MOTIVATION
The Cliffhanger Technique: How to Be Crazy Eager to Start Your Work
Turn yourself into an accomplishing machine!
Some days, it feels like I would do anything except start the task I’m supposed to do. Suddenly, I would find a passion for organizing my emails or cleaning the dishes. Heck, I would gladly get a tooth removed at the dentist instead of doing my work!
Do you often find yourself in the same kind of situation? What if you could reverse this stubborn attitude with the most simple hack on earth?
Enter the Cliffhanger Technique…
The Cliffhanger Technique
You probably know the cliffhanger technique from great storytellers. The idea is to make people hold their breath when something very tense happens, just like Stallone hanging from a cliff with one hand in the movie Cliffhanger. J.K. Rowling often used it in her Harry Potter series. First, she would slowly build drama. Then she would abruptly end a chapter when the tension was highest. This is profoundly arousing for the brain, which is dying to know how the tension resolves. Contrary to a boring book, you can’t resist reading the next chapter. It’s too tempting. Your brain yearns for a conclusion.
Hemingway’s trick to start writing
Ok, so if J.K. Rowling can make you desperate to read a new Harry Potter chapter, why not use the same technique to make yourself desperate to start your work?
That’s what author Ernest Hemingway was doing each day when writing. At the end of his workday, while still having a large stream of writing ideas flowing into his head, he would abruptly stop his writing midsentence. Like J.K. Rowling, that would make his brain desperate to reduce the tension.
Usually, the most challenging part for a writer is to start writing at the beginning of their workday. But when Hemingway used this technique, he felt compelled to write. His brain was eager to complete the half-finished sentence he had written the day before.
Using the Cliffhanger technique on any task
I know you are probably not a writer. So how could you possibly use the Cliffhanger technique to motivate you to start your work? Well, simple. When you leave your desk at the end of the day, just don’t finish your task. The following day, you will be crazy eager to resume your task. One crucial point here is to interrupt your task only when you know what to do next with your task. If you know exactly what to do to resume your task, you will be extra happy to do it the next day.
Also, instead of applying the technique only at the end of your workday, you can use it several times per day while taking a pause. If you take a pause and interrupt your task midway, you will be motivated to resume your work after your pause.
My personal way of using the Cliffhanger Technique
Last but not least, let me give you a personal example. As a software engineer, my job is to write programming code. So my tasks would typically alternate between two activities:
- Writing a couple of lines of code
- Testing it to see if my program is doing what I had in mind
Then the cycle would repeat, again and again. The testing activity here is a crucial moment. Either my code is working, and I pat myself on the back, or it fails, and I must correct what I wrote. This “high-stake” situation makes it the perfect moment to create a Cliffhanger. It is the programming equivalent of Ernest Hemingway’s stopping midsentence.
To create the Cliffhanger, I would write some code, then stop my working session without checking if my code is working. Then, in my next work session, I would be curious: “Is my code working or not?”. That would make me extra motivated to resume my work by testing if my code is working.
Sometimes, I simply write an intriguing question I will answer the next time I work. It can be something like: “What criteria differentiate an admin user from a normal user in the database?”. Then, instead of searching for the answer, I just stop working.
As you can see, it does not have to be complicated.
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Starting your day on a brand new task is typically exhausting for your willpower. But completing a task you’ve already started the day before is enticing.
The trick is to stop at a critical moment of the task. Since your brain is eager to reduce the tension, you will be more than happy to resume your work. And that’s how you turn yourself into an accomplishing machine!
On February 1st, 2022, I embarked on a 100 days writing challenge. This is post number 84.