If you found it easy to motivate yourself you would not be reading this – if you were the most prolific person in your field you would never click on such posts.
You are probably like most people and, as a result, none of the articles about productivity hacks are of much help to you. Stories of morning rituals of the highly successful never stick in your mind to become your own habits.
You are probably reasonably healthy, if not you may need to get on top of that problem first. But let’s assume that you are able to cover the basics and for the most part:
- You get up early and on time.
- You eat a relatively balanced diet (you don’t drink too much).
- You do some kind of exercise (even walking counts).
- You balance your work and other obligations according to the norms of your culture.
It can be difficult to prioritize all of this but it is the basic requirement for you to play along in society so you probably figured it out when you were 20 or so.
What new habits do you really need to master in order to take your productivity, freedom or earning potential to a higher level? What are you missing?
You are lacking discipline, you are lacking sticktoitiveness – you believe that there is not enough time in the day because of your shortcomings. How will you develop the serious, persistent discipline to maintain the daily habits that will change your life? I am going to assume that you are not an optimist either, this is one of your biggest hurdles.
Most people can overcome the aforementioned shortcomings for a few weeks, but what about overcoming them for 18 months straight? In that amount of time, you could change everything – you could change your company for the better, your career could take off, you could master a skill, start a profitable business… if only you could, WHAT?
How To Seriously Increase Your Level of Productivity Overnight
Table of Contents
Optimism is your starting point.
Optimism – the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.
Ambrose Bierce
If you are unable to muster optimism when it comes to your own ability to produce and create you ARE a self-fulfilling negative feedback loop. There is no hope for you unless you are the one who brings hope to the table. You should stop reading and forget about the dream that you have, you are doomed to be a stiff, a dead man walking.
If you understand the problem, your source of strength should be the fact that you do not have the option of being a pessimist. You have your back against a wall, what are you going to do?
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
Oscar Wilde
Dos and don’ts – every time you are being your own naysayer.
- Don’t try to predict the future. Instead of predicting…
- Envision what the completion of your project, goal, achievement looks like. What will success feel like for you?
- Envision the next step that takes you a little closer to that vision.
- Do not dwell on the past.
If you make the mistake of predicting the future, your pessimistic side WILL predict failure, and you do not have that option. In this context, the past does not exist except in the form of your self-worth, reputation, and the knowledge that others have of your integrity. Going forward, you are a new creature, one of your own making. Your self-worth and reputation will catch up to the new optimism and resulting behavior.
BAM! Just like that, you are an OPTIMIST! You know it is the only way you will get what you want. Still there is a problem, NOTHING is getting done. Just like everyone else that actually reads this, you too are a procrastinator.
If this article is to have any chance of achieving the goal stated in the title, we have to keep it simple. You will not be able to go through a whole book worth of behavioral and attitudinal changes and start being like Jeff Bezos by tomorrow morning. We need to keep it simple, stupid.
All procrastinators have one thing in common.
A lot of really intelligent and creative people are also procrastinators – a lot of people work in bursts of productivity only after the deadline gets close enough to put fear in them. Thinking in terms of deadlines is the thing that all procrastinators have in common. Why do you procrastinate, are you naturally lazy? A lot of folks who are regarded as procrastinators can cram through a lot of work once they feel enough pressure. So what is the problem?
The deadline is the problem (for procrastinators).
The procrastinator has a love-hate relationship with the deadline – whether it is a boss or a spouse setting up deadlines for them or they do it themselves, marking things on calendars and setting up reminders to get something done by X date gives them a feeling of accomplishment. When the boss tells the procrastinator to have something done by a date several days away, the first reaction in their mind is to gauge how much time they will have to push the task back. The more comfortable the deadline is the greater the dopamine reaction in the mind of the procrastinator.
You are a dopamine addict. Increases in dopamine releases occur in response to sex, drugs, far off deadlines, and rock and roll. Depending on the task, “far off” could be three days or as little as three hours. For non-procrastinators like project managers, deadlines are just information that allows them to structure the flow of work. For your procrastinating mind, the deadline is some kind of perverse time leash that gives you a spike in your sense of freedom, and that freedom is on a digressive curve that ends in panic.
If you have demonstrated in life that you have the tendency to procrastinate you CANNOT allow deadlines to determine how you structure your productivity – that is a great way to severely diminish what you accomplish in life. This is especially true if you are trying to start a business.
Your thoughts create your reality.
