute exercise every day. 

You won’t make any progress. You won’t get anything done on your project, but that’s not the point. You job isn’t to make progress on your novel/painting/enterprise. You job, first and foremost, is to sit down and face the soul-consuming fear as steadily as you can. That’s the battle that will make or break the war. Be warned: if you sit down and work for five minutes every day, it will be miserable, especially at first. You’ll hate the lousy work you create. You’ll feel like you’re dragging yourself through thick mud. You’ll feel thoroughly defeated. At the end you’ll want to toss the work into the trash can.

That’s OK. You job, on a daily basis, isn’t to make good work, you job is to sit down and face the fear. Don’t see yourself primarily as a writer, a game developer, an entrepreneur: see yourself as someone who regularly faces the fear. You show up, every day, even when you know that you’ll get nothing done, just to thumb your nose at the fear. To show it who’s boss. You’re Saint George, and you face dragons. You’re a bareknuckle boxer who climbs into the ring, day after day, and bets beat to a pulp. You know you’ll be back again tomorrow, no matter how hard the beating is. You’re not there to win: You’re just there to show up, to take your licks as much as you can.

When you start operating this way, when you start facing the fear, a couple things will happen:

• Some days, you’ll actually make progress.

Almost never, but occasionally you’ll find that you actually wrote something good. This can’t be your goal – remember, you’re not a writer, you’re a person who faces the fear – but it will happen. Some days you’ll get to the end of your five minutes, and you’ll be kind of into it. You’ll find you have five more minutes that you can work. You’ll create something halfway decent.

• Some days, you’ll get a burst of energy.

You’ll plug away at the creative rock-pile, hating the work, hating yourself, and you’ll feel utterly miserable and defeated…until you stand up. You’ll look around, and somehow you’ll find that you’re energized. You’ll wash a few dishes without the internal whining. You’ll get a few things done. Things will be OK for a while, somehow.

• You’ll gain a bit of self-respect.

Once you admit how hard it is to face the fear, then you’ll gain some measure of self-respect. When you sit down and face the fear regularly, you’ll be able to honestly respect what you’re doing. Maybe you won’t get anywhere, but that’s beside the point: you’re doing the hard, hard work of facing down your self-sabotage, and that’s admirable. Talented people have blown up in the face of the fear. It’s destroyed lives. When you face it today, you’re slaying a dragon who might come eat you. That’s tough. It’s worth respect. I know how hard it is, when you face the fear, I respect you, and you respect yourself. You’ll be a bit better to your wife, you’ll be a better parent, a better daughter, a better son. You’ll be a better employee, and you’ll be less likely to get caught up in your own egoism and crap, whatever crap you tend to get caught up in.

• You’ll be ready for the sprint.

This is where we bring everything home. When you’re facing the fear for 5-10 minutes a day, you still won’t be getting anything done. You still won’t be making any measurable progress on your dream. You won’t be crossing the starting line. But you will be keeping your fear-fighting muscles in shape. You’ll be stretching and preparing for the sprint. When you do find an unbroken chunk of time to work on your project – say a Saturday morning is unexpectedly free – then you’ll be ready to sit down and do the work. These sprints are where you get the bulk of the work done, but they’re only possible if you are used to sitting down and facing the fear. If you face the fear daily, then you’ll be much more able to face the fear when you’re sitting down to get a big chunk of work done. This is what you need to do if you won’t have consistent time to work: daily face the fear, and sprint when you can. Get out the sword daily, oil it, make sure it’s razor sharp – and go for the kill when you can.

This is how I’ve published 7 books, this is how I’ve created all that I’ve created. I’ve had a complicated life – kids, health difficulties, financial strain – I’ve faced the fear regularly, and I’ve sprinted when I could. It won’t always be perfect, some days you’ll fall off the horse, you’ll get beaten up, but you’ll be back the next day, ready to take a beating.

This is how creative works are made. This is how you can work towards your dreams, even then life is complicated.

Go do it.