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

Changing habits, making good choices, or really pushing hard toward a goal can get very difficult when it comes time to act. Probably you’ve had experiences, like I have, where good intentions beforehand weren’t enough to force a good choice when the time came. Continuing to try despite not always succeeding is key in developing good habits, but it’s not the only way to be more successful with self-motivation. In fact, there are a lot of things we can do to make self-motivation easier. While you might already know some of these ways, especially if you’ve been reading this site, the reason for this article is to ask the question, “Are you doing everything you can to make progress toward your goal easier?”

To help provide a good answer to that question (and to offer some areas to look at in case the answer is “no”), here’s a list of many ways to make willpower and self-motivation easier. After all, making the task easier usually means getting better results for less effort: it falls into the category of the time-worn advice “Work smarter, not harder.” There are limits to how much willpower we can summon up on a moment’s notice, but there may not be limits to the advantages we can stack up beforehand.

Decide what to do and make plans
Probably the single most important thing any of us can do to facilitate good choices is to understand what those choices should be ahead of time. If the task is studying, then how much studying needs to be done, and when should it happen? If the task is some kind of daily upkeep, like following up on e-mails within the day or keeping the dishes from piling up, what’s the exact plan for how these things will be handled?

Anticipate problems
If you ever find yourself explaining away self-motivation problems by saying “I was going to ____, but ____,” this may be a sign that you need to work on anticipating problems. Someone who’s trying to eat more healthily will be much more successful if they figure out what the options and dangers are before they walk into a party or a restaurant, for instance. Someone who’s self-employed and is trying to get in more work time will want to figure out ground rules for situations like when friends visit from out of town or for how much time–if any–it’s OK to spend doing things like volunteering or socializing during the work day.

Improve your tools and environment
In other posts I’ve gone into some detail about the value of choosing the best tools and setting up an encouraging environment for work on your goal. For example, a more welcoming environment can help a writer write more; having the right software or paper system can help another person organize much more easily.

Prepare
It can help sometimes if we think of ourselves as our own assistants. We have large, important goals, but often moving toward those goals is much easier when we do some grunt work ahead of time. To help facilitate a study session later in the day, try laying out books and other study materials on a table or desk so that starting requires just sitting down. To eat better, shop better.

On Monday I’ll continue with Part II and five more ways to make self-motivation easier.

Photo by Somewhat Frank

Self-motivation and willpower can benefit from learning a lot of different skills: setting goals, tracking progress, repairing broken ideas, organizing priorities; exercising and eating well and trying to get plenty of sleep and meditating to have energy and support a good mood; making rules … and while it’s possible to have willpower without using every one of these tools, the more of them we use effectively, the stronger our willpower is.

One key theme
And yet there’s one simple principle that underlies almost all of these tactics. It’s much easier to state than to follow, but thinking about it helps us keep focused on what willpower means and on what we can do from moment to moment. It goes like this: Think more about the right things and less about the wrong things.

What I mean is that for any goal I might have (for instance, let’s say I was someone who did project proposals as part of my job and wanted to finish three new project proposals by the end of the week), there will be thoughts I could have that will help make that happen (like “there’s a good chance the higher-ups will be pretty impressed if I can pull this off” or “the next step would be doing that competitive analysis”), thoughts that I could have that will get in the way (like “I couldn’t get my proposals done on time the last time, so I’ll probably screw up again this time” or “I hate this work. I just want to go home and eat Twinkies”), and thoughts that won’t have any impact one way or the other as long as they don’t distract me too much (like “These shoes are getting pretty worn out” or “Wow, there’s an albatross outside my window!”). These are right thoughts, wrong thoughts, and neutral thoughts, respectively. The neutral ones we don’t care about, so that’s the last I’ll say of those.

By the way, I want to be clear that I don’t mean that the “right” thoughts are “right” because they are somehow morally better than the “wrong” thoughts. We’re just talking about right or wrong for moving toward a particular goal.

The direct approach
People often seem to talk about thoughts as though we have no control over them, as though they just arise in our heads, stay as long as they want, and then leave without any permission or control on our part. Fortunately, this isn’t the case. We can actively choose to think more of the right thoughts and less of the wrong thoughts by reflecting on our own thinking (a process called “metacognition,” which is one facet of mindfulness) and by focusing our attention.

For instance, if I’m trying to play less golf in order to spend more time with my family, and if I then find myself thinking about golf, I can consciously 1) recognize this and 2) select something different to focus my attention on. So when the thought comes into my head “This weather is perfect for golf,” I can then ask myself “Would it be perfect for doing something with my kids, too? What would be fun that we haven’t done in a while?” The more I think about that second, right thought, the less attention I’ll have to spare for that first, wrong thought.

