Merlin Mann on his 43 Folders site (currently posting only occasionally as he works on his book) quotes Frank Chimero asking and answering this question:

Q: How do you maintain focus (on work, dreams, goals, life)?
A: You do one thing at a time.

While I think there’s more to know, I also think Frank has hit the nail on the head. As I mention in my post “How to Multitask, and When Not To,” our brains are rigged to only really focus on one thing at a time. This is one reason task lists fail sometimes: we get the whole list of everything in there, but then we look at it and say “Aah! I can’t do all that stuff! That’s overwhelming!” Then we run and hide, or perhaps waste three and a half hours surfing the Net to find out what happened to our favorite childhood TV stars.

Even when we bravely face our task lists instead of running away, it’s still difficult to get up motivation to do something when you’re simultaneously staring at three dozen other things you need to do. My solution to this was to create a separate “At the Moment” list in the task list system I use and to put just a few items at a time in that list, the ones that I’m pretty confident I’m going to get done in the next little while, or at latest by the end of the day.

My “At the Moment” list has proven very helpful, but it hasn’t entirely solved the problem. Nor has it solved the problem of sometimes picking whichever item from the “At the Moment” list is easiest or most fun, letting myself forget that others are more important or more pressing.

So I created yet another category: my Top 1 list. I’ve mentioned before the importance of knowing the next thing you’re going to be focusing on so that as soon as you get a chance to focus on it, you can start right in instead of having to regroup. The Top 1 list just takes this idea and makes it into a practice: whatever the next thing I’m going to do is, it goes on the Top 1 list. Then as soon as I’m done whatever I’ve been doing and am free to move on to the next thing, I look at the Top 1 list–the contents of which I usually already know–and there is the thing I need to tackle. Even if that one thing is unappealing, just spending a very short time–say, 30 seconds–thinking about getting that done is usually enough to get me in gear and ready to tackle it. Having that much focus on that one item alone makes it much more likely I’ll get it done.

Of course I put a new item on there as soon as the Top 1 task is under way, feeding from my At the Moment list, which is short enough to make this process fairly painless. And choosing a task to do next is usually a little easier than choosing a task to do now, since you don’t yet have to face the task when you’re just choosing it to do a little later.

All this process does is shove a few obstacles temporarily out of the way, but often just this little advantage can make a big difference; it certainly has for me.

Photo by Koshyk

In 2003, I entered a writing contest, one in which I had already been a finalist. The deadline for mailing in entries was a Saturday, and at the time I lived in a small Vermont city where the last mail collection anywhere nearby on Saturday was at noon–but there was a post office about an hour away that didn’t close until a few hours later. I finished final edits to my story after noon, cursed my luck, printed it and readied it for mailing, and drove the two hour round trip to mail it from the central post office. On the way home I thought to myself “If I don’t win–and it’s such a big contest, I probably won’t–this is going to have been a huge waste of time.”

I did win, and the winning was very, very much worth the inconvenience of a two hour drive. But I had three months in which to write the story, and I finished just an hour or two too late to mail it from my local post office. Why did everything get pushed to the last minute? Why are so many of us so often late?

The answer to that question has gradually come clear to me over the last few years of studying self-motivation, and in general it’s that being on time requires coordinating a variety of things we often don’t think to or don’t want to coordinate. Knowing exactly what all of these pieces are makes it much easier to be on time all the time–if a person decides to put in the effort. If being on time doesn’t feel as important as finishing the TV show or getting another 15 minutes of sleep, then it won’t win out. If being late is causing trouble in your life, the first thing to consider is valuing being on time more highly. Maybe it’s worth more than it seems at first blush. Because knowing how to be on time isn’t enough: to be on time, a person also has to take responsibility and commit to using what they know about timeliness. I’ll talk about how to value things better in another post.

