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The Law of Diminishing Intent: The What, The

Why, And How To Resist It
Three tools for mastering the art of timely and productive work.

Braden Moore Follow

Jun 26, 2019 · 11 min read

Whether it’s sending that email, calling a family member, or doing your most important

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work, it’s easy to put off the task for another day. “There’s always tomorrow,” you
reassure yourself. Yet with tomorrow comes another excuse. “One more day couldn’t
hurt.”

And so it goes… until one day, the time to take action has passed you by. Your good
intentions become altogether forgotten.

Life is too short for inaction. It’s time to take action. It’s time to fight back.

Jim Rohn taught a principle which he called the Law of Diminishing Intent. It goes like
this: “The longer you wait to take action, the less likely you are to take action.” This law
affects all of us, and it’s stopping you from achieving what you know you should.

The Law of Diminishing Intent. Source: michaelhyatt.com/leap-principle/

Yet knowing about the law is only half the battle. The other half is planning. Fortunately,
there are some weapons to fight against the law of diminishing intent. Here are three
practical tools to help you take action on the things that matter.

The Law of Compounding Effort

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In short: Invest a small amount today.

“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the

world.”

— Albert Einstein
A simple way to get rich is by investing. A small amount of money invested today will
grow to become far greater over many years. The earlier you start investing, the greater
the reward. This is, in large part, due to the law of compound interest.

Yet just as with money, the effort you invest in a task compounds over time — a small
amount of effort today pays dividends in the future. This is what I call the law of
compounding effort. And you can leverage this principle to help overcome the law of
diminishing intent.

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Over time, your investment — whether money or effort — pays off. Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

Below is a practical application of the law of compounding effort. This approach works
best for larger projects which can be broken into smaller pieces, but even the smallest of
tasks can benefit.

1. Choose the task you want to complete.

2. Find the smallest meaningful piece of work you can do to make progress on the task.

3. Do that work today.

With these three steps, you’ve not only started to make progress on a task or project, but
you’ve also made the rest of the work even easier. Here’s why it works.

Your brain works on the problem, even while you aren’t.

Your brain operates on two levels — the conscious and the subconscious. You engage
your conscious mind when you purposefully focus on a single task. Your subconscious
mind, by contrast, works in the background — and it’s responsible for getting most of
your deep work done. Even while you’re not thinking about a problem, your
subconscious mind may still be working through it.

By spending even a small amount of time on to a task, you’ve primed your subconscious
mind to keep looking for solutions. This is why epiphanies come to you in the shower,
and why sleeping on a problem often brings clarity where there previously was none.
Doing a small amount of meaningful work starts the process of compounding. You’ll
come back to the task with more familiarity, a more developed solution, and even less to
complete than you thought you had.

Smaller parts provide a sense of progress.

Research has shown the most important factor for motivation in knowledge workers is
progress. When people feel they are making headway on a set of tasks, they are more
likely to feel motivated to keep putting in the effort. Breaking down a larger task into
actionable pieces can give you that immediate sense of progression.

You’re less likely to quit once you’ve invested.

By spending some time and effort on a task — no matter how small — you become
emotionally invested in it. Failing to follow through with the rest of the task means
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throwing away the effort you’ve already expended. Can you really bear to quit, when
quitting means letting that effort go to waste? This is the sunk cost fallacy, and it’s part of
the reason why the law of compounding effort works.

The law of compounding effort works in part due to the sunk cost fallacy. This is the
strong bias we have against giving up on something we’ve already invested time, money,
effort or emotion into. It’s the reason we stay too long in relationships that just aren’t
working, and why we throw good money after bad.

Once you’ve invested your time in a task, the sunk cost fallacy starts to take hold. The
prospect of giving up on something, even through inaction, is immediately less
appealing once you’ve invested in it.

The Ivy Lee Method

In short: Do your most important work first.

In 1918, Charles M. Schwab, president of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation and one of
the richest men in the world, sought to improve his company’s efficiency and
productivity. To do this, he enlisted the help of productivity consultant Ivy Lee.

