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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Neha runs a weekly newsletter about growing vegetables in a small backyard.
It started when she turned her own cramped patio into a salad garden.
Her pitch is simple: you don't need an acre.
A few pots and a sunny corner will do.
And her readers? They want the same — real food from a tiny space, not a farm.
⛳️ Problem:
Neha has wanted to run a paid spring-planting workshop for two months.
Every morning she opens her laptop, sees "plan the workshop," and closes it again.
The task feels huge.
Where does she even start?
So she tidies her inbox instead and tells herself next week is better. Ouch.
Her struggle: how to start a big task when she can't see the first step.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The 5-second first step
You won't "go for a run" when you're tired, right?
But you'll put on your shoes.
And then you're already going.
Turns out a stuck task works the same way.
That's what Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole teach.
They run Ship 30 for 30, a writing course taken by over 10,000 writers.
It's earned them seven figures.
Their take: procrastination usually isn't laziness.
It's a task you haven't made small enough yet.
When it feels impossible, your brain freezes and grabs anything easier.
So the fix is to shrink the first step until it's too small to resist.
Ask AI for about 25 steps.
Make step one take under 5 seconds.
And get this — one of them ran it on himself.
He'd stared at "hire a partnerships director" for six weeks.
Every morning he saw it, felt his chest tighten, and closed the app.
So he asked AI to break it into 25 small steps.
Step one was "open a doc and title it Partnerships Manager." That's it.
Twenty minutes later? A job description, three messages sent, interview questions written.
🚗 The steps
🗣️ Step 1 — Dump the whole stuck task to AI.
It's like tipping a stuffed junk drawer onto the table.
You can't sort the mess until it's all out where you can see it.
Neha talks it out: "I want to run a paid spring-planting workshop. I've avoided it for two months. I don't know where to start."
🪜 Step 2 — Ask for 25 steps, with the first under 5 seconds.
A wall stops you cold.
A staircase doesn't.
You don't leap to the top — you just take the first stair.
Neha gets her list back.
Step one: open a doc and title it "Spring Workshop." Five seconds.
She does it.
🏃 Step 3 — Do the first step now, before the fear talks you out of it.
It's like jumping into a cold pool.
You count to three and go.
Wait, and your brain talks you out of it.
Neha does step one, then keeps going without meaning to.
An hour later? A date, a price, and an invite ready to send.
The workshop was never too hard.
She'd just never made the first step small enough.
The prompt below breaks any stuck task into 25 tiny steps.
You just tell it the task you've been avoiding.
🧸 One messy task + 25 tiny steps + a 5-second start = momentum that beats the fear.
🏄♀️ The prompt
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Update your input values in the prompt or just run as is, your AI sidekick will use the example values and will give output.
CONTEXT:
- (use what's available, fall back to the inline values)
- If my Voice Profile exists, write in that voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If my ICP / Audience doc exists, target that reader. Otherwise, use the audience below.
Inputs:
The big task I've been avoiding (the one that feels huge and keeps sliding to "next week" — be specific):
{e.g. plan and launch my first paid spring-planting workshop for small-space gardeners}
Why it feels stuck (the worries or unknowns swirling around it):
{e.g. I don't know what date to pick, what to charge, or what to do if nobody signs up}
For Outcome: {e.g. a 25-step checklist where the first step takes me under 5 seconds, so I start today instead of next week}
Outputs:
1. Three quick questions about my task — time frame, resources, and any hard limits — so the steps fit my real situation.
2. The task type in one word (creative, operational, or decision-based) so I know what kind of work this is.
3. About 25 concrete steps that build toward finishing the task, each with a time estimate in parentheses. The first step must take under 5 seconds.
4. The one step I should do right now, pulled out and put at the top so I can't miss it.
Then do step 1 with me: tell me the exact 5-second action to take this second, in one sentence.
One scary task cut down to a five-second start.
One workshop finally on the calendar.
One morning that ended in real progress, not a tidy inbox.
That's it, my fellow outliers!
Yours 'finding high-potent AI lazy automations so you work less and enjoy life' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️