But for any of us who are interested in being more punctual, here are the key principles of being on time:

1. Plan in advance. It’s not possible to be on time on the spur of the moment unless you happen to be very lucky. Being on time requires planning, because our off-the-cuff estimates tend to miss important things that are between us and getting somewhere on time except in the simplest cases. Little problems and delays in getting somewhere are common–the greater the distance or the less familiar the route, the more they tend to happen. Really being on time requires allotting extra room in case of a little trouble on the way.
2. Get ready first; do optional things second. Though it’s often much more tempting to, say, finish reading a chapter of a book first and then get ready to go, really committing to being on time may mean putting the book down, getting ready, and then finishing the chapter if there’s time.
3. Know what time you have to get up to go (… or pick up the phone, log in, head to bed, etc.). Include travel time, a buffer for minor mishaps, and time to actually get out the door (because getting up from the easy chair isn’t the same thing as pulling out of the driveway).
4. Know everything you need to do before leaving and how long those things will take.
5. Take personal responsibility for being on time. It’s true, sometimes there are major problems that get in the way, but things like “I couldn’t find my keys” and “Traffic on the interstate was slow” usually are sidestepping responsibility rather than taking control and owning one’s own schedule and decisions.
6. Be OK with arriving early. If you try to arrive exactly on time, you’re planning on everything going exactly as expected, which everything rarely does. If you’re concerned about not making good use of time or about being bored, bring something to do (a book, a list of things you need to think over, a meditation practice) in case you find yourself with extra time.
7. Recognize the costs of being late, both to others and to yourself. For instance, if a meeting for five people is held up for 15 minutes because of one person, this is equivalent in some ways to making someone sit down and wait for them for an hour. Being late also diminishes others’ confidence and trust in the late person, loses opportunities that may be available on time but not afterward, makes a worse impression, creates problems with others’ schedules, etc. To adapt an analogy from Stephen Covey, building trust is like making a deposit in a bank account: each time a person lives up to responsibilities, trust increases. Each time a person doesn’t live up to responsibilities (for instance, by being late), the account gets drawn down, and if this keeps happening, it eventually gets overdrawn, and there’s no trust left at all.
8. Accept that being late isn’t the end of the world, though. It’s not necessary to beat oneself up about being late: recognize the costs, take responsibility, and be willing to prioritize more next time. Getting too anxious about being late can make it hard to bring ourselves to focus on it long enough to conquer the problem. The past is done; we can only change what we’re doing now and plan better for the future.

The principles of being on time apply not only to getting to appointments, but also to things like getting enough sleep and doing a task that is promised by a certain time. And while being on time is not the single greatest virtue in the world, it is a practice that contributes to serenity, opportunity, and good relations.

A later post of mine provides a simple mnemonic for being on time: EAST. It provides an easy way to apply the ideas above.

Image by monkeyc.net

Since I started getting serious about fitness, there have been two kinds of health habits I’ve been trying to change and improve, and they’re the same two that we hear all the time when people talk about weight loss: eating and exercise. I can tell you from experience that eating well and exercising regularly work, if they’re done the right way. What I haven’t understood until now is why picking up the exercise habit was so much easier than changing my eating habits.

In both cases, I’m trying to strengthen good habits (getting regular exercises, choosing healthy foods to eat), but only in the case of eating am I also trying to quash bad habits (eating the wrong foods or too much of the right foods).

When I started exercising, I got into good habits within a few months, habits that have improved slowly over time ever since. Eating, however, has been another story. In terms of good eating habits, I’ve been building those much like my exercise habits. Some of the lunches I’ve been eating are so filling yet light and nutritious, they’d make you weep. Well, maybe not you, but certainly someone with a sentimental streak for healthy lunches.

My bad eating habits, though, haven’t been going away at the same rate as my good eating habits have been coming in. Sure, they’ve been diminishing over time, but if the good habits had had anything to say about it, the bad habits would have been beaten to an unrecognizable pulp years ago. So what’s going on here?

Research to the rescue: A study by psychologists Bas Verplanken and Suzanne Faes gives evidence that forming a good habit to reach a goal doesn’t necessarily do anything to get rid of bad habits that might get in the way of that same goal. Verplanken and Faes make sense of this with the idea of “implementation intentions”–plans to do something specific in a specific kind of situation. This research seems to show that implementation intentions (like “prepare a healthy lunch in the morning and bring it in to work instead of buying something”) are much more useful for forming habits than general goals (like “eat a healthy lunch”). When you think about it, this makes sense: building habits is about doing something over and over again. If a person hasn’t decided exactly what to do exactly when, there’s a lot more in the way of the behavior that person is trying to repeat.

