Get Motivated in the Morning

Do you find hard to motivate yourself at the start of your day? Ever want to start the day awesomely productive, but starting that first task seems daunting…so you procrastinate? Of course – we all have that problem at one point or another.

Well, you’re in luck, because you can start your day encouraged and motivated.

And the good news is it doesn’t involve any sort of wishy-washy new-age pap. It amounts to a pure practical principle preached positively (say that three times fast).

Step 1: Stop While You’re Ahead

A simple, effective way to starting your day encouraged and motivated is to leave your last task unfinished so you can quickly finish it the following day.

This way, you’ll get encouraged and motivated first thing in the morning – by keeping the momentum from the previous day’s creative fire going.

You won’t have to think about what you need to do, or see a daunting task of starting something in front of you. You’ll have a in-progress task ready to dive in and finish. And that–finishing an important task first thing in the morning, that you don’t even need to think about what to do–will encourage and motivate you for the rest of the day.

Step 2: Write Out Tomorrow’s Steps Today

In order to make this method of working more effective, write out tomorrow’s steps while you’re still hot today.

Bottom line: Write out how you’ll finish that task with specific steps the night before.

Be as specific as possible. Don’t leave any ambiguity, or you’ll also fall into start-paralysis, since you won’t want to figure out what needs to be done in the morning.

If you don’t specifically write out the steps, that’s still not as bad as starting a completely new task. But it’s still not as effective as writing out the steps, because you can’t just dive in and start executing without thinking.

When you’re still on a roll in your creative zone the night before, use your thinking to write out as specific steps as possible.

The following morning, when you’re not in that creative zone anymore, you don’t need to think – you just do by following your steps.

Step 3: Finish the Near-Complete Task Tomorrow Morning

When you get to work the following morning (or afternoon for you night owls), finish the near-complete task first thing.

All you have to do is execute the specific steps to finish the task that you wrote out in step #2 above. No need to think about what to do and how – just do your list of steps.

Before you know it, you’ll get an important task finished, without having to be daunted by starting a new task or thinking about how to finish the task (which is when you start procrastinating and watch YouTube clips until lunchtime).

Finishing an important task so early in your day will encourage and motivate you. The creative juices and productive mindset will kick back into gear, and you’ll be ready to rock the rest of your day. That new task will be much easier to start, and bigger tasks will be easier to tackle.

Wait, Shouldn’t I Finish What I Started That Day?

Yep, this goes against the common practice of trying to finish everything off before the end of the day – trying to package everything up, with a nice bow on top.

But when you finish off a task for the day, you’ll have to start from scratch on a new one the following morning. And that’ll create start-paralysis – not knowing how or where to start, and then procrastinating because the prospect of starting something new seems like a huge step.

By stopping while you’re ahead, you’ll avoid start-paralysis the next day, because you already have an in-progress task to dive into, or just one final small step to finish off.

You’ll quickly get it done (and thus one important task for the day), which will encourage you to keep going and being awesomely productive.

Quickly finishing off a task, getting encouraged and motivated, and then rocking the rest of your day with new tasks and whatnot – much, much more effective than trying to start your day finding and getting into your encouraging and motivating groove.

Need Proof? Hemingway Worked This Way

If this method of productivity might seem familiar, that’s because sometimes it’s related to Hemingway’s hack.

Writer Ernest Hemingway would work similar to this way – stopped right before he finished and left it for the following day (or left a scene unfinished to later incorporate into the story). Hemingway was quoted as saying about working:

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day…you will never be stuck.

Start Your Day Encouraged and Motivated

Destroy start-paralysis. Avoid unnecessary procrastination. Be awesomely productive. Start your day encouraged and motivated by leaving your last task unfinished so you can quickly finish it the following day.

Write out the specific steps needed to finish that task the night before, then get to it at the start of your day. By quickly finishing an important task, you’ll keep the momentum from the previous day going, and you’ll be encouraged and motivated to rock the rest of your day.

Now get out there and start stopping — while you’re ahead.

How to be more productive

If you asked several people what personal productivity meant to them you would probably receive a different definition of the term from each individual. Some might say personal productivity is getting more stuff finished in a timely manner. Some would tell you that personal productivity is setting goals and accomplishing those goals. Others might even tell you that the term meant nothing to them at all.

Simply put, personal productivity is completing the actions that move you closer to accomplishing your goals in a manner that brings balance and ease into your life.

