How to Motivate Yourself Without Hard Deadlines
In the art of productivity, a key skill is being able to motivate yourself without hard deadlines. These are the deadlines that if you don’t finish on time, you’re screwed. And if you’ve ever scrambled to get your taxes finished in April, you can see why relying on them for motivation isn’t a good idea.
Hard deadlines tend to clump up. If your “soft” deadlines, or deadlines you impose on your own schedule are just as motivating as hard deadlines, you become the one in control. Instead of having your schedule be at the mercy of your boss, professor or the world, you can decide how to finish work in advance so you don’t drive yourself crazy.
Hardening Soft Deadlines
How hard are your soft deadlines? When you decide to finish a project today, how likely are you to finish it? Some people can effectively use these self-imposed deadlines to get work done early. Other people make the deadline, but end up procrastinating until a real deadline forces them to work.
At first glance, the difference between these people might just look like different personalities. One is more disciplined, the other is lazy. Some people can motivate themselves, others need outside pressure.
But even if you are a chronic procrastinator, you can harden your soft deadlines. A few years ago my soft deadlines didn’t have nearly the same weight they do today. By tweaking how I setup my soft deadlines, I figured out how to use them to combat procrastination.
Be the Master of Your To-Do List
I’ve found there are only three main keys for making harder soft deadlines:
- Set Reasonable Expectations.
- Cycling Hard and Easy Days.
- Schedule Calibration.
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Stop Worrying: 7 Effective Strategies for Dealing With Anxiety
We all spend too much time worrying about things that will never materialize. And this worry only makes our lives unnecessarily complicated and painful. However there is hope. By implementing the strategies in this article, each of us can diminish our worries and anxieties, and thereby be free to enjoy life to its full potential.
Delay Worrying
This is a simple technique to stop our worries. If you find yourself concerned over a situation in the future, you can try telling yourself, “let me worry about this tomorrow; there is no need to worry about it today because it won’t happen for quite a while anyway”. Whenever the problem comes to your mind, just try this technique – delay worrying for another day. The fact is that most worries never occur; delaying them is just a clever way of dealing with our negative mind. The nature of our mind is to create problems and things to worry about, but this is a way to forget about them. If you keep ignoring your worries you may later realize they are not going to occur anyway.
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The Key to Productivity: Schedule Calibration
Do you know when to stop?
With thousands of articles about combating procrastination, I’ve seen few that deal with the reciprocal problem: not knowing when to stop working. Surprisingly I believe both procrastination and working until exhaustion are symptoms of the same root problem: poor schedule calibration.
Useless To-Do Lists
The quickest way to beat the procrastination/burnout problem is simply to make clear to-do lists. If you don’t specify what work you plan to do, then it is hard to know when to quit. And if you don’t know when to quit, you probably won’t be too eager to start. Procrastination and burnout both stemming from a lack of organization.
“But I have to-do lists and daily goals and I still procrastinate and feel guilty when I take a break,” you say. This is where schedule calibration comes in.
Setting a to-do list won’t immediately solve your problem. If you make the to-do list too large, you will start procrastinating again. If you make the to-do list too small, you’ll feel pressured to work in your off hours. Without calibrating your schedule, a to-do list is just a piece of paper.
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Courage Under Fire: Facing Up to the School Bully
Note: this is a follow-up the last week’s article, 3 Words That Forever Changed a Deaf Boy’s Life.
After hearing those three words, life as I knew it was never the same. It put me directly in the path of discovering courage I never knew I had. And I learned that the opportunity to overcome adversity with this kind of courage sometimes strikes when we least expect it….
A week after Mrs. Jordan belted out THAT’S RIGHT STEPHEN!, I was out on the playground during lunch recess. It was a beautiful spring day. Skies were clear and a warm, gentle breeze was blowing across the landscape. I always loved the spring. It always put me in a good mood. It felt as if the warm spring breeze caressed my face, giving me the feeling that I was being taken care of.
Ten minutes into lunch recess I saw David, the class bully sauntering towards me. He walked with a cocky swagger, his lips pursed like Elvis Presley. It was typical of an undefeated bully in those days. Up to that point, he had literally beaten up everyone else in the whole school, except for me. Not that I was tough or anything but he left me alone for some reason.
Oh, no, my time has come, I thought. My body went rigid with tension. I didn’t dare move. With steady eyes, I watched him approach me.
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A Guide to Awakening a Robotic Mind
There seems to be an increasing trend towards what I call “robotic” (or “mechanical”) thinking. This is a type of thinking that leads people to jump to conclusions, make claims to universal truth, and depend upon simplistic explanations of complex realities.