It is not that you can materialize things with your mind – you will not violate the laws of physics in this game, including the direction and passage of time. Your perception of time can vary dramatically, we all experience this every day. When things require our attention time seems to expand, when things do not require much attention time passes us by in a flash. The brain wants to conserve energy, but you cannot let the brain conserve energy. If you allow your brain to conserve energy time will go by in a flash. If you do this, you are a stiff, and you will find yourself lying on your deathbed wondering what happened and how you got there so fast.
Going forward, break time into smaller chunks then you would usually do. No more “I will do this stuff before lunch and that stuff after lunch”. No more “I will get this done over the next three days and that stuff over the following two days”. Stop thinking in such large time segments, you will get nothing done and you will perpetuate your deadline addiction. Deadlines can still exist and continue to be real to the project manager. You have to assume that you will get everything done long before the deadline – deadlines can no longer have such relevance in your perception of time.
Any task that takes three days to accomplish is NOT ONE TASK.
The three-day task is really 50 tasks. Break down all tasks into tiny fragments that you can complete in 20-30 minutes. That is the reality of everything you do anyhow.
Think of your time as a series of 15 or 30-minute blocks, not 4-hour blocks, or 2-day blocks.
Focus on one small task at a time without any distractions. Even if you are writing code and working on a single piece of software, every loop and every object in the code is a task. Every slide in a presentation, each section of the article you are writing is a task and can be broken down even further in your mind. With this method, you will feel constant accomplishment and this constant sense of accomplishment will be your new source of dopamine.
How we choose to perceive things is the filter through which we experience reality. Everything that we have experienced, or will ever experience, passes through this perception filter. After a short period of time, shorter than you probably think, your perception, which governs your behavior and responses, will change the physical world around you.
Most things are out of your control – that is true for everyone.
If you ever hear yourself say or think that things are out of your control and see it as an excuse to not persevere, that should set off alarm bells. That mentality of seeing the outside world as an impediment to your success is the way that stiffs think. You are not a stiff anymore, you thrive in an ever-changing landscape. The world will change faster and faster before your eyes as time goes by – you can sink into chaos and despair or see the beauty and opportunity in it.
The world will notice if you are one of the few who sees the opportunity where most see excuses – the world will reward you for this.
Comfort seeking is not going to help you.
Watching Netflix every night sipping on beer and wine will be the undoing of your efforts. You like it because you are designed to want to allow your brain to go into energy conservation mode. You can relax, but you would be better served by reading a book. Spend your downtime reading things that will enhance your intellect or teach you something that is essential to your success in your new business or other pursuits.
Drink a glass of wine with dinner or a beer with your dinner instead of ending the evening by drinking a liter of wine. Every time you drink too much you are really hindering your ability to make progress towards your objectives the following day. Obviously you can have fun with friends but drinking every night is a sign that you have the wrong attitude and some kind of anxiety. If you are okay with challenges and misfortunes and see the world as an exciting game you will not need alcohol to soothe your fears so you can sleep at night. I am adding this alcohol bit because it is clear that this is a pervasive source of lost productivity that transforms doers into dreamers.
The world as an exciting game.
Nuff said, you know deep down that it is true. Even your religion tells you how to win or lose. Literally everything in this universe is set up like a game, from how we gain resources and lose them even faster to how we combine our genes with each other to make new players. It can get very serious when health issues come into play and physical harm happens to our loved ones. Either way, you cannot stop the game as long as you are alive. Play it – history is full of people who had a rough time in life. You may be one of them and that is okay. History has few records of folks who threw in the towel to become part of the landscape in this game.
If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.
Leo Tolstoy
Fighting for the convictions of others that you do not share is a terrible way to play this game. Your efforts must be in alignment with YOUR convictions. Inflexibility in understanding the perspective of others is one of many behaviors that wrecks the game we are all here to play – don’t be that guy either.
This game rewards bravery.
Risk takers will reap the biggest rewards, they will also take losses. You have to roll with the punches and accept losses, seek the help of other players. Anyone who believes that failure equals ‘being a loser’ does not understand how this game works. Seeking nothing but certainty or failure avoidance makes you part of the landscape in this life, one of the lawn mowing creatures that cover the landscape.
There is not a successful person in history who was not brave along the way. Everything from starting a business, to seeking a raise, or pursuing the love of your life requires bravery. Part of bravery is accepting the possibility, even the likelihood, of failure.
Be less afraid to fail and you will win more often and be more free. You will also not despair when inevitably things change and do not go as you hoped they would.