Implementation intentions, though, only cover specific circumstances and specific behaviors. So my nifty ideas for lunch can certainly help me choose a healthy lunch over an unhealthy lunch–but those same ideas will have little or no effect on whether I decide to buy some kind of high-calorie food to munch on an hour later.

The upshot seems to be that good habits can help destroy bad habits only if there’s no way for both habits to happen together. Bad habits can be overcome, and there are many tools on this site that offer ways to overcome them, but to make the best progress on that front, it becomes important for us to separate out the specific habits we’re trying to change or acquire, good and bad, so that we know which bad habits need to be tackled directly and which we can depend on good habits to crush.

Photo by Helico

There’s one particular kind of choice that most of us make several times a day without even noticing it, one that can have a profound impact on our focus, understanding, and drive and therefore on what we accomplish in our lives. These choices are about what to do with spare thinking time. Driving or riding in to work, we might be in a habit of turning on the radio or listening to music or to audiobooks. Waiting at the doctor’s office, we may pick up a magazine or check e-mail on a cell phone. Relaxing after a long work day, we might turn on the television as soon as we have a moment to breathe. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with those things, but they are worth reconsidering just the same, because we can use some of those times to think about our goals.

Why thinking about goals is cool
I admit, “thinking about goals” doesn’t sound like a very exciting activity, but it does have some immediate payoffs. Taking a few moments to write about or think about or discuss or even talk to ourselves about whatever our primary goal is at the moment–eating more healthily, being a better parent, contacting more sales prospects, honing violin skills, or whatever it may be–provides us with four essential ingredients of self-motivation: mindfulness, visualization, feedback, and planning.

The mindfulness advantage of using some of our available mental time to think about a goal is that we have more opportunity to anticipate times when we want to be more aware in the near future–to remind ourselves to be mindful–as well as more time to notice details of things that have happened very recently.

Visualization is about reconnecting with our goals. What are the payoffs of eating well or talking to more prospects? How would it feel to be able to play that really difficult piece on the violin or to get through a disagreement with the kids at home without shouting? Really taking time to imagine how things might be once we succeed at a goal is both informative–we get a clearer idea of where we’re trying to get–and energizing.

The feedback that even a few spare moments provide can offer solutions to problems that may not even have been apparentotherwise. For instance, if I’m trying to be a better communicator and I realize at lunch that I haven’t gathered all the information I need for the meeting I have at 2:00, I may come to the realization that sometimes my communication problems are just lack of preparation. Reflecting often on how things are going with an important goal gives a better short-term understanding of our own actions that can be invaluable.

And planning can be more useful even than it might seem. For instance, if I’m working on always being on time I might think about a 7:00 dinner I’m expected at while driving home from work and realize that I need to leave the house fifteen minutes earlier than I had planned because I need to allow time to stop and pick up a bottle of wine.

Fighting habits to change another habit
Fighting the habit of immediately going to some kind of entertainment or distraction as soon as our brains are available takes some doing, and requires a bit of mindfulness itself. However, the payoff of using even a few spare moments a couple of times a day is greatly increased awareness and greatly improved ability to use the tools available to us to increase motivation.

Photo by tripu

It’s a common idea in our culture that we can do better if we just try harder. And it’s true that the more times we try something, the more likely we are to succeed, so that’s useful. It’s also true that sometimes a person’s point of view can change, and they can find themselves much more driven to accomplish something they haven’t been able to do before, like the smoker who has a heart attack and finds her attention focused on getting healthy in a new and powerful way. Yet usually, “just trying harder” is worse than useless. Here’s why.