The opposite of a robotic mind is an open and critical mind. This is where we are curious, questioning, flexible, and willing to consider a wide range of possibilities in dealing with a question or problem. And this approach lets us make judgements, choices and decisions for ourselves, instead of letting others do it on our behalf.
I think each of us would like to think we are open minded, but the truth is many of us are oblivious to our own individual thought processes. And there are, of course, various shades of gray in between having an open mind and a robotic mind. So lets have a look at what are, in my opinion, three of the major signs of robotic thinking and some ways to fix this problem.
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Spirituality for Dummies
When many people think of spirituality their minds automatically go to religion. This is not, however, an entirely accurate understanding of what spirituality is. Having spirituality simply means believing in something greater than yourself. It can be incredibly powerful to have a sense of spirituality in your life, and very often it can haul you through the difficult times in your pursuit for success, happiness, and fulfillment.
Your sense of spirituality may involve the divine. Our society is rooted in the belief of a supernatural, omnipotent being who oversees our personal destinies. Other people shirk these beliefs and prefer to take destiny into their own hands, and in choosing spirituality invoke the aspects of nature or the cosmos rather than an all-knowing religious icon.
Spirituality is deeply personal in nature. It serves to rejuvenate and enlighten the soul and feed the human spirit. It helps guide our decisions in life and helps to direct our conscience. Recent surveys have shown that the vast percentage of society holds religious or spiritual beliefs. It is also interesting to note that a majority of these people have broken from childhood teachings in order to seek out a belief system that holds greater personal meaning to them.
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The Shy Person’s Guide to Talking to Strangers
One of the easiest ways to improve your networking ability and invigorate your social life is to develop the skill of talking to strangers.
We’re trained as children to fear strangers (which is good for safety reasons) but most people carry this fear into adulthood where it does more harm than good. It becomes a constraint on the number of people you can meet and interact with. You get stuck in a box, only open to creating new relationships through people you already know.
If you already know a lot of people, this can work all right, but it limits you to meeting people who are generally like you. If you are new to an area and don’t have many friends, the fear of talking to strangers is absolutely crippling.
Fortunately, developing the skill of talking to strangers is easy. Once you get started the immense benefits and excitement it brings will encourage you to keep going.
It comes down to three things:
- Understanding the benefits of talking to strangers.
- Knowing how to deal with the occasional rejection or unpleasant encounter.
- Breaking down your fear through practice.
Everyone is a Learning Experience
To get an idea of the benefits of talking to strangers, you need to change your mentality. As tribal creatures, we’re naturally inclined to fear, nay hate, people we don’t know. We instinctually perceive them as dangerous outsiders, seeking to pillage our village and make off with our women and children!
In modern society this simply isn’t true. Most people are friendly and perfectly open to conversing with you. It just takes a little effort to cross the stranger barrier. Each person is an incredible learning opportunity. What they tell you about themselves. How they live and interact with the world. There is a wealth information waiting to be tapped.
Strangers also tell you a tremendous amount about yourself by the way they react to you. As you gain experience and learn to read body language, these reactions are essential to developing your social skills. Of course, there are also the priceless relationships you’ll have the chance to form:
- Business contacts – Who you know (and what they think of you) is often more important than what’s on your resume.
- Friendships
- Mentors and teachers
- Romantic relationships
I think the last point is extremely important. We all dream of meeting our ideal mate, but when we see someone we’re extremely attracted to, we’re usually too intimidated to approach them. How can you expect to find love with that mentality?
Dealing with Rudeness and Rejection
Now that you’re sold on the benefits of talking to strangers, the only other skill you’ll need is the ability to let rejection roll off your back. The key to this is not taking it personally.
At least 95% of the time when a person reacts negatively to you it has absolutely nothing to do with you personally. Most likely they’re having a bad day or you caught them at the wrong moment. Maybe they’ve been harassed by people before and assume you have bad intentions. Or maybe they’re just not that cool and you wouldn’t gain much from knowing them anyways.
Instead of reliving the incident in your mind and dwelling on your insecurities, imagine reasons for their behavior that don’t depend on you. In the 5% of cases where you actually caused the negative reaction, treat it as a learning experience. The problem isn’t you, it’s your behavior, so examine what you could have done better. Did you come off pushy? Could your personal appearance be better? Thinking about these things will go a long way towards improving yourself.
