I’ve always been a last minute sort of person. If you’re anything like me, I need deadlines to make me get down and finish the task. If I don’t have deadlines, I tend to procrastinate. I have been trying for many, many years to motivate myself, and all attempts have so far been unsuccessful; all except one.
Now I will caveat this with the fact that I am less than a week into this experiment, but it seems to be working. It’s not a complex solution, in fact, it’s really very simple. But brings me back to a fundamental truth that I had forgotten – it’s not about the time you spend on something, it’s about the outcomes you achieve.
It started over the Easter bank holiday weekend with me wasting a couple of days watching TV and looking at my phone. I felt lazy and made a promise to myself that my next two free days were going to be more productive. The next morning, I wrote down 6 things I was going to do that day, and promised myself that a) I would do them all, and b) I could do whatever I wanted after I’d done them. The effect was quite amazing; I saw it as a challenge to try and get them all done as quickly as possible so that I could get my reward of being able to do whatever I wanted – watch TV, play the latest most addictive game on my phone. The tasks took longer than I thought, as tasks generally do, but ticking off the tasks was a reward in of itself. And when I got to the end of the day, I could watch TV completely guilt free; I’d been really productive and it was a great feeling!
There were two factors I was thinking about when creating the tasks, which I feel were instrumental to the success of the experiment:
1) Use the concept of tiny habits, suggested by B J Fogg (https://www.tinyhabits.com/), to set very small targets. It’s all about getting started on the task, and that’s so much easier if the goal is very small (particularly if you’re a perfectionist like I am). For example, I have over 30 boxes of stuff from my childhood currently filling up my spare room that my mum kindly sent me from her loft. I set myself the challenge of clearing 1 box (very manageable!) and ended up doing 3. The challenge is getting started. A tiny task makes that much easier, and you inevitably end up doing far more than you thought you would at the start. In fact, writing a bit of this blog was a challenge for today; I thought I’d do 10 minutes and have ended up doing 25 and still going strong!
2) Make the tasks manageable in the time you have available (particularly if you end up doing more than you thought you would!). It’s amazing how quickly it becomes de-motivating when you are not getting through your list and you watch your free time at the end of the day gradually disappearing. It will become a chore and you will feel exhausted. I proved this to myself very effectively on Monday when I decided to create a To Do list for work as well as a list for outside of work tasks, and promised myself that as soon as I’d completed those work tasks, that would be my work day completed (very motivating to get it done as quickly as possible!). I put down 6 tasks on my work To Do list and 6 tasks on my out of work To Do list. I completed them, but it was 10pm by the time I finished and I admit I felt robbed of my evening. It will probably take you a few days to get the balance right, as I’m finding out.
There is a third factor which I believe is also critical to success. When I started this experiment, I remembered a podcast I listened to a while ago where the interviewee was talking about the importance of keeping promises to ourselves. It is hardly surprising that many people face confidence issues when they consistently break their own promises to themselves, and this applies to many leaders I’ve profiled over the years as well. Take New Year’s resolutions as an example – how often have you kept to them for the whole year? But so often it’s also a daily occurrence that we make promises and don’t keep them – I’ll go to bed earlier tonight, I’ll go for a run when I get home, I’ll not look at my phone before bed etc. How are we meant to believe in ourselves and our capabilities if we consistently break promises to ourselves?! What he said on that podcast really struck a chord with me. So point number 3 is…
3) View your To Do list as a promise you are making to yourself, and keep it!
This is really helping me to take control of my own schedule, rather than responding to other’s demands all the time. And critically… it is building my confidence in my own ability to set my own goals and achieve them. I hope that, by sharing this experience, you might be able to use this too.