It’s all about completing an action cycle. Knowing what your objectives are and the actions necessary to reach them is the trick to boosting your personal productivity practices. The different phases of this cycle are:

• Setting meaningful and measurable objectives
• Evaluating the objective into actionable items
• Completing the individual actionable items
• Reviewing and acknowledging your progress

Let us look a little closer at each phase of the productivity cycle.

Setting Meaningful and Measurable Objectives

“You’ve got to think about the big things, while you are doing the small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction” – Alvin Toffler

It is not enough to complete the tasks on a list. The tasks you are completing need to be directly correlated to a meaningful objective. You need to be working towards something. Being productive is akin to travelling a measurable path where your progress can be evaluated. Meaningful objectives are not vague ideas – they are the needle on your compass. They are the reference point used to measure your success or failure. If you don’t have clear and specific objectives you can easily fall into the trap of completing tasks just for the sake of completing tasks. You might feel good about getting things done, but you will never feel satisfied with your overall progress in the bigger picture.

Getting caught up in is setting too many objectives is another easy trap that wages war against your ability to be productive. This can lead to feelings of inadequacy and imbalance. Even though you are completing tasks, you will probably feel like you are never getting anything accomplished. This will cause the priorities of your life to conflict with one another and you will be left without balance. Many who fall into this pattern won’t allow their work to suffer. However, they do end up sacrificing their home life and “down time” in order to complete everything they’ve purposed themselves to do.

The main idea of this phase of the productivity cycle is to prioritize the things in your life that are truly important to you. You need to manage both the number and content of your objectives in order to maintain a balance in your life. So remember…meaningful objectives are precise measurable goals with which we can align our actionable items and tasks. That way the things that we do work towards our goals. In the end, this will allow us to be successful on the whole on our own terms.

Evaluate Your Objectives into Actionable Items

“A vision without a task is but a dream; a task without a vision is drudgery; a vision and a task together is hope for the world” – from a church in Sussex, England

Now that we have discussed how important meaningful objectives are to our personal productivity, we need to talk about how actionable items are the power plant that drives us to become productive people. Again, personal productivity is about completing the tasks connected to our meaningful objectives. Most productive people spend a considerable amount of time planning and thinking their tasks through, only placing the next actionable item that works toward their goals on their task lists. Unproductive people have the tendency to place items on their lists that are not even possible for them to complete.

An actionable item is the next critical stride that can be taken to work towards your goal. An actionable item has no dependencies. It is possible to complete this task in a single step. If you can whittle your list down to the next possible actionable item that works towards your objective, your personal productivity will rise to heights you never believed possible.

Completing the Individual Actionable Items

“It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.” – William James

A lot of you might make long lists of things to do, and wonder why you are never able to complete them. The problem often lies in making agreements to do more work than what is possible to finish; never knowing when or how you are going to get things done. The key to accomplishing your tasks and reaching your goals is to schedule them. That way you do not end up sacrificing balance and breaking your agreements.

By scheduling the actionable items on your task list to your calendar, you drastically improve the chances of completing them. These kind of steady, small successes will bring you the motivation to continue moving forward towards your goals. When your meaningful objectives take some time to accomplish and your goals seem to be sitting far off on the horizon, the smaller tasks you complete along the way will give you that daily sense of satisfaction that you need.

Review and Acknowledge Your Progress

“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road” – C.S. Lewis

You may find yourself so caught up in the world around you that you rarely take the time required to evaluate the small endeavors you successfully complete each day. When you acknowledge the completion of an actionable item on your list, you can see yourself getting one step closer to the objective connected to it. Acknowledgment of your success is critical because it creates the motivation required to continue through your productivity cycle. In addition, there will come a time when you do not successfully complete the task at hand. Instead of feeling as if you have botched the “master plan”, understand that setbacks give you an opportunity to step back and reevaluate your task or mission. The evaluation phase gives you the opportunity to move on to the next actionable item for an objective that is just as necessary to reach your goals.

Conclusion

This concept is simple, but delivers great results. The productivity cycle allows you to maintain your sights on the bigger picture while continuing forward through the completion of small tactical tasks that lead towards your goals. Your precise and measurable objectives will determine the exact actionable items on your list. Scheduled tasks will ensure their completion. Evaluating your progress will allow you to adjust your plans accordingly and you’ll be motivated to continue moving forward. As you practice this cycle, you will end up going through it enough times that it will become instinctive.

Ultimately when this cycle becomes second nature, you will find yourself experiencing true personal productivity.