The idea of “just trying harder” assumes that a person wasn’t trying as hard as they were inclined to already. “Trying harder” is based on the idea that we have some power, some reserve of will, that we’re holding back and have simply not deigned to use, even though we could use it at any time we wanted. For most of us, in most situations, that’s not the case: we’re using all the motivation we can muster. Trying harder is a nice idea, but not something that is really going to emerge, because the next time we’re presented with the same situation, we’re likely to be about the same person with about the same priorities and about the same resources, following about the same habits for about the same reasons. All of which means that we can expect our results to be about the same.

Fortunately, there is another option. Instead of trying harder, we have the option of trying differently.

Trying differently means paying attention to different aspects of our situation, choosing to think different thoughts, and following different procedures. Here are some specific ways in which we can do things differently:

• Mindfulness: When the problem situation comes up again, we take a moment to reflect on what we’re thinking, on what our values are, and on patterns we’re following.
• Idea repair: This one goes well with mindfulness, and involves detecting and then repairing misleading and destructive thoughts when we allow ourselves to think them.
• Planning: Planning how to act in advance, like setting aside extra time before leaving for an appointment to avoid running late, can provide options that under normal circumstances aren’t available.
• Redirecting: When a problem situation comes up, instead of putting our efforts into trying to resist the behavior we don’t want, we can focus our attention on the behavior we do want, especially the positive things about it.

These aren’t the only approaches that can empower us to act differently, although they are some of the most useful. The key thing to take away here is that failure is often not so much a sign of weakness or limitation or of not trying hard enough as it is a sign that next time, another approach might make all the difference in the world.

Just before Thanksgiving, I posted How Not to Blow a Diet Over the Holidays, which contained the best information I had to offer about holding to a difficult course of fitness and weight loss during a time of year crammed with distractions, temptations, and surprises. Toward the end of the post I said, “Today I weigh 182 pounds. I’ll update this post in early January to let you know how it came out for me: I expect to have lost at least a few pounds.” Was my prediction sound? And just how useful did I find my own recommendations?

What worked
Well, my rash declaration definitely helped me focus my attention and reminded me to use the best knowledge I have. (After all, just knowing something isn’t the same thing as making active use of the knowledge), and the self-motivation skills I’ve been researching and writing about seem to have done the trick: my scale this morning tells me I weigh 177, five pounds less than I did a few days before Thanksgiving. I’ve lost roughly a pound a week over that time, most of it in the beginning of December, and am very close to my goal fitness level. (Exactly how close, I can’t be sure, as I’m not aiming for a number on the scale, but instead for a level of visible fitness.)

Did my pre-Thanksgiving strategies help me? Absolutely. I made a point of bringing food I could eat to celebrations and meals, planned what to eat ahead of time (including limits), took special care to track what I was eating, and talked freely about what I was doing to get support and to increase the potential rewards of sticking with it.

Unexpected complications
So did my own pre-holiday advice eliminate all trouble for me? Definitely not. The two problems I wasn’t expecting seem obvious in hindsight, but when I was making my plans, all I was worried about was the food that would be available to me.

The first of the surprise problems was time for exercise. I generally try to exercise as close as possible to every day. Over the holidays, there were a number of days when I would be with friends or family in all of my available time, and the idea of getting everyone up after Christmas dinner to go for a family run somehow didn’t seem very appropriate to me. Also, my habit of taking 3-5 Taekwondo classes a week was interrupted by holiday closures of the dojang (Taekwondo gym). So I squeezed in exercise when and where I could, more than once getting on the elliptical trainer or doing home Taekwondo practice well after 10:00 at night. In future, I’d want to plan better for these scheduling challenges, probably getting in some morning exercise instead of following my usual evening schedule–but I will also know to expect that I’ll get less exercise over the holidays, and to a limited extent, that’s OK with me.

The other problem I faced was a one-two punch: I would arrive home tired (though cheerful) after having eaten at irregular hours and spent the day with family or friends. I don’t know about you, but for me the combination of being tired and being off my normal eating schedule is a very bad one: it tends to make me feel hungry and inattentive, which means I’ll often just take whatever I think of first and eat it–hardly a recipe for weight loss success. A day like this broke my winning streak of keeping under 1700 calories a day and logging everything I ate, which had gotten up to 42 interrupted days. I’m now in the early days of a new winning streak, and have high hopes that it will carry me across my personal finish line as I rack up the days.

