Three Months to Everything You Want
The uncomfortably simple productivity hack nobody wants to hear
I've wasted thousands of hours preparing to work.
Two-hour morning routines.
Supplement stacks that looked like a pharmacy exploded.
Meditation apps.
Productivity podcasts playing while I made the perfect breakfast.
All this bullshit theater designed to get me "in the mood" to do the thing I was supposed to be doing anyway.
And then I'd look up and realize I'd burned half my day getting ready to be productive.
Alex Hormozi said something in an interview recently that made me want to punch a wall.
Not because he was wrong.
But because he was so obviously right and I'd been avoiding it for years.
His productivity hack?
Stop trying to get in the mood to work. Just start working.
That's it.
That's the whole thing.
No elaborate ritual.
No perfect conditions.
Just open the laptop and begin.
Because starting is the perfect condition.
The Ritual Trap
We've convinced ourselves that preparation equals progress.
That if we just get the environment right.
The mindset right.
The energy levels right.
Then the work will flow effortlessly.
Research backs up what Hormozi is saying, though.
Studies on morning routines show that consistency matters more than complexity.
A University of Wyoming study found that disrupting someone's morning routine tanks their productivity for the entire day.
But the routine itself doesn't have to be elaborate.
It can be as simple as coffee and opening your laptop at the same time every day.
The problem is we've romanticized the preparation.
We've turned getting ready to work into its own form of work.
I used to think successful people had these elaborate systems that unlocked their potential.
Turns out most of them just show up and start.
The five minutes before you begin?
That's where all the resistance lives.
That's where your brain invents reasons why now isn't the perfect time.
You need more coffee.
You should check email first.
Maybe do a quick workout to get the blood flowing.
Perhaps scan Twitter to see what's happening in the world.
All lies your brain tells you to avoid the discomfort of starting.
Hormozi talks about how he used to waste hours on this mental masturbation.
He'd have these big tasks looming and he'd choreograph this whole production around finally sitting down to do them.
Eventually he realized that the moment he actually started working was when his output per unit of time went up.
Not after the meditation.
Not after the routine.
The second he opened the document and started typing.
Your Brain's Secret Weapon
But there's something deeper happening when you just start.
Something your brain does automatically that you can leverage.
You know how Netflix always ends episodes on cliffhangers?
How you physically cannot stop watching because you need to know what happens next?
That's called the Zeigarnik effect.
And it's one of the most powerful psychological forces you can harness for productivity.
Here's how it works.
Back in the 1920s, a psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik noticed something weird about restaurant servers.
They could remember incredibly complex orders perfectly while the table was still active.
What did table seven want again?
Oh, the guy wanted the salmon with no sauce, extra vegetables instead of rice, and the woman wanted the steak medium rare with a side salad, dressing on the side.
Flawless recall.
But the second they closed out that table?
Complete memory wipe.
They couldn't tell you what those people ordered if you paid them.
The brain abhors an open loop.
Unfinished tasks create what Zeigarnik called "psychic tension."
Your mind literally cannot let go of incomplete work.
It keeps churning on it in the background, keeping all the relevant information active and accessible.
The moment you finish?
The tension releases and your brain dumps all those details to make room for the next thing.
Studies on this effect found that people remember interrupted tasks up to 90% better than completed ones.
Your brain is essentially holding onto that unfinished business, waiting for you to come back and close the loop.
Hormozi figured out how to weaponize this without knowing the science behind it.
When he has a big task, something that requires real mental effort, he doesn't try to complete it in one perfect session.
He starts it, gets five minutes in, figures out the lay of the land.
And then sometimes…
He stops halfway…
Through…
A…
Sentence…
Yeah, halfway through a sentence.
Because now his brain can't let it go.
The open loop drives him back to the work.
Just like how you kept reading because you were waiting for me to finish that sentence just a moment ago.
The activation energy required to begin the next day drops to almost nothing because he's not starting from zero.
He's continuing something his mind has been processing in the background.
The dark romance novel genre has gotten so aware of the Zeigarnik effect's power that some books now advertise "no cliffhangers guaranteed" as a selling point.
People hate the discomfort of open loops so much they'll pay to avoid them.
But for productivity?
Open loops are gold.
Focus Is Just Three Months
So what does this actually look like in practice?
Most people are way closer to what they want than they think.
The life you're imagining.
The business you want to build.
The body you want to have.
The relationship you want to improve.
It's not five years away.
It's three months away if you can learn to just start.
Three months of actually working instead of preparing to work.
Three months of opening the document and beginning instead of waiting for inspiration.