Violence doesn’t solve anything
It’s useful to recognize that “right” thoughts aren’t just negations of “wrong” thoughts. The problem with trying to argue myself out of a “wrong” thought is that the more I mentally struggle with the problem, the more attention I’m giving it, and so the more opportunity the behavior I don’t want has to ensnare me. If I let that thought go and instead focus on letting something else appeal to me, then I can be led away peacefully rather than trying to defeat my own desires in mortal combat.

What tools are good for
With all of that said, thinking more of the right thoughts and less of the wrong thoughts isn’t always easy, and it’s not always clear how to do it. Nor is it always easy to focus our attention on our own thinking enough to recognize when we’re getting drawn into non-constructive thinking. To make things easier, we come full circle to the kinds of skills I mentioned at the beginning of this post, skills for making ourselves more resilient, understanding ourselves better, redirecting ourselves more easily, and so on. Feedback loops, rules, tracking, idea repair, and all the other mental tools I talk about on this site help support the process of thinking more of the right thoughts and less of the wrong ones. Regardless of what tools we use, taking charge of our own thoughts leads in the direction of achieving what we want to achieve.

Thinker photo by Rob Inh00d
Albatross photo by MrClean1982

Back in April I talked about this post on the New York Times blog, which seems to tell us that if we exert self-control in one area, it can cause us to have less self-control in other areas. Since then, I’ve come across a lot of information–studies, people’s stories of their experiences, my own experiences, books, and so on–that have helped me understand willpower a bit better. With this more informed perspective, I’d like to come back to the subject of self-control fatigue and ask: does willpower really get used up?

One goal at a time: focus, not fatigue
First, there’s one area where it’s become clear that not fatigue, but focus is the key. In the April post, I said “If we try to push in too many directions at once, we’ll rapidly become fatigued and usually lose our grip on all of the pieces. This is why, generally speaking, self-motivation works best when we work on one and only one kind of goal at a time.” Much information I’ve come across since writing that reinforces my conviction that as a rule, we have much better chances with new goals if we take on only one of them at a time–but because of focus instead of fatigue: if we try to take on two or more new goals at once, our attention is divided between them. This means less concentration on habits for each goal, less thinking about each goal, less recognizing of opportunities, less clarity, less mindfulness, and other kinds of limitations on how well we can really devote ourselves to our new goal. Since accomplishing a major goal usually means changing habits, and since habits are stubborn by definition, we usually need all the focus we can get when we take a new goal on.

Physiological energy and fatigue
The other aspect of self-control fatigue I talked about was physical energy: mentally exerting ourselves toward a goal takes a surprising amount of our available energy (and available blood sugar), which is what the Times blog post was focusing on regarding the study in question. Replenishing this energy with a little sugar fix (some lemonade) seemed to help. This particular point still stands, I would say: it’s harder to push for new goals when we’re tired, although it’s definitely still possible, especially if we’re well-prepared.

Is willpower a reservoir or a skill set?
But does this mean we use up willpower itself and need to regenerate it, or does it just mean that we use up our physical energy and have less of that to use in exerting our willpower? Just to share my current belief–this is nothing I’ve seen tested yet in any study, although that would certainly be of interest to me–I don’t think willpower really does get used up at all. What is willpower, after all? It’s often characterized as being like a reservoir or an electrical charge, something that we have a limited amount of and can use up. In reality, though, effectively exerting willpower isn’t really a matter of struggling against temptation and winning, at least not most of the time: instead, it’s a matter of learning and using the right skills to redirect ourselves. In other words, it requires learning and applying what we learn rather than brute force.

For instance, if I’m tempted to stay up late into the night to watch a movie I just received even though I know I need to be up early the next morning, it might be possible for me to dredge up a stern enough “No!” to force myself, resentfully, off to bed. But it’s definitely possible for me to ask myself questions like “Will I enjoy this movie just about as much if I watch it later?” and “Would it also be enjoyable right now to climb in bed and get some rest?” and “Will I be happier tomorrow morning if I watch this movie or if I hold off?” and “What if I just go get ready for bed, then see if I’m still as keen on watching the movie?”

All of these questions are strategies for looking at my situation in a different–and more complete–way, questions that can help me line up my actions with my long-term happiness instead of with whatever short-term pleasure offers itself–especially since, if I’m patient, I can often get some of the pleasure anyway without such a big cost.

