How To Get Started: The Trick to Unbegun Things

Last week we discovered microshifts, the mental reframe that can turn something unapproachable (like cleaning out a closet), into something doable. It begins with a small recalibration of a task that suddenly makes it feel approachable. In the case of my closet, the secret to how to get started is to follow the one-shelf rule. Don’t think about a whole closet; focus on one-shelf. This is the trick to how to get started with unbegun things.

This week I take the theory and apply it to something I once found pleasurable but that’s fallen by the wayside. I think we all have these things. They’re the things we tell ourself we don’t have the time or the energy to do anymore. Maybe it’s the morning walk. Maybe it’s the craft, the writing, the cooking we once really enjoyed.

For me, it’s reading. My husband first noticed it. “You don’t read as much as you used to,” he said one evening as I scrolled Netflix.

Honestly, I was kind of speechless for a second. “I read and write all day,” I said.

“Yeah, but you don’t just read, like you used to,” he said. And I had to admit he was correct. I was the one who always had three or four different novels going. While I still read constantly, it’s more blogs, AI-related, essays, things that relate to Lifeticity.

On a recent vacation, one of my sons recommended a book he’d brought on the colonization of the Belgian Congo, and handed it to me. All 416 pages of it. I devoured it in two days, as I sat on the shore.

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It’s not that I stopped wanting to read. It’s that reading, for pleasure, had become something I needed to get back to. And sometimes, when we’re busy, getting back to things is its own kind of project. Even something I truly enjoy was in need of a recalibration.

I still had the tower of unread books by my chair. They were double-stacked on my office bookshelves. Then there were those on my nightstand. I never stopped wanting to read. Still, I had mostly stopped reading. The few times I’d glanced at the stacks of books I felt overwhelmed. Not sure where to start. There were all the books I’d started and didn’t love. Then there were those that’d been recommended and I knew weren’t my thing. None of these felt like the right starting point.

What I had lost wasn’t the desire. It was the habit. And somewhere along the way, getting back to it had started to feel like its own kind of project. Something that required the right book, the right mood, a stretch of uninterrupted time, a version of me that wasn’t already tired.

Sound familiar?

The project that reading had become

Last week’s linen closet rehab turned out to be nowhere near as overwhelming as I’d thought it would be. The project in my imagination was enormous. The actual project was a couple of hours.

Reading had become the same kind of thing. In my head, getting back to it was a project: figure out what to read next, find an uninterrupted hour, get in the right frame of mind, commit to actually finishing something for once. That version of reading, the imagined, fully-assembled version, required conditions I never quite had.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand about unbegun things: the version we carry in our heads is always more demanding than the thing itself. We experience it whole and complete before we’ve touched it, which means we feel the full weight of it before we know what it actually weighs.

Reading, in my imagination, required an hour. Reading, in reality, only requires ten minutes.

The ten-minute microshift

I gave myself ten minutes. Not as a strategy, not as a habit-building technique, just as a way to make peace with the stack of books on the nightstand. Ten minutes was so small I couldn’t argue with it. Ten minutes wasn’t a commitment. It was barely an inconvenience.

Of course, I didn’t stop at ten minutes. I’ve never been able to stop at ten minutes. That’s not really the point.

The point is that ten minutes was a believable entry point, small enough that my brain didn’t resist it, specific enough that I could actually begin. And once I was inside the book, the book did the rest. Reading doesn’t need momentum to sustain itself. It just needs you to start.

This is the microshift: not committing to an hour of reading. Not building a reading routine. Not figuring out the optimal time of day or the perfect chair or the right ambient lighting. Just picking up the book and reading until you don’t want to anymore, with ten minutes as the minimum floor and no ceiling at all.

The imagined version of getting back to reading required the right conditions. The real version just required opening the book.

The second microshift: permission to quit

There’s a second reason people stop reading, and it’s more specific than drift: they’re stuck in a book that isn’t working, and they feel obligated to finish it.

This is its own kind of unbegun thing. You can’t start the next book because you haven’t finished this one. You can’t finish this one because you don’t want to read it. So the whole practice stalls, not because you stopped wanting to read, but because one book is blocking the door.

The microshift here is giving yourself permission to close a book that isn’t doing it for you. Not abandoning it (you can always come back). Just setting it down without guilt and picking up something else. Something you actually want to read right now, not something you feel you should finish.

There are more good books than you will ever read in your lifetime. Spending three weeks grinding through one that isn’t landing is three weeks you could have spent with one that pulls you back every night without any effort at all.

The obligation to finish a book you’re not enjoying is an imagined obligation. No one assigned it. You don’t owe the book anything. Close it. Of course, this also applies to other pleasures, as well. The recipe, the project . . .

What this has to do with everything else

I keep coming back to the same pattern, and I don’t think it’s only about reading.

The things we want to get back to, the practices we’ve let slip, the pleasures we’ve quietly abandoned, the habits that used to be ours, almost always feel larger from the outside than they are on the inside. We look at them from a distance and see everything required to do them right. The commitment. The continuity. The version of ourselves we’d need to be.

But getting back to something doesn’t require doing it right. It requires doing it at all. Ten minutes. One shelf. One paragraph. The smallest true unit of the thing you want to reclaim.

The same logic that got me back to reading has gotten me back to other things I’d been meaning to return to. Not because I finally had more time, or better conditions, or more motivation. Because I stopped requiring so much before I was willing to begin.

The stack on the nightstand

I still have a stack of books on my nightstand. It’s smaller than it was.

I’ve closed two books mid-way through this week because they weren’t working. I don’t feel guilty about either of them. One I might return to in the fall when I’m in a different mood. The other I probably won’t, and that’s fine too.

What I’ve reclaimed is the practice itself, the particular pleasure of being inside a book, of following a mind other than my own for a while, of having something to look forward to at the end of a day. That’s what I’d lost. That’s what ten minutes gave back.

If you have a stack of your own (books, projects, practices, or pleasures you’ve been meaning to return to), the question isn’t when you’ll finally have time for them. It’s what the ten-minute version of them looks like.

Start there. You probably won’t stop at ten minutes.