Three months of leveraging your brain's natural tendency to obsess over unfinished business instead of fighting it.
Think about what you could accomplish in 90 days if you stopped the ritual theater.
If every morning you just sat down and started the most important task immediately.
No warm up.
No easing into it.
Just beginning.
The math is absurd when you actually calculate it.
Say you waste two hours every morning on productivity theater.
That's 10 hours a week.
40 hours a month.
120 hours in three months.
That's three full work weeks you're burning on getting ready to work.
Now imagine you took those 120 hours and put them directly into your most important project.
What would move?
What would finally get done?
The trick is understanding that you don't need to be in the mood.
The mood follows action, not the other way around.
Hormozi talks about how those big mental tasks used to intimidate him.
He'd think about them and his brain would invent all these reasons why he needed to prepare first.
But when he forced himself to just start, to give it five minutes of actual effort, he'd get into it.
The resistance would dissolve.
Your brain is trying to protect you from discomfort.
That's its job.
But it's wildly overprotective.
It treats starting a difficult task like you're about to jump out of a plane.
The actual experience of doing the work is almost never as bad as your brain makes it seem in the moments before you start.
The Halfway Sentence Strategy
Here's what changed everything for me after hearing that Hormozi interview.
I stopped trying to finish things cleanly.
I started stopping mid-thought.
Mid-sentence sometimes.
Right when I knew what came next but hadn't written it yet.
Feels wrong at first.
Your brain screams at you to just finish the paragraph.
To get to a clean stopping point.
But that's exactly what you don't want.
The clean stopping point releases the tension.
It closes the loop.
It gives your brain permission to forget.
When you stop halfway through, you create deliberate discomfort.
That unfinished sentence haunts you.
You'll think about it while making dinner.
You'll wake up knowing exactly how it ends.
And when you sit down the next day, there's no resistance.
You're not starting.
You're continuing.
This works for everything.
Writing.
Coding.
Planning.
Designing.
Strategizing.
Any task that requires sustained mental effort benefits from strategic incompletion.
Want to know a secret?
I started writing this Substack yesterday.
That last sentence was the point where I stopped and went to bed.
The other thing I started doing?
I stopped checking email first thing.
Email is other people's agenda for your day.
Every message is someone else trying to open a loop in your brain.
If you start there, you're spending your peak mental energy on everyone else's priorities.
Instead, I open the document for my most important project before I do anything else.
Before coffee sometimes.
I don't wait to feel ready.
I just start typing.
And you know what?
Within five minutes, I'm in it.
The resistance disappears.
The work starts flowing.
Not because I found some magical productivity system.
Because I stopped avoiding the discomfort of beginning.
What Three Months Actually Gets You
Let's get specific about what's possible.
Three months of focused work, where you start immediately every day and leverage open loops to keep momentum, can produce what most people think takes years.
You could write a book.
Build a profitable side business.
Transform your physical health.
Develop a new skill to expert level.
Create a portfolio that changes your career trajectory.
The constraint isn't time.
It's focus.
It's your willingness to skip the performance of productivity and just do the actual work.
Hormozi built multiple eight-figure businesses by understanding this principle.
His whole philosophy is about compression.
What most people spread across a decade, he compresses into months by eliminating everything that isn't directly producing output.
That doesn't mean working 18-hour days.
It means not wasting two hours every morning convincing yourself to start.
It means understanding that the activation energy to begin is always higher than the energy required to continue.
So you make continuing easy by never fully stopping.
You might be reading this and thinking it sounds too simple.
Too obvious.
And yeah, it is simple.
That's the uncomfortable part.
We want productivity to be complex because then we can justify not doing it.
If it requires some elaborate system we haven't learned yet, we're off the hook.
But you already know how to start.
You just don't want to feel the discomfort of those first five minutes.
So you procrastinate by preparing.
Here's what I want you to do tomorrow morning.
Before you do anything else, before coffee, before checking your phone, before any warm-up routine.
Open the document for your most important project.
Don't think about it.
Don't wait to feel ready.
Just open it and start typing.
Give it five minutes of actual effort.
Not planning.
Not organizing.
Not preparing.
Actual work on the actual thing.
See what happens.
My guess?
You'll discover what Hormozi discovered.
That starting is the perfect condition.
That everything you thought you needed to begin was just resistance in disguise.
That the mood you were waiting for shows up five minutes after you start, not before.
And if you can do that every day for three months?
You'll be somewhere completely different.
Somewhere most people think takes years to reach.
All because you stopped preparing to work and just started working.