To Begin Any Project, First Clean Your Space
There is a system to success — yes, some form of “magic formula” that assists you in achieving whatever ambition that you set your mind to. However, it is not magic, but method, and system.
It is a description of the order of operations that you undertake a project with, that helps you to place your attention on the things that need to be addressed from the beginning, so that you use your time and energy efficiently and effectively. In essence, applying force at the right points so that the ambition has no choice but to unfold in the direction that you desire.
One of these principles is To Begin Any Project, First Clean Your Space.
Clean Space, Clear Mind, Clear Intent
For me personally, usually before I ever take any steps to actually begin a project, I dwell on the idea extensively. I think about it night and day, turning it over in my mind, going over the idea until a plan gradually materializes, and the thing begins to emerge on its own.
I did this for literally months for my Camper Build that I am currently engaged in. I had the design in my head — in numerous renditions — long before I ever picked up a drill and saw, let alone my pencil.
The idea comes before the actual intent, and long before the work actually commences. However, when it is time to begin the project, you first have to clean your space. At least this is true for me personally. The act of cleaning my space acts as the catalyst that initiates the project. At a certain point, my mind and body begin to scream “go”, at which point I clean and organize to begin.
(Now, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea: I am, objectively speaking, VERY far from an organized person. I think I am fairly organized in a number of ways. However, my physical environment is not one of them. I have a massive tolerance for physical disorder, because I grew up in messy, quasi-hoarder, space. Plus my psychology makes me exceptional and ignoring the material world completely. Therefore, if this principle is important to me, I assume that it is even more important for most other people.)
Optimize The Space
Your space has to reflect perfectly the action that you intend to take. Yes, it is more efficient, because you have your tools laid out. It is like cooking in a kitchen versus a makeshift table while camping. A kitchen is efficient. You can wake up in the morning and make coffee because your coffee machine is right there, or tea, because you kettle is plugged in by the sink. All you have to do is fill it with water, add your coffee/tea, grab your cup, and wait.
Most humans have some form of this exact habit, which we all do when we are dead tired, without thinking, before our neurons have begun to fire properly. This is the exact scenario that we want to replicate in all of our major habits and projects (and probably our minor ones too).
Psychologically it reduces friction towards an action, shifting the inertia of our base state towards that motion, rather than rest. Most people think that the pull off coffee in the morning is enough to make you go to any lengths to get coffee. However, for those who have cooked on a camp stove long enough, they will tell you otherwise. Early in the morning or late at night, the task of setting everything up just to boil water is monumental — the tendency is not to go through the trouble at all.
People live their lives in exactly this fashion.
If the barrier to a task requires any amount of work that is trivially above non-zero (when we are stressed, tired, busy, preoccupied) that trivial, non-zero work might as well be running 10k in a -20°C winter morning. It is minorly monumental.
Eliminate decision fatigue (in order to save it for the actual work itself), remove the barriers to an act to make action almost inevitable, and free up the space in your mind and life to allow the ambition to grow.
It is that simple.
