Minimum Units of Progress

Ribbit over the rainbow

Image created with ChatGPT

It’s taken almost three decades, but I think I’ve finally figured out the key to overcoming procrastination. It’s not a very complicated solution, and certainly not an original one, but for me at least, it seems to be the only one that reliably works. I ask myself: What is the absolute Minimum Unit of Progress—or MUP—I can possibly make on this task? A.k.a. I “mup” it.

[Note: In this post, I use the capitalized MUP in place of the noun phrase “Minimum Unit of Progress” and the lowercase mup as a verb meaning “to identify/implement a MUP.”]

There are many many versions of this strategy floating around,¹ but I like the MUP framing best both because it’s highly generalizable and because each of its constituent parts conveys valuable information:

• Minimum implies a task that can be completed in less than half an hour—and often as little as five minutes.

• Unit implies that the task can stand alone, with binary criteria for completion (i.e., either it’s done or it’s not).

• Progress implies unequivocal movement toward a goal. This is admittedly the squishiest criterion of the three, but I think it suggests that the task should be active and/or entail a concrete output. (“Create a five-bullet list of possible presentation topics” is a solid MUP, “Spend five minutes thinking about presentation topics” less so.²)

As simple as this might sound, I assure you that mupping your work is a skill which can be cultivated. After all, even very simple tasks like sending a letter or making social plans often entail a deceptive amount of substeps when you really drill into them; the more you mup, the better you get at identifying all the tiny links in the sequence.

In fact, in my experience, it is ironically the not-quite-conscious awareness of these substeps—the haziness of the actions we need to take and the effort they’ll involve—which leads to feelings of avoidance in the first place. Our elephants aren’t stupid, and procrastination is often just an ill-conceived “solution” to the very real problem that we don’t quite know how to proceed or haven’t properly accounted for every last detail. MUPs are a way of gently shooting down this internal resistance.

Some examples; a MUP is a MUP is a MUP.

The “progress” in the examples above might seem comically incremental—and indeed it is—but in a way, that’s exactly why they work. The whole point is to lower the stakes of action to almost nothing, to the point where you say to yourself “I could wait until tomorrow to do this, but the step I’ve identified is so trivial that it’s actually easier to just do it now than have to continue thinking about it.” Furthermore, when you do successfully mup a task you’ve been avoiding, a few positive outcomes occur.

First, and most straightforwardly, you will have made real movement toward your goal. While drafting a text may sound like a small victory, it’s nevertheless one less thing you have to do tomorrow—one which does in fact reduce your overall cognitive load and total time to completion. Plus, MUPs usually don’t feel as small in retrospect as you might imagine; this is because people tend to remember that an event occurred much more than they remember how long that event lasted.³ No MUP is too small to be worth doing.

Second, you’ll often find that once you complete a MUP or two, you’ll actually have more motivation than you expected to continue. Of course you have the ability to wash one single dish right now—but if you wash one dish, are you really going to leave the rest of the stack sitting there?⁴ Now, it’s true that simply getting started doesn’t always spur the will to continue; but in my experience, this usually happens eventually. String together three or four MUPs over a few consecutive days, and suddenly something clicks, and you kick into a higher gear with less avoidance.

Third—an especially important consideration for creative work—each MUP you implement effectively has the effect of loading the entire project into your mind anew each time. Revisiting the same problem repeatedly is a way of teaching your brain “pay attention to this, it’s important!”; each exposure embeds it more deeply in your memory, and encourages your unconscious mind to continue chewing on it. When I taught high school English, for example, I would always offer my students a version of the sample MUP above. (“Even if you’re not going to start writing your essay until a day or two before it’s due, at least read over the assignment a few times and jot down some notes.”) The purpose of this wasn’t to trick students into starting earlier; it was an attempt to prime them so that ideas would be more likely to organically arise, and they’d require less activation energy whenever they finally did sit down to write.⁵

Procrastination is often linked to the false impression/wishful thinking that we have “plenty of time”—and MUPs are indeed a way of combating the planning fallacy. However, I’m frequently just as guilty of the opposite kind of delusion: Craving long blocks of focus, I tell myself I don’t have enough time to really immerse in the project at hand, so there’s no point in doing anything at all. Here, MUPs are invaluable because of course if you restrict yourself to only working under the inspiration of long blocks of focus, you often won’t be getting much work done at all.⁶

Ultimately, making progress—especially on big, ambitious projects—requires us to hold two truths at once. On the one hand, we must fixate on a romanticized ideal: the imagined end goal which does not yet exist and may well change along the way. On the other hand, we must navigate, with plodding diligence, the obstacles that lie in our path now. Toggling between these two perspectives requires immense reserves of cognitive (psychospiritual?) flexibility—an amphibious mastery of two elements at once.

After all, sometimes the voice which gets us to the other side is neither sage nor drill sergeant, but just the gentle, nasal croon of quiet reassurance.

1. In a writing context, one of my favorites is Anne Lamott’s exhortations to work “bird by bird” and only tackle as much as you can see through a one-inch picture frame.

2. Note that because it is both easily completed and measurable, “Spend five minutes thinking about presentation topics” does in fact meet the Minimum Unit criteria; but unlike a list of bullets, the evidence of Progress here is much more dubious.

3. This is a bit of a technical point, but one worth expanding on a bit. You can observe evidence of your own duration neglect in the way that vastly different periods of time seem to take up about the same “weight” in your mind, so long as each period is its own “event.” (Consider life chapters of different lengths spent in different cities, or your mental weighting of the week vs. the weekend.) Duration neglect occurs because our minds wrap up and package experience, at all time scales, based on perceived boundaries. The good news for MUPs here is that even just five minutes of progress feels shockingly similar, in memory, to five hours. (They do of course feel different—but nowhere close to 10x different.)

4. I don’t believe in using MUPs as a way to trick yourself into doing the stuff that you don’t want to do. I think this can backfire because a part of you is expecting a bait-and-switch, and then MUPs themselves become a source of avoidance. Rather, a MUP should be treated as a success in its own right, and you should simply be open to the possibility that once you start working, that you might continue.

5. I doubt many of my students actually took this advice, given their age. I think “read over the assignment a few times in the weeks leading up to the due date” is a particularly difficult lesson to internalize because in the actual moment of writing, you have no access to the counterfactual world where you didn’t prep in this way. It’s only through repeated comparison of times when you did or didn’t use these kinds of “pre-writing” strategies that you come to recognize the value of priming/repeat exposure in creativity.

6. Another way of putting this is that it’s most effective to mup your way forward between long blocks of focus, so that when you do have the luxury of immersion you can make better use of it.