But after that, I deserve to make bad choices!
A special situation that can make willpower seem like it’s getting “used up” is what schema therapy (of which more in future posts) calls the “entitlement schema,” the idea some of us often get that we deserve some pleasurable thing regardless of its effect on our long-term happiness. Having to exert willpower in one area can activate this schema, making it harder to exert willpower later. For instance, a person might think “I didn’t get to have that chocolate cake earlier, so now I deserve to eat this ice cream.” These kinds of statements sound like they make sense, but they really don’t when we examine them, because past good choices don’t make current bad choices any less bad. When I find myself running into problems like these, I try to remember to use idea repair to remind myself what’s really important.

An entitlement schema can make it seem like we’re using up willpower when all we may really be doing is having trouble reconciling ourselves to the good choices we’ve already made. This isn’t fatigue, just an attitude issue.

In the end, our mental resources are finite: we can only handle so much at once. But our mental resources also seem to often be much greater than we expect or give ourselves credit for, and even when it might seem for a moment like we’ve run out of willpower, if we search a little, we may find great untapped reserves ready to carry us forward–lemonade or no lemonade.

Photo by apesara

The following are not my actual thoughts, I’m happy to say. However, they do demonstrate the different kinds of broken ideas. Each of them could be repaired.

So I know this post is going to suck¹, but … wait, you must already be thinking I’m a complete idiot if I say my post is going to suck². No, no, I shouldn’t be telling myself I know what you’re thinking³! And I shouldn’t say “shouldn’t!” Oh man, I did it again, I’m such a dork⁴! No, hold on, I can’t call myself a dork in my own post, that’s awful, that ruins the entire post. ⁵ It ruins the entire site⁶! And if this site sucks, my entire life sucks⁷! And this post is making me sick, which means it must suck⁸. Writing like this ruins all of my posts⁹. People may tell me they like my posts sometimes, but that’s just because they pity me¹⁰. If I didn’t suck, people would always leave comments¹¹. I think I’ll go eat dirt¹².

¹ Fortune telling
² Mind reading
³ Should statement
⁴ Labeling
⁵ All-or-nothing thinking
⁶ Magnification/minimization
⁷ Overgeneralization
⁸ Emotional reasoning
⁹ Mental filtering
¹⁰ Disqualifying the positive
¹¹ Personalization
¹² Actually, this isn’t a broken idea, because there’s nothing unrealistic about deciding to eat dirt if you really want to. However, I think personally I’ll pass.

Photo by Freekz0r

Let’s say someone has been working on losing weight, but over Thanksgiving gave up and ate way, way too much. Or they were going to write 50,000 words this November for NaNoWriMo, yet here it is a few days from the end and they’re only 28,000 words in. Or they’ve gone back on a promise, done something they had vowed to stop doing, failed to stick with a new habit that they really wanted to keep up, or in any other way completely wiped out.

Often in situations like this, we’ll start telling ourselves in one way or another that whatever plans we have are now ruined. The promise is broken, the diet has failed, the project has flopped. It’s easy to lose all enthusiasm at this point and give up, to conclude that people who are successful at achieving difficult goals don’t have these kinds of setbacks. That conclusion would be wrong.

It’s true that failures on the way to a goal can cause a more than their share of trouble. If I’m trying to build a new habit, interruptions to the thing I’m trying to make habitual will make it take longer for the habit to form. If I suffer a setback, it can often create additional obstacles, because slip-ups erode momentum in the same way that taking initiative builds momentum.

Yet it’s clearly typical–in fact, I’d hazard a guess that it’s almost inevitable–for a person to have some failures on the way to successfully building a new habit or pursuing a goal if that goal is sufficiently challenging. For example, according to the American Cancer Society, “most of those who attempt [to quit smoking] cannot do it on the first try. In fact, smokers usually need many tries — sometimes as many as 8 to 10 — before they are able to quit for good.”

Another way to put it, as strange as it may sound, is that the kind of person most likely to succeed at a goal is someone who has already been working on it but has failed one or more times.

Yet knowing this probably doesn’t make you automatically feel like a winner. What will do that is getting back to working on your goal right away. It’s easy to fall for reasoning like “I’ve blown it anyway–a little more won’t hurt” or “I’ll recharge my batteries before I take another crack at it,” but that kind of logic is usually flawed, because whenever we let a setback “give you permission” to stick with old, bad habits for a while, or to stop something we were working on, we are strengthening and refreshing the behaviors we don’t want and letting the behaviors we do want fade in our minds. The neural connections we’re building by prolonging the interruption will make it easier to make wrong choices and harder to make right choices. We’re also often doing more damage that will have to be repaired once we get back on track, making restarting even harder.

