Motivation is helpful when it is there, but it is too unpredictable and easily lost. Every night before going to bed, I am motivated about what I will achieve tomorrow, and the next morning, I barely achieve a quarter of what I was excited about the night before. Most of my motivation is there when I have something else to do, but once it is time to actually do it, I don’t care enough anymore.
Motivation is so easy to lose, one thing can go slightly off track and it is done, we won’t be able to rely on it for the next few days. So should we wait until it comes back to continue progressing on our projects? Not at all, we have to do it the hard way, discipline ourselves to do what we have to do, no matter how we feel.
This may be a bit too extreme, because there will be cases where taking a break is the right thing to do, for example if we are sick or if we had a particularly exhausting day at work. But a gloomy day should not be a reason to slack off on our project unless the weather is actually a hindrance to its progression, but there is probably something that we can work on indoors anyway too.
Discipline is necessary to accomplish pretty much anything that is worth it. And the bad news is that it is hard to do, it requires that we kick our own ass to get going. It requires a strong will and self-control.
But even if most of it has to be forced upon ourselves, there are some tricks that I found that could help ease the work.
Planning and organization
Careful planning is a good way to make it easier for us to get going on some work. Defining what has to be done and the steps to do it will make the work a lot more structured and straightforward, which will in return make it less hard to focus and work, because we will clearly know the path to follow. Organizing our work by separating it by type of tasks may also be a good thing to do, I will come back to this later in the article.
Short and productive sessions
We can sometimes get the impression that to progress on something, we have to spend many consecutive hours working on it. But it is not required, unless you are actually able to do so, of course. I found out that for some tasks, mostly those which I am not experienced at, are counter-productive to work on for extended sessions. The reason for this is that at some point I get stuck on a problem and stop progressing. The solution for this is to try completing a single step at a time, and then analyze if we still are progressing, it not, we stop there, and come back later, our rested mind will be better at solving the problem.
The right task for the right moment
Depending on how we feel at a particular moment, we may not be in our best shape to execute certain types of tasks. A way of making sure that we still progress in such times is to work on tasks that fit better with our current mood. This is where the organization that I talked about earlier comes handy, if we organized our work correctly, we can just choose the appropriate task and get to work. For example, on a day where we feel less creative, working on some more “robotic” work (data entry, calculations, measurements, etc) could still have us extract some productivity out of ourselves.
Rewards
Implementing a system of work-reward for ourselves could also facilitate the introduction of work discipline in our life. It consists of setting achievable goals, from which we will get a reward of our choice upon completing. The logic is that instead of working just to “get-things-done”, we also work to get something concrete in return.
Deadlines
Deadlines could also be used, perhaps in combination with a reward, but I personally wouldn’t set deadlines as rigid as the ones we see in an actual work environment, it would be more like a target that we should aim to meet, rather than an additional source of stress.
These few tricks can certainly help, but they will not do the work in our place, we still have to create space in our life for our projects and we have to put in the work. But the hard part is to start and make it a habit, and then it will become easier and maybe fun at some point.