One good holiday season may be the most I’ll ever need
As I write this and do my best to extract knowledge for future (an example of keeping a feedback loop), I’m realizing that if all goes well, it’s very, very likely that when the 2010 holidays come around, I’ll have been on maintenance for quite a while, and while I’ll need to continue to be careful, I won’t need to be nearly as careful as I am now. In other words, losing weight over this past holiday season together with continued effort may mean I’ll never have to be quite so careful over the holidays again. Even if I had done no better than maintain my weight during that time, the same result would probably apply. For many people who are getting in shape, one really successful holiday season may be the make-or-break period for the entire process.

How did things go for you over the holidays? Any special difficulties or unusual accomplishments?

Regardless of how the holidays came out for you in terms of your health, we’re now at a time of year that is probably better suited to renewing commitment and redoubling efforts than any other, and we can use it to launch ourselves forward. Here’s to a powerfully motivated New Year.

Photo by oh_candy

In my previous article, I offered four ways to make self-motivation easier, and talked about stacking up advantages ahead of time instead of waiting to come face to face with a difficult situation. Here I’ll cover five more ways to make self-motivation easier: building up enthusiasm, being more mentally and physically prepared to face challenges, getting help from others, learning, and minimizing temptation.

Visualize and find your enthusiasm
When things are going well, I’m not distracted, and I have time to think about what I want to do, I’m often in a good state of mind to improve my motivation, but by definition these low-demand times tend to be ones when not much motivation is needed. I can build up motivation for harder times by using these opportunities to visualize where I’m trying to get and by otherwise spending time thinking about and especially enjoying my goal, whether I’m reflecting on successes so far, enjoying progress, envisioning future payoffs, or planning ahead. The more time I spend thinking positively about my goal, the more accessible positive thoughts about it will be when I really need them. For instance, if I’m trying to learn to play a musical instrument, I can visualize myself playing it and remind myself why I’m putting in all the hard work.

Take care of yourself
When we get enough sleep, exercise regularly, eat well, and use techniques like meditation to aid mood and mental focus, we’re much more capable of being proactive in our lives than when we are tired, inactive, badly nourished, overstuffed, or carrying around a lot of stress. Mood and physical well-being have an important impact on making good decisions, so everything we can do to improve them will tend to improve  motivation, too.

Get support
Connecting with a friend or family member to talk about your goals, the problems you’re running into, your plans, and your successes is a good way to keep your goal more in mind and to process your thoughts about it. Having someone in your corner can also make it more important to to do well and provides more options if something starts going wrong. A person trying to quit a bad habit can go talk to a supporter when temptation seems particularly strong. Someone trying to get a better job can talk through their plans and strategies if they have a sympathetic ear.

Read, learn
Reading about subjects having to do with our goals serves several purposes at once: it gives us more information to use when making plans; keeps our goal more in our mind; lets us try on others’ ideas; and serves as a physical reminder (whenever we see the book) of what’s being accomplished. Someone trying to get fit can learn a lot from books about nutrition and exercise, like The 9 Truths About Weight Loss. Anyone trying to change habits and running into emotional resistance can benefit from books like Emotional Alchemy, The Feeling Good Handbook, or A Guide to Rational Living.

Minimize temptation
Finally, minimizing temptation can be a real boon, at least in the short term, for anyone who’s really struggling with making the right choices. If you’re working on spending money wisely, you can take any savings you have and put it in a CD or some other instrument that makes it difficult or impossible to withdraw for a time. Someone who’s trying to quit playing video games can actually sell the games rather than hanging on to them to play just a little bit now and then.

This approach is a bit of a crutch, and the problem with relying too much on it is that when a situation comes up where there is temptation–for instance, when the person working on spending gets a tax refund, or when the former video game player is staying with a friend who has a top-notch video game system–the strategies to deal with the temptation may not be very well developed. But like all of these strategies, minimizing temptation–if not relied on absolutely–can help make everything simpler.