We can learn from setbacks by analyzing what went wrong and coming up with ways to act differently in future. And we can cut off failures, keeping them to the shortest span possible, so that they become just blips on the graph. In practical terms, all a setback does is take away a little progress and lower our spirits. We can gain that ground back and raise our spirits at the same time by renewing our plans to pursue our goals and not letting the problems claim any more of our lives than they have to.

Photo from Cornell University Library.

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

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. This article follows up by discussing the first of those four, choosing your location. 

Location, location, location
To the extent that you have some control over the times and places when you are focusing on a goal you’re trying to achieve (like getting your finances in order, learning a language, or writing a book), good choices of working environment will help you work better and with fewer interruptions.

We don’t always consider the power a location can have to minimize distractions, but once we do, the kinds of locations are fairly self-evident: favor locations where there will be few distractions, and try to avoid places where you might run into friends or be expected to respond to people or events. The most accessible and convenient locations–your home or usual workplace–are often the most vulnerable to distractions because people will expect to find you there. But places where you’re less likely to be distracted, like a friend’s spare room or the library (when those kinds of places are options in the first place), often involve extra time and effort to reach, and therefore may discourage work on your goal or cut into your productive time.

While there’s no way around being bound to a location for some efforts, like decluttering, avoid being completely dependent on one location if possible: the more times and places you can use to work toward your goal, the more progress you’re likely to make.

To the extent that you have a choice, try to prefer working on your goal at times when you’ll have minimal distractions, as long as those times don’t offer other problems—for instance, late at night can be a peaceful and productive time to work, but not if you’re always exhausted by then, or if it will have a serious effect on you getting enough sleep, or if  your work would wake somebody up.

Sometimes it’s possible to get more uninterrupted time to work on your goal by shifting around more interruptible activities, like housecleaning. 

Mental work environment
Your mental work environment is also a key factor. You can prepare your brain by committing to the project you’re about to work on and setting a minimum amount of time to focus on it. Avoid shifting around among different kinds of tasks within one work session when possible–for instance, working a little on your business plan, then answering some correspondence, then coming back to the business plan–since when you make these shifts you’re effectively interrupting yourself.

In the next article in this series, we’ll dig into the other three strategies for minimizing distractions: managing responsibilities, making rules, and erecting barriers.

Photo by girolame

This post and the follow-up I’ll be posting next week are based on the “Handling Distractions” chapter from my new eBook, The Writing Engine: A Practical Guide to Writing Motivation. Have I mentioned it’s free to download and share?

The true cost of distraction
Distractions are pernicious for even more reasons than might be immediately obvious. They

• offer unwanted invitations to stop doing whatever we’re doing,
• require two mental “reboots,” one to address the distraction and another to return to work,
• interfere with focus and immersion–distractions lower the number of pieces of information and connections we can keep in mind at once and force us to retrace our steps,
• cut into time set aside for work toward a goal,
• make otherwise productive activities more frustrating and less pleasurable,
• encourage errors,
• help discourage us from doing constructive things in the first place (due to feeling like we won’t be able to work uninterruptedly), and 
• interfere with “flow” states, in which we’re engrossed in what we’re doing, highly productive, and enjoying ourselves.

If you have trouble screening out distractions, there are several useful techniques you can employ–but it may also help to know that focusing despite distractions, like virtually any other skill, is one that improves with practice. My experience certainly bears that out. It used to be that I couldn’t write or focus on work when there was any kind of noise around me, but there came a time when my home office had to share space with the playroom. Pushing through sometimes difficult writing sessions with kids playing in the background, I eventually became much more resistant to distraction, and a couple of years after that process began, I found myself cheerfully writing a book in the middle of a social gathering, and even contributing a little to the conversation from time to time. I  I didn’t do anything special to gain this skill except to keep trying to write even when distractions made it hard.

What our brains have to do to handle distractions
In his book Brain Rules: 12 Rules for Surviving and Thriving at Home, Work and School, developmental neurobiologist John Medina describes the process the brain goes through when it has to shift attention from one kind of task to another. It has to disengage from the first task, shutting down the systems it was using; assess the new task; fire up new systems for it; handle the new task; then go through the whole thing all over again when we switch back. Says Medina, “a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to complete a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50 percent more errors.”

