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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