When Lee — a successful businessman in his own right — was asked by Schwab to show
how to get more done, he replied, “give me 15 minutes with each of your executives”.

In this 15 minutes, what Ivy Lee taught made so much of an impact on productivity that
he was reportedly paid $25,000 (equivalent to $430,000 today) for his insights.

What he taught has come to be known as the Ivy Lee Method — a simple daily routine
for getting more of the right things done:

1. At the end of each day, write down the six most important tasks you need to
complete tomorrow.

2. Prioritise these tasks in order of their importance.

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3. The next day, concentrate only on the first task. Don’t move on to the next task until
the work is finished.

4. Once the first task is complete, more on to the second most important task. Continue
your way down the list.

5. If there are still unfinished tasks by the end of the day, move those tasks to the next
day’s list.

6. Repeat the process.

It’s that simple. The Ivy Lee Method a powerful tool you can use to overcome the law of
diminishing intent — and here’s why it works.

You’re forced to assess your priorities.

Not all tasks are equally worthy of our time, yet we often don’t make time to decide
which are most important. Using the Ivy Lee Method force you to think purposefully on
the importance of your tasks, and make a decision on which to act on first.

During his time as President, Dwight D. Eisenhower had to make many tough decisions.
Among these was the choice of what to focus on, and what to ignore, each day. To help
his decision, Eisenhower invented a technique of prioritising tasks by importance and
urgency — called the Eisenhower Matrix.

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The Eisenhower Matrix — a tool for prioritisation. Source: developgoodhabits.com/eisenhower-matrix/

The Eisenhower Matrix is a box divided into four quadrants — important and urgent,
important and not urgent, not important yet urgent, and both not important and not
urgent. All of your tasks can be placed into one of these quadrants, and it’s a useful way
to think about prioritisation.

Without conscious prioritising, we often spend our time on tasks which are both
important and urgent. These are the fires to put out, the screaming child to attend to. Yet
far more of our time should be spent on tasks which are important, but not urgent.
These tasks, such as reading, meditating, or starting work on a project, have a long term
benefit — yet are often lost in the sea of urgency.

Whether you use an Eisenhower Matrix on any other method for prioritisation, the
simple act of choosing what matters makes a difference.

It overcomes the barrier for getting started.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, wrote Laozi. Yet the law of
diminishing intent often holds you back from taking this first step. Following the Ivy Lee
Method helps you overcome the barrier for getting started.

Prioritising your tasks gives you confidence that what you are doing is a worthwhile use
of your time. Focusing on one task at a time overcomes the tendency to multi-task. You
know exactly what you need to do, and you’ve given yourself permission to do it.

Removing the necessity of choice helps reduce ego depletion.

Your willpower is a limited resource, and it is easily expended. In 1998, social
psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues demonstrated that willpower, or self-
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control, was not fixed — but was instead like a muscle, which became fatigued with
each use. The act of making choices or exerting self-control makes each further choice
more difficult. This is called ego depletion.

By planning tomorrow’s tasks the night before, you relieve yourself of the burden of
choice. Instead of starting your day by choosing what to do, you look at your list and get
to work. Your willpower muscle stays strong, and you have more self-control left over to
spend throughout the day. With a full reserve of willpower, it’s easier to resist the urge to
put off those important tasks, and more likely you’ll not give in to the law of diminishing
intent.

Practical Accountability
In short: Enlist a friend, a coach, or a financial disincentive.

In his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith
writes about his experiences working with highly-successful managers to help them
change their behaviours. One of the key themes throughout is the use of accountability
— acknowledging and being held responsible for one’s own actions.

Our habitual behaviours often cause us to succumb to the law of diminishing intent.
Staying accountable is a powerful way to inspire yourself to action and to begin
changing unproductive patterns of behaviour. It means not giving yourself an easy way
out.

It’s one thing to believe in the concept of accountability, and another to live it. Here are a
few ways to utilise practical accountability in your own pursuit of action.