How to Get Started
That hardest part of talking to strangers is getting started. Before you have experience striking up conversations it can make you nervous and awkward, but the more you do it the smoother and more likeable you’ll become.
Start Small - If you’re a naturally reserved person, you’ll probably want to warm up a bit. Start with making eye contact with people you might like to talk to, smiling at them, or saying Hi out of the blue. Think of possible conversation starters you could say.
Comment on Something – If you see something remarkable, make a comment. Even if it’s not at anyone directly, chances are people will hear and react to you. If you see someone doing or wearing something interesting, tell them what you think. Keep it positive and most likely they will be happy to chat.
Make a Joke - If a decent joke pops into your head, just come out and say it. If someone laughs, that’s the perfect conversation starter. This is great for opening dialogue with attractive people of the opposite sex.
That’s really all there is to it. Good luck and don’t get discouraged. You have nothing to lose but your shyness!
Update: Due to reader request, I’ve written a post with some more practical tips on appearing friendly and approachable.
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Don’t Let Your Family Affect Your Work
If you work from home, you’ll understand what I mean when I say “don’t let your family affect your work”.
We love our family members, there is no doubt about that. Consequently, their smallest actions sometimes leave behind prolonged shadows. An argument with a spouse is a lot more draining than an argument with a colleague in the office. Your child’s behavior may leave you totally shattered when you are in the midst of drafting an important document. Even a single remark from your boyfriend or girlfriend can shatter your entire schedule.
When you go to office you normally leave your home behind. It is a completely new world where, although you are surrounded by people you know, they actually don’t matter to you as much as your family members do. If they say something to you or if they do something that is not agreeable you will be simply angry or enraged; there is a very little chance that you will be heartbroken. This is because you are not emotionally attached to those people. To family members you are. They can hurt you like no one else.
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3 Words That Forever Changed a Deaf Boy’s Life
From the very first day, school was a struggle. And yet, as fate would have it, three simple words forever changed my life…..
Since it never occurred to anybody at the school to retain the services of an interpreter, I had to sit in the front row so that I could read the teacher’s lips. Classroom discussions were virtually impossible to follow because I couldn’t hear what was being said around the room. In a vain effort to keep up with the flow of conversation swirling around me, I was always asking whoever happened to be sitting next to me what was being said. Eventually, I got tired of watching everyone shrug their shoulders indifferently and rolling their eyes. I began to pretend that I knew what was going on. Fitting in was so important to me that every time the kids laughed, I laughed along even though I was clueless most of the time.
I spent every spare moment trying to keep up with my peers. While most of them finished their homework well before dinner, I was often holed up in my room right up until dinnertime, only to go back and work well into the night.
One evening, I was working on a math word problem. For the life of me, I couldn’t solve it so I asked my father to help me out. We had been going over it for more than a half-hour and making no progress at all. The smell of pizza drifted in from the kitchen. It was almost suppertime.
My father decided to try one last time.
“Stephen, read through the word problem again,” he said.
After I read it aloud, he added, “Now, do you add or subtract?”
Hesitantly, I replied, “Add?”
“NO, STEPHEN YOU HAVE TO SUBTRACT, SUBTRACT, SUBTRACT!”
His eyes were bulging, ready to pop out while slamming his fist on my tiny desk, almost knocking over the little green lamp.
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Exciting Announcements
You’ve probably noticed some subtle improvements on PickTheBrain over the past month. Stuff like better images in posts, competitions, and book giveaways.
The explanation for this is that I’ve started doing less, and Peter from IWillChangeYourLife has come on board as the primary editor!
I’ll still be around, writing posts, taking part in discussions, and managing the site in general, but having Peter around to help out will allow me to spend time on other projects while continuing to improve the site.
If you’d like to know a bit more about Peter, check out his interview at the TheNext45Years or head over to his personal blog, which is a great read. Also, feel free to contact him at Peter@pickthebrain.com.
New EBooks from Scott and Leo
Two good friends of PickTheBrain, Scott Young and Leo Babauta, have recently published ebooks that are definitely worth checking out.
Scott’s book is about holistic learning, and provides some great tips for how to learn more while studying less. You can check out a preview copy of the book here.
Leo’s new book is called The Zen Habits Handbook for Life. It’s basically a well organized and nicely designed compilation of all the best ZenHabits posts.
I was fortunate enough to receive free review copies of each book, and both of them are well worth the investment.
Also, I’ve just launched a new blog, totally unrelated to PTB, about media and technology. If you’re interested in that type of stuff head over and check it out or just grab the RSS feed.
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