First, Light a Fire

The best advice my father ever gave me was to start a fire.

My family owns a cabin out in the middle of nowhere. For nine months a year, it sits empty, and during the summer, various branches of the family take turns vacationing there. It’s beautiful, but the first family in has the responsibility of “opening” the cabin for the season — cleaning, yardwork, de-winterizing, etc. It’s a lot of work, and when you first arrive after two full days of driving, it can be pretty overwhelming.

My father would often volunteer to open the cabin. When we arrived, he made a point to always start by lighting a fire. Not because you need one right away, but because it’s a quick, simple task, and when it’s done you immediately feel like you’ve accomplished something.

When I’m doing production work on a website, there’s usually a daunting list of tasks in front of me. I need to create the page templates, populate all the content, slice up all the images, and QA every page of the site in several browsers. Whenever I start to feel overwhelmed by it all, I remember my father lighting a fire, and pick a simple task to knock out of the way quickly and build momentum.

Once you get in the zone, you can plow through a giant list of tasks pretty easily. At the start of a project, your biggest challenge is motivation, so do yourself a favor and start your job by lighting a fire.