Defining Done and Minimum Steps
Scope: The execution toolkit in Greg McKeown’s Effortless: define a concrete finish line, find the first obvious action, take the fewest steps that complete the job, and iterate from a rough draft. It complements the mindset and state-of-being practices in The Effortless State and the Easy Path.
1. Define What “Done” Looks Like
McKeown opens with the Vasa, the Swedish warship that “sailed less than a mile before being buried in the sea,” because the king kept redefining what “done” meant. His lesson: “If you want to make something hard, indeed truly impossible, to complete, all you have to do is make the end goal as vague as possible… you cannot, by definition, complete a project without a clearly defined end point.”
The rule: “To avoid diminishing returns on your time and effort, establish clear conditions for what ‘done’ looks like, get there, then stop.” It also unlocks starting: “As soon as you define what ‘done’ looks like, you give your conscious and unconscious mind a clear instruction.” The method takes sixty seconds of visualization, for example “I’ve addressed each of the questions the client posed and proofread it once.”
His vague-to-concrete examples show the format (observable, binary, checkable):
| Vague goal | What “done” looks like |
|---|---|
| Lose weight | The scale reads 177 |
| Walk more | Ten thousand steps a day for fourteen days in a row |
| Read more books | The reader says “Finished” next to War and Peace |
| Launch my product | Ten beta users try the app for a week and give feedback |
| Complete podcast episode | The podcast is recorded and the file is uploaded |
He extends the idea with “Swedish Death Cleaning” (clearing clutter while you are alive) as a metaphor for approaching life goals with the end state in mind. This is a milder cousin of the mortality-framing in Mortality as the Ultimate Prioritization Framework.
2. The First Obvious Action
“We often get overwhelmed because we misjudge what the first step is: what we think is the first step is actually several steps. But once we break that step down into concrete, physical actions, that first obvious action begins to feel effortless.” McKeown quotes Shakespeare (“Though she be but little she is fierce”) for the power of a tiny first move.
Examples from the book:
- Clear the garage: first obvious action find the broom; microburst: sweep out the shed and move the bikes in.
- Launch a product: open a cloud document; microburst: brainstorm features.
- Large report: pick up a pen and paper; microburst: draft an outline.
When stuck, either make the important step “a little easier to get started” or make the trivial alternative “a little harder.” He calls looking at the first step “through the lens of 2.5 seconds” the “habit of habits.”
3. Minimum Steps: Subtract, Do Not Simplify
“No matter how simple the step, it’s still easier to take no step.”
McKeown’s story of a founder who spent months simplifying each step of an ordering flow, but never tried removing steps, makes the distinction between simplifying steps and eliminating steps. The diagnostic question: “What are the minimum steps required for completion?” He is careful to separate this from sloppiness: “Unnecessary steps are just that: unnecessary… completion is infinitely better than adding superfluous steps that don’t add value.”
The Apple anecdote: the team “had started with an immensely complicated product and attempted to pare it down. But Jobs came at it from the opposite angle. He started at zero and tried to figure out the absolute minimum number of steps required to achieve the desired outcome.” This is first-principles thinking applied to process: rebuild from zero rather than trim from the status quo. He closes with Andy Benoit’s line that most geniuses “prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”
4. Do Not Go the Second Mile Before the First
His rule: “Being asked to do X isn’t a good enough reason to do Y.” Extra mile effort is justified when essential (a surgeon preventing infection) but not for “unnecessary, superficial embellishments.” His own practice: six slides, fewer than ten words total. “It’s better to go just the first mile than to not go anywhere at all.” The same discipline appears in Pseudo-Productivity.
5. Embrace the Rubbish Draft
McKeown argues that we misunderstand creation by comparing our start to someone else’s finish: “We see something exceptional or beautiful in its finished state and we imagine it started out as a beautiful… version of what we are looking at. But exactly the opposite is true.” Embrace the rubbish “no matter how ugly it is” so you can “crash, repair, modify, and redesign fast.” This lowers perfectionism, one of his three named causes of hard-to-start work.
The full highlights extend this into a “Progress” practice: “Overachievers tend to struggle with the notion of starting with rubbish.” The fix is to “make failure as cheap as possible” through learning-sized mistakes (Reid Hoffman’s “I’m okay with an error rate of 10–20%…if it means you can move fast”) and to “lower the bar to start.” The sequel step, setting a lower and upper bound on daily effort, is in Effortless Pace and the Range.
The book’s five execution verbs are Define, Start, Simplify, Progress and Pace; this article covers the first three plus the rubbish draft.
Cross-Source Connections
- Wildly Important Goals and OKRs both demand a measurable finish line; McKeown’s contribution is the one-minute personal version and the stop rule.
- Keller and Papasan’s Focusing Question asks what the ONE Thing is; McKeown’s first-obvious-action asks what the next physical move on it is.