The best advice I ever gave myself was “floss one tooth.” I was trying to develop a habit of flossing EVERY SINGLE DAY to avoid gum disease. My brain had a different excuse literally every day for most of a year why I shouldn’t have to floss. Each day, I told myself, “OK, that may be true, but we’re going to floss one tooth. After that, we can stop if we want to.”
Each day, my brain would grudgingly agree to these terms, and I would get out the floss, floss the first tooth…and then floss all the rest. The hardest part for me was getting started. I think there was only one time I didn’t finish, and instead just flossed the top half of my teeth — so even on that one single day, I got to 50%, which is a lot better than 0%.
This usually works for me for other things, too. Some days, I make myself a deal to open the file of the story I’m working on and look at it. That’s all I have to do to count it as “done.” Sometimes I write a thousand words after that, sometimes only fifty, or get a couple of paragraphs revised, but it’s always something more than the ridiculously low goal I’ve set for myself.
River Kanning, Writer 