Photo by James Jordan

This series of articles on distraction is adapted from my eBook on Writing Motivation. In the first article in the series, I talked about the high cost of distractions and mentioned four things we can do to minimize them. The second article delved into how location choice can help prevent distractions. The next article will consider some ways to deal with distractions that can’t be prevented, while this one covers three prevention tactics: managing responsibilities, devising rules, and erecting barriers.

Manage responsibilities
Managing responsibilities means using planning and negotiation to minimize interruptions. If you want to set aside time every night from 9:00 to 10:00, tell everyone you know that you’re busy during that time and would appreciate no phone calls or spur-of-the-moment visits. If you’re a parent and have a spouse or partner, offer to take full responsibility for the kids during certain periods in exchange for your spouse doing the same thing during your pre-arranged work times. Almost anyone who might either interrupt you or be a means to head off interruptions is a good person to negotiate with to help keep these times undisturbed.

Managing responsibilities may also mean finding ways to keep yourself from being distracted by other obligations. In my interview with her, writer and entrepreneur Nancy Fulda talks about the effectiveness of taking care of small, nagging tasks before tackling the larger, more consuming ones: “The problem with that was that all those unfinished tasks weighed on my mind.  It was like a mountain of work hanging over me, this big dreadful pile of Things That Needed Done, and it sapped my energy like a vampire … The thing is, that huge dreadful mountain tasks seldom took more than an hour to complete.”

Devise rules
Devising rules means thinking about possible interruptions and coming up with solutions to head them off before you even get started. The resulting solutions are ones you can adhere to without thinking, for instance “Never answer the phone while practicing” or “When decluttering, never stop to read anything: instead, put anything of real interest aside in a ‘to read’ pile.” Rules have to be clearly planned so that there is no thinking involved. If one of your rules is not to open your e-mail program while you’re working on your finances or not to watch TV until your housework is done, then you’ll know that you’ll need to be strict about those rules in order for them to work. When you have preplanned responses like this, dealing with the situations you’ve anticipated does not take a large amount of attention, and therefore doesn’t require the wholesale reorganization of thoughts a full-fledged distraction would have forced.

My article on the value of rules in motivation is here . 

Erect barriers
Erecting barriers means taking physical steps to guard your work area from interruptions: a sign on the door saying “Please come back after 2:30 PM,” unplugging your phone or your network cable, putting on music that you work well to, and using earplugs are all ways to use barriers to temporarily shield your environment from the infinite distractions of the outside world.

Photo by mahalie

There’s a very good (though a bit overstated) articlea friend pointed out today in The Chronicle of Higher Education  about lateness: http://chronicle.com/article/Sorry-Im-Late/49148/ . It’s a little jaded, but it offers four categories of late people, three of which seem very insightful to me. (The fourth claims that busy people are never late because they know the value of time, but to me that seems much like saying hungry people never make bad food choices.)

I was particularly interested in the article because of one of my own that I began writing some time back and expect to post when it’s ready, entitled “How Not to Be Late.” I think it will be useful in informing my own article when the time comes to finish it.

While we often focus on how willpower operates at the moments when we need it, there are some aspects of willpower that function best if they’re prepared beforehand. A couple of examples might demonstrate what I mean.

Running up against no-win situations
1. A business owner plans a meeting with a prospective client. Knowing that she tends to be late, she resolves to pay extra attention to being on time. On the day of the meeting, she works on her marketing plan for much of the morning before remembering that she has to complete some important work for another client before she goes. She rushes through the task, but by the time it’s done she’s running behind, and she realized belatedly that she still needs to gather some papers before she leaves. She decides she can’t afford the time to find the papers, hurries to the meeting, arrives 20 minutes late, and is very anxious during her presentation–particularly since she doesn’t have the materials she was planning on bringing.

2. A man has recently started to eat more healthily and has resolved not to eat some of the foods that he used to love because his doctor has warned him of the danger of serious heart problems. He decides late in the afternoon to take his wife to dinner and lets her pick the restaurant. At the restaurant they have many of his old favorites that he has been trying to avoid and not much else that sounds appealing. He ends up ordering something that sounds a little healthier than his usual fare but turns out to be pretty much just as bad. His recent successes with healthy foods doesn’t feel so inspiring any more.

