How To Stay Motivated In Difficult Times.
In the Working With Podcast this week, I answer a question about staying motivated when our daily life gets interrupted.
Script
Episode 127
Hello and welcome to episode 127 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I hope you are all staying safe and haven’t gone completely mad from having to stay at home and not be able to get outside. We are living in difficult times at the moment, but as in most things in life it won’t last and we will soon be able to start moving again. Stay strong and stay focused on the long-term.
This week, it’s all about maintaining motivation and routines when everything gets thrown out of sync. With many of you having to learn how to work from home and how to deal with a sudden drop in activity and movement it can be easy to lose your motivation to focus on what is important, your health and fitness and even keep up with the demands of your work when there are so many new distractions all around us—distractions we have not had to deal with before.
Now a quick tip before we get into the question: if you have taken my COD course, now would be a good time to review the course. Many of you will have had your working routines change over the last few weeks and that means many of the ways you collect and organise your work and commitments will have changed. Reviewing the course will help you quickly develop a new way of collecting and organising that reflects the way you are working today.
If you are new to this podcast and have not taken the COD course—that’s Collect, Organise and Do—the course is free and it will give you the basics of setting up your own system that will see you through these difficult times. Full details on how to get into the course are in the show notes or you can find it on my website—carlpullein.com
Okay, on with this the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jenna. Jenna asks, Hi Carl, I am really struggling to keep up with my productivity system. I have to work from home at the moment because of the Corona virus and I had just finally got a system in place. Not it feels like everything is falling apart. Is there anything I can do to keep up with a system?
Hi Jenna, thank you for your question. I think a lot of people are struggling with motivation at the moment. When we are suddenly taken out of our normal routines it feels disorientating and that often leads us to feeling disrupted and to losing sight of what we have identified as being important to us. The key here is to be absolutely clear about what exactly is important to us.
What I mean by this is let’s say maintaining a healthy lifestyle is something you identified as being important to you. Part of that lifestyle is you exercise five to six times per week and you follow a healthy diet.
Now, during your normal routines, you would eat a healthy breakfast at home, and then buy a salad or something at a specific place near your workplace for lunch and then go to the gym or go for a run when you return from work. Now, because you are working from home and your gym is closed you will feel trapped and unable to maintain your healthy routines. It is very easy to just give up and tell yourself you can take a break.
Okay, that’s probably fine for a few days. But there will come a point where you start to feel uncomfortable. Your energy levels will drop significantly and you will find yourself losing motivation to do anything. The temptation to become a sofa surfer will be overwhelming. The problem is that will just make you feel worse and you will begin to feel guilty.
Instead what you can do is identify what is important to you. I spoke about the importance of maintaining a structure to your day in last week’s episode—just because you no longer need to go to your workplace, you still need to have some structure to your day—you need a start and finish time for your work, and in the example above you will still need to do some form of exercise five to six times per week.
Now you may not be able to do your regular exercise—perhaps you do not have any exercise equipment at home, or if you run three to five miles a day you may not be allowed out of your home because of a lockdown in place, but you can get creative and do some body-weight exercises or use your stairs for some cardio.
Now I know it can be hard to motivate yourself to do this, so a trick I have used in the past is to fool my brain. If I feel unmotivated to exercise I give myself permission to just do a ten-minute session. I set the time—usually 2 pm and say from 2 pm to 2:10 pm, I will do some push-ups and squats. Nine times out of ten, I will end up doing a thirty-minute session. Had I told myself I had to do a thirty-minute session I know my brain would convince me I don’t need to exercise, that these are exceptional times and I can always get back into my exercise routines once this pandemic is over.
Now you can do this with your work too. If you have a report to do and you keep putting it off, just schedule a fifteen to twenty-minute session on it. Tell yourself you only need to spend ten minutes or so on it and get started. What you will find happens is you will do far more than ten minutes. Once you get started you will not want to stop so you just keep going. Before long you discover you have spent an hour or so on it and may even want to continue.
And, by the way, if you do this in the mornings you will find it much easier. When our brains are fresh and our willpower is at it’s strongest, that’s the time to do these more challenging tasks.
Another way to keep motivated is to have a plan for the day. This does not mean you create a plan to do ten to twenty tasks per day, that can actually be demotivating. What I mean by this is you create a list of no more than three things to accomplish that day. Write these down on a post-it note or a piece of paper and leave it on your desk when you close down the day.
Then when you begin the next day you see your three things and that is where you start. Start with the first task, once that is done, cross it off and move on the next and so on. Now don’t get greedy. What you want to do is create a list that you will accomplish, not a list that ends up with ten to twenty tasks uncompleted. This is the MIT method—your ‘most important tasks’.
The reason this is motivating is that at the end of the day you have three crossed off tasks and that builds momentum and momentum is your best friend in these difficult times because it generates motivation and it creates forward motion. When you feel and see that forward motion your motivation grows.
Now in your specific case, Jenna, maintaining a productivity system is a case where your method of doing work needs to become a part of who you are. Let’s take the COD system for example. How you collect your tasks, events and notes is what you do. It is just who you are. I remember a few years ago having lunch with David Allen in Seoul and as we were talking, he had his notetaker wallet on the table. Now for those of you not familiar with David Allen’s notetaker wallet, it is a wallet with a small notepad on one side. David uses that as his ubiquitous collect tool (UCT)
The theory goes that wherever David Allen goes, so does his wallet. This means he always has a method for collecting stuff. For me, my UCT is my phone. My phone is always with me so I have made sure that is set up for quick collection. People I regularly work with know if they ask me to do something I will pull out my phone and add it to my to-do list. If I don’t they think something’s weird (often ask if I heard them!)
Likewise for the way you organise your stuff. For me, spending ten minutes clearing things up, filing and organising everything collected at the end of the day is just something I do. I don’t need to think about it. I would feel I had missed something if I didn’t do it. Organising my stuff no longer needs motivation because I just do it. It has become a part of who I am.
And finally, always begin the day with a routine and a plan. Your morning routines are so important. The way you begin the day sets you up for the day. If your alarm goes off and you hit snooze two or three times, then you finally crawl out of bed, make coffee and not know how or what to start with, you are never going to feel particularly motivated. Instead, if you begin the day the same way, perhaps do some meditation or a little exercise, for example, you will find yourself much more motivated.
Likewise, when you have a plan for the day and you start knowing exactly what you want to accomplish, that drives momentum and motivation and once you have completed your tasks you feel ready to do it all over again the next day.
Motivation and routines go hand in hand. Making small improvements and a little progress every day creates a cycle of motivation. It’s when you have no plan and no routines that’s when you a cycle of demotivation.
As many of us are experiencing a change to our daily lives and we are thrown out of our usual routines it can be demotivating. But by making a few changes and adjustments it can be quite easy to get back on track and stay motivated in these unprecedented times. We may not be able to perform at our best, but if we can keep moving forward, even a few tiny steps at a time, our motivation will stay strong and that will make it easier to transition back to our normal lives once this pandemic comes to an end.
Thank you, Jenna, for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Stay safe and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.