In other words, a two-minute interruption takes a lot more than two minutes away from whatever it interrupted. That interruption can also mean the difference between being in flow and being out of it

So, it pays to prevent distractions. There are at least four ways to do this: choosing your location, managing responsibilities, devising rules, and erecting barriers. Next week, we’ll talk about each of these strategies in more detail.

Image based on a photo by rachel_titiriga. In case you’re one of the lucky ones who might not recognize it, the blue thought bubble contains a blue screen of death.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard a lot of advice over time warning me not to push too hard at anything: “You have to ease into it” … “Moderation in all things” … “One step at a time.” It’s folk wisdom, founded in neither exceptional experience nor careful examination of the facts, and in many cases following it will ruin your chances at making any real progress toward your goals.

That’s not to say that there aren’t ways that moderation applies. For instance, trying to pay a lot of attention to more than one thing at a time is a doomed approach to making big changes in your life. Also, it’s sometimes necessary to take things in steps for safety’s sake, like not trying to go directly from no exercise program to extremely intense workouts. Apart from that, it’s just plain bad advice, and there are five reasons that’s so.

1. The status quo likes to be kept
The habits you already have, the situation you’re already in, and the choices you’re used to making are deeply ingrained. We’ve piled on connections in our brains to strengthen certain behaviors–these are our habits–and those strong behaviors need a lot of effort to overcome. The people in our lives expect us to act certain ways and may get anxious or even interfere if we change, even if we change in a healthy way. Activities we’re not used to turn out to have complications we haven’t solved yet and requirements we didn’t know about. Even a body that’s used to maintaining or increasing fat stores has physical mechanisms to prevent losing those fat stores too easily. If we want to overcome these obstacles, the most effective approach is usually to push hard–not to try something small and see if it makes an impact, because often it won’t.

2. Habits form much more quickly when behaviors are repeated close together
I’ve mentioned in a post about habit formation that in a study designed to determine how long it took people to form new habits, the only people who were actually successful at forming new habits during the study period were those who repeated the desired behavior virtually every single day. It is possible to form a habit by doing something three times a week or every four or five days, but it will take much, much longer than if you do that thing daily, and the results will take much longer to show.

3. Intense work on a goal provides quicker rewards
One of the problems with trying to change habits or pursue a goal is that often it’s hard to see whether we’re making progress, and if so, how much. This can easily lead to discouragement and apathy. By contrast, if we throw ourselves into working on a goal, the results are faster, more dramatic, and more motivating.

4. Immersion fosters momentum, focus, and smarter choices
When we are very active with something, working hard at it, we become immersed in that activity: we think about it more, we tend to become more committed to it, and we become more aware of opportunities. We also create momentum. For example, a writer who writes every day doesn’t have to spend the first part of each writing session brushing up on what went before, getting plans back in mind, etc.: the memories of the work are fairly fresh and therefore more detailed and easier to access.

When we’re more involved in a goal and therefore thinking about it more, we also make more connections in our minds regarding the goal and think of more ways to further our intentions.

5. Hard work makes goals into rules
I’ve talked elsewhere about how rules promote better self-control. The short version is this: if you have a rule that you’re trying to follow, and if the rule is well-designed, then whenever the rule applies, your choice is both clear-cut and obvious.

Of course, having a rule doesn’t automatically mean you’ll follow that rule all the time, but it does make it much more likely than if you didn’t have a rule. Without rules, we tend to talk ourselves into sticking with the behaviors we’re used to more often, which is not an effective way to change habits or improve our lives.

Doing hard work on a goal every day takes a lot of the waffling out of choices about that goal. For example, if I decide to do 30 minutes of filing in my office every day until my files are pristine, then I never have to ask myself “Should I do some filing today? I don’t know … there’s so much other stuff I need to get done …” Instead, I simply ask myself when I’m going to start. A lot of the nonsense gets brushed aside.

Sound extreme?
Does this kind of no-moderation approach sound extreme? If so, you’ve understood me perfectly. Extreme effort has a much better chance of providing meaningful progress than trying to ease in slowly, and yes, it can be a lot to get used to at first. But if you’ve ever had trouble making real progress toward a goal, ask yourself how hard you’ve pushed. If you’ve tried taking it easy on yourself, consider trying again–and this time not holding anything back. For most of us, going flat out will result in some discomfort, but the same is true even of moderate approaches. With an extreme approach, much of the early effort will pay off even if things aren’t done perfectly, and you won’t be left wondering any more whether change is possible, because you’ll see the evidence in front of you.

Photo by renatela