Feel Motivated to Work Every Day

It’s amazing how easy it becomes to be motivated when you know what you’re doing every day.

A lack of motivation is often a sign of not knowing where to start.

The challenge is too many decisions about where to start. You get overwhelmed and do nothing.

Remove the decision making in the moment. When you’re not faced with doing the task immediately, you are more likely to make good calls on what needs to be done. Plan ahead what is going to happen and when.

Then your job simply becomes a matter of sitting done and doing it. Easy!

I’ve talked about this over and over but planning ahead of time gives your subscious brain time to figure out a plan. When it comes to executing, you always have an idea on what to do next. 

It gives you a chance to get excited about what you’re going to do. What you’re going to create. To be mentally brainstorming as you go about your day. When it comes to executing, you’re itching to get on with it.

That’s being motivated.

Some may argue that being motivated is about waiting for inspiration to strike. Or an act of mental discipline. Of a function of having a greater purpose.

And all of these things are true to a degree.

But the single thing that guarantees feeling motivated? Having a system.

Planning ahead of time.

Knowing what you’re going to be doing and when.

On Monday’s we catch up on emails and return phone calls, review our schedule and plan our week.

On Tuesday’s we do our most deeply focused week.

Wednesday’s are for meetings.

On Thursday we action everything from the meetings. 

And on Friday we make sure we’ve finished everything we’ve started that week so we can start fresh on Monday.

Suddenly it’s easy to show up every day, motivated, focused and getting on with the job because you always know EXACTLY what you’re doing.

And your brain is already generating ideas on how to get it done. When you sit down to work, you’re ready to go.

You can eat the elephant one bite at a time because you know the rest of it is going to get taken care of in due course.

We lack motivation when we look at our to-do list as a whole and feel intimidated. There’s no way we can get it all done. The underlying assumption being getting it all done today.

When we have a system that accounts for everything, you’re no longer looking at the whole to-do list, the whole elephant. You’re looking at each individual task, each individual bite.

Today we eat the leg. Tomorrow an ear. Day after is the tail. Friday we start on the stomach. And so on. Yes it sounds ridiculous. But it also works.

Do you know what you’re doing today?

If you don’t, taking The Productivity Program will give you the systems and tools to know what you’re working on at any given moment in a way that feels easeful and expansive not rigid and constricting. Let motivational challenges be a thing of the past.