Ask a friend to check in with you.

If you want to make sure something gets done, tell a friend you’re going to do it. Then,
ask that they follow up with you at a predetermined time or date. When you know
someone’s going to call you up on your progress, you’re more likely to be on your best
behaviour.

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It’s best to work with a close friend or family member. These are people who care about
your success and wellbeing, and will sacrifice some amount of their own time to make
sure you’re on the right track.

Work with a coach.

When building your accountability, it can be beneficial to work with someone detached
from the situation. A friend or family member may be inclined to go easy on you from
time to time — but not a coach. One of the roles of a coach is to help hold you
accountable for your actions (or inactions) — a key weapon against the law of
diminishing intent.

Once you’ve found a coach you’d like to work with, schedule a recurring meeting where
you can discuss what’s most important for you to do next — and whether you’ve
achieved what you set out to do in your last conversation. Frequent check-ins provide the
motivation to take action. In addition, a coach can provide practical insights and
guidance in other areas of your life.

A friend or coach can keep you accountable and away from inaction. Photo by Nik MacMillan on Unsplash

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Set up a financial disincentive.

The chance to earn money is a strong driver for action. The possibility of losing money is
even stronger. This is another method of practical accountability — the use of a financial
disincentive.

Assign yourself a task and a deadline. This could be, for example, calling your parents by
Sunday night. Then, assign a cost you’ll have to pay if you fail to act. You might promise
yourself to pay a nominal amount to your friend, partner, coach, or (for even more
incentive to get the work done) donate to a cause or political party you are opposed to.

The use of a financial disincentive can be combined with the previous methods of
working with a friend, colleague or coach, but can also be self-managed. If you’re
committed to accountability, and keen to change your behaviour, imposing
consequences on your actions is a strong driver for that change.

These are just a few methods for using practical accountability against the law of
diminishing intent. Here’s why they work.

You’re forced to confront and learn from your past failures

“We do not learn from experience. We learn from

reflecting on experience.”

— John Dewey
Researchers have found that we have a tendency to ignore our past failures. Instead, we
often focus only on our successes. There’s a valid reason for this — being continually
confronted by our failures would leave us sapped of self-confidence and motivation,
unlikely to make much progress with the rest of our lives. Yet this also means that,
without vigilance, we are doomed to repeat the same negative patterns of behaviour.
This is where practical accountability can help.

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By being held accountable, you acknowledge and take responsibility for your actions (or
inaction). By acknowledging your past mistakes you are less likely to repeat them. You
do not learn from experience — you learn from reflecting on experience. Being held
accountable means being given the opportunity to reflect and learn from your past.

We crave approval and recognition

…and we don’t like other people thinking that we’re flawed. When you know someone
will be checking in with your progress, it’s a lot easier to find the motivation to act.
You’ve got something to prove.

We have a strong aversion to loss

One of our many biases is known as loss aversion. Put simply, loss aversion refers to our
“tendency to prefer avoiding losses rather than acquiring equivalent gain”. Research has
shown that we are affected by the loss of some amount of money twice as much as by
the gain of an equivalent amount (though loss aversion isn’t only true for financial
matters). It is partly due to this bias that a financial disincentive works.

We can leverage the prospect of loss to motivate ourselves into action. While we may
gain some small solace from ignoring a task, this gain is frequently outweighed by the
loss that comes with it. By pairing a negative behaviour with a monetary loss, our strong
aversion to loss becomes a powerful motivator.

Life is full of incredible opportunities. To make the most of these opportunities, we need
to act upon them. Yet often we wait, ever longer and longer, eventually settling for
inaction. And this inaction doesn’t just affect mundane tasks. More important than the
email you never sent, is the business you never started, the parent you never called, and
the adventure you never took. This is the danger of the law of diminishing intent. You
need to fight back.

Don’t delay. Take action today — even if it’s only to ask a friend to help you out. It
doesn’t take much to get started. And getting started is all you need.

This is your call to action.

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