In what’s now become a September tradition, here’s my past post sharing Patrick O’Connor’s sane, easy-to-follow system to help seniors do the most important college application-related task—just make progress. No wasted time meticulously over-scheduling your every to-do (which rarely works), or worse, procrastinating until the last minute. Just make progress, a little bit at a time. And that state of progress eventually leads to a state of completion.
Don’t let the simplicity fool you—it’s actually a wonderful hack that can be applied to any worthwhile project, whether you’re a teen applying to college or an adult forging ahead in work and life.
Teresa Amabile, Director of Research at Harvard Business School, and developmental psychologist Steven Kramer are the authors of The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. As the title suggests, their research found that the single biggest factor for keeping someone excited and engaged with their work is simply making regular progress, even if it’s just a small win. And best of all, they also found that when you experience that feeling, you also become more creatively productive. The more progress you make, the better those applications are likely to get.
A waiting virtual pile of yet-to-be-started college applications is foreboding. And foreboding is a feeling you want to run away from, not toward. But that feeling of making just a little progress, of just completing that first section of an application, or hammering out that first, albeit imperfect, draft of an essay, or even just making a concrete list of to-dos so at least you know where to start, is a feeling you want to come back to the next day. Once you get a taste of the progress, you’ll chase it repeatedly. And you’ll get even better as you go.
If you’ve slowed, stalled, or not yet started your college applications, don’t focus on the totality of the project in front of you. Instead, find a way to just make progress. When you finish for the day, celebrate that win. Repeat that exercise, feed off your momentum, and you’ll eventually be celebrating your big win of submitting that final app.