Plan to do 1%. No more. Maybe less.

Exhaustive planning usually precedes productive work, as any rational agent would have you believe. Maybe you plan to finish a draft, so finish the draft you must. Maybe you timeblock an hour, so an hour’s worth of work it must be.

But why assign yourself the burden of completion when you haven’t even started? Instead, I offer you a mindset shift: Just focus on doing the first 1%. Or 1% of that 1%.

Just do one homework problem. Write one paragraph. Run one lap. If that’s too much, even doing the prep work counts. Close that Reddit tab. Clean your desk. Point your feet towards the door if you need to leave your room. Doing that 1% usually won’t be met with too much resistance (if it is, you can probably break it down further), but finishing 1% gives you the momentum, energy, and focus to do some more. Resistance drops, interest rises, and the task inches toward completion faster than you’d expect. Just make sure you know that you can stop at any time, and that you are under no obligation to do more. The magic is, you likely won’t stop at just 1%.

It’s not unrealistic to think this way. Heck, it’s the only way you can get things done: You don’t just “write an essay.” You draft and revise single sentences, individual words. You don’t plan on doomscrolling for an hour. You just watch “one more video,” over and over again. You don’t just suddenly find yourself at the top of a tree. You have to climb the branches one by one. (Thanks William). Not that I know how to climb trees.

Some of my best work has come from unintentionally applying the 1% plan. All of my 150+ GitHub stars came from wanting to scratch a small itch on a public repository. A video with five million views (and a profit in ad revenue of $1,200+) came from an idle thought and an hour of unscheduled editing. Most of my UI designs came not from carefully planned time blocks, but from many mornings when I spent five minutes drafting up what I thought of the night before, only to look up and realize that two hours had passed and I had missed breakfast. It’s very easy to do just 1% without planning and see where it takes you.

Is this more effective than planning manually?

Believe me, I’ve tried timeblocking, even tracking and planning every minute of my day back in freshman year of college. Nothing really worked, because I would eventually get too overwhelmed by my plans to effectively follow them. The 1% Plan came to me one night, very recently, when I was trying to find the motivation to wash plates after dinner. Instead of just procrastinating, I thought, wait, I could just wash one plate and see what happens. To my surprise, or maybe lack thereof, washing one plate wasn’t so terrible, and the rest is history. Why it took me 21 years of existence to figure this out is beyond me.

These good people on the internet have similar advice:

Vincent Huang, an MIT grad whose blog I’ve followed for a long time, frames this technique as “finding a low-energy entrypoint.”

for instance, i will go to the basement and touch my ddr [Dance Dance Revolution] tiles without building anything or i will read through my draft without making edits. usually by the time i’m done touching my tiles or reading my draft i’ve reconnected with the love enough to want to work

Risa Williams, author of the Procrastination Playbook, calls this strategy doing the “ridiculously easy first step.”

The trick? Make the first step SO RIDICULOUSLY easy it’s hard NOT to do it. I mean super easy. For example: Instead of typing a page, type the title and then close the document. Or if that’s too hard, just open up the blank document and then shut it.

Tim Urban has thought a lot about procrastination and his eternal struggle against it, writing thousands of words on his blog and giving a TED talk viewed millions of times over on YouTube. Here’s an excerpt from one of his posts, emphasis mine.

Writing 300 blog posts while I was supposed to be dreaming up brilliant business growth strategies wasn’t “easy” in the sense that I didn’t have to work hard to write them—it was easy in that there was nothing at stake. Stakes are really what’s hard for a human.

The 1% plan just removes the stakes.

You keep the rewards.

Clarifications and more details, since you seem invested

But how will you prioritize what needs to be done? How do you get your P1, Q1 tasks done without deliberately planning for them? I’m still figuring that out. Maybe schedule a few “seeds” during the day, 15-minute intervals that you hope will grow into something more? I’ll update this post when I get more data points.

Also, there are times when the 1% plan won’t work. If you’re way too tired. If you’re mentally or physically exhausted. If you’ve just been traumatized by accidentally stepping on a chipmunk and watching it writhe on the ground for a handful of minutes before dying a lonely death. But in normal situations, the 1% plan certainly does help get the ball rolling downhill!

As a bit of meta commentary, the very existence of this post is a direct consequence of using the 1% plan, over and over again. This was just a small idea, and I wasn’t expecting to write any more than a few sentences, or a shadow of an outline, really. I didn’t foresee myself churning out anything of respectable quality. And yet, if you’re reading this, this post has been drafted, re-drafted, revised, and, finally, posted.

8/30/26 Update: What is motivation but just knowing concretely what the next steps are and getting really excited about doing the steps?

Further Reading

https://liminalcounseling.medium.com/adhd-life-hack-the-smallest-possible-step-1c221a5c1569 (This Medium post frames the solution for someone with ADHD, but what’s described also works for someone like me, who doesn’t have ADHD probably.)