When no-win situations can be won in advance
In both of these examples, the individual is relying completely on acting well when the key decision–to leave on time, to choose something healthy–comes. The woman doesn’t consider making special plans to ensure she won’t be late, and the man assumes that eating right means just deciding well when he gets to the restaurant. Yet when the moment of truth comes along, the woman finds she is still busy with another priority, one she can’t set aside, and the man finds he has few good options.

Both of these situations show people who are trying to change habits using a “business as usual” approach. The problem with this is that changing habits by definition means not doing what we’re used to doing. Both the businesswoman and the man who is trying to protect his health are assuming that if they “just try harder” in some indefinable way, they will succeed. “Just trying harder” doesn’t work: what works is trying differently. In these examples, trying differently means preparing.

So how might the situations come out if the people involved prepare? Let’s take a look.

Using preparation to make willpower easier
1. A business owner plans a meeting with a prospective client. Knowing that she tends to be late, she decides to schedule the time she has before the meeting to ensure that she leaves not just on time, but 10 minutes early. She calculates how much time that will leave her in the morning and reviews her obligations. This shows her that she has to complete some important work for another client before she leaves, and that therefore she’ll need to start on that important work first thing in the morning. She would also like to work on her marketing plan, and thinks she might have time to complete that too, but she makes sure she schedules it second just in case. She completes the work for the other client in the morning and sends it out an hour and a half before it’s time to go. Then she sets an alarm clock for five minutes before departure time and begins work on the marketing plan. She’s not finished with the marketing plan when the alarm goes off, but she gets up and gathers her things. She realizes she needs to get some papers to bring with her and spends ten minutes getting them, but since she had built in a small buffer, she still arrives at her meeting a few minutes early, fully prepared.

2. A man has recently started to eat more healthily and has resolved not to eat some of the foods that he used to love because his doctor has warned him of the danger of serious heart problems. He decides late in the afternoon to take his wife to dinner, but realizes that unless they go to a place with something healthy he likes to eat, he might be in danger of ordering one of his old favorites. He talks with his wife and picks a restaurant that sells a lot of deep-fried foods but that also has a salad bar he likes. On the way to pick up his wife he realizes that he should do everything he can to prevent buying something fried, so he resolves to refuse a menu and preemptively order the salad bar. At the restaurant, the waitress tries to press the menu on him just so that he can see all the options, but he insists that he would like the salad bar even before they sit down. He has the salad bar and it’s pretty good, even if it’s not as good as the chicken fried steak and cheddar cheese soup he would usually have eaten. He even chooses to have the vinaigrette instead of his usual ranch dressing. He does eat some of his wife’s french fries, but not very many.

Perfection is optional
In the examples with preparation, both the business owner and the health-minded man still made mistakes. The business owner could clearly benefit from even more planning, and the health-minded man would do better to completely ignore his wife’s food–but both of them were essentially very successful, and their success was based not on somehow summoning up powerful reserves of self-control, but on steering their own behavior through preparation, and on recognizing their limitations.

All that effective preparation requires to aid willpower is a willingness to look into the future and think about the places where we’re vulnerable to fall into bad habits. In some cases, preparation can get us out of impossible situations (like needing to finish a project before leaving but also needing not to be late), and in others it can just make good choices easier (like providing an acceptable alternative to deep-fried food).

There is no substitute for a good choice
Preparation isn’t a substitute for making good decisions, though: the business owner could have chosen to work “just a little longer” on the marketing plan and ended up late after all, and the health-minded man could have taken the menu from the waitress just to avoid seeming unpleasant, then ended up ordering something he ultimately didn’t want to be eating. Good choices here means surrendering to our own priorities, giving up on the idea of finishing the marketing plan right away and being willing to seem a little unfriendly to the waitress if those things turn out to be  necessary for sticking to our goals.

What’s your greatest difficulty with willpower or self-motivation? Is there anything you could easily do ahead of time to tip those kinds of situations in your favor?

Photo by .imelda