In writing, there’s a useful suspense technique called the “ticking clock.” You’re probably familiar with it: the hero has some desperately important thing that she or he has to accomplish, and suddenly it’s made much worse because it turns out there’s only a short time to get it done before all is lost. We have ticking clocks of our own, at least for little things, in our own lives: work that has to be done before a deadline to grab an opportunity or stave off disaster, a place you have to get before it closes, a medical emergency … and in all of these cases, we naturally become much more engaged and focused in doing what needs to be done.

This is going to seem like a completely different subject for a moment, but let’s turn our attention to people who expect to die and miraculously survive–people whose inoperable cancer goes into remission, or people who through incredible luck live through accidents or disasters that they expected to be fatal. It seems to be common for people like this to come away with specific revelations: that our lives are precious, that little problems don’t mean that much, and that it’s important to make the most of what time we have. Yawning yet? This is kind of standard inspirational fare. “Yes, life is miraculous, we’re alive, isn’t it amazing? Sure, we should make our lives meaningful, enjoy every day, yadda yadda yadda …”

So let’s bring together that ticking clock technique and that boring old “our time is precious” saw. The way they fit together is this: we have a limited lifespan; eventually we’ll die. We have an even more limited window of enjoyment or benefit for certain things, like learning to be better parents (once the kids have grown up and moved on, the most important parts of parenting are over) or enjoying an activity or opportunity that might not be available forever.

That means that for most things of importance, every day we delay in reaching a goal is a day less that reaching that goal can benefit us. If you’re working on good financial management, the longer it takes you to get around to really focusing on it, the shorter the portion of your life where you have your finances really under control will be. If you want to write and direct your own movie, every delay in doing that shortens your total time as a maker of movies, which determines how many projects you can do, how good you’ll get, and how much enjoyment you’ll experience.

If this kind of talk makes you feel a little anxious, that’s good, because you can harness that to drive yourself energetically toward your goals–but hold onto it for a moment before you go very far with it. We need to distinguish between unnecessary delays on the one hand and the amount of time it realistically takes to do things well on the other. If you’re not making movies because you’re busy focusing on making yourself healthier, and if health is a higher priority for you, the movies can wait: it’s hard enough to really focus on one major goal at a time, and two or more is usually enough to cause crashing and burning of all of the goals. We have a limited amount of time and attention in our lives. It’s not only OK to use it on just one major project at once, it’s downright clever.

And reaching goals–especially goals that require changing habits–takes time. You have to do a lot of writing to become a really good writer, and to turn down a lot of bags of chips to become the kind of person who automatically and enthusiastically eats a healthy diet. Our brains do change and rewire themselves, but it always takes time, whether we’re talking about good quality practice to acquire a new skill or changing our habits to modify our outlook and behavior.

The exception to the “single goal” approach is our day-to-day decisions. We can always try to keep in mind how beneficial it is to make better choices, so if each time a meaningful decision comes up we take an extra moment to see if we can’t get ourselves to take the high road, that’s a moment well spent.

So you may want to take a moment right now to think about your goal–not all of your goals, but the one most important current goal in your life–and apply that ticking clock. Are you working on that goal with focus, every day, or are you putting it off, telling yourself it’s not urgent, that there’s plenty of time? If it doesn’t feel urgent, you could spend a little time thinking about what you might be losing by your delay. How much more could be gained by doing it today instead of tomorrow? One less day of having to wait for the wonderful results you want to achieve? One day of increased income before retirement? One day of being better at relationships, and therefore one more day of greater happiness for other people in your life?

And if you are applying yourself every day, I hope you can take a moment to pat yourself on the back. There are a lot of things that can make the important goals in our lives look like they can wait, so if you’re pushing ahead despite all that, you’re in an uncommon and enviable class of people, even if the pushing ahead itself is difficult or unpleasant. Keep on keeping on!

And if you’re not applying yourself every day, please come back to this post next week when you are and read yourself that congratulatory paragraph. You will have earned it.

Photo by gnijil_lijing.

A friend posed this question:

“What do you do when you have two conflicting things to get done? For example, for me it’s writing vs. studying.  Both take the same amount of focus, time and activity level.  One is more pleasurable, and one is more necessary.

“So when I have a block of time in which I could EITHER write or study……….I end up surfing the web for hours.  In that web-surfing loop where you don’t really look at anything, just go to the same sites over and over to see if they’ve been updated since three minutes ago.  To be honest, it makes me feel like that story in I, Robot: Runaround.  I experience this practically every time I schedule writing-and-studying time for myself.”

It’s a good question, and one I definitely identify with in my own experience. When I have more than one important thing to do, all of the important tasks are weighing on me at once. If I undertake one of them without making special effort to handle this problem, the fact that I’m not doing the others will distract and upset me. For me, this gets worse when there are more things to do, because then it’s hard to even identify all of the things that need doing, and the other priorities will plague me without my even being fully aware of what they are.

One of the reasons we often turn to something completely self-indulgent in these cases is that we hope it will take our mind off all of our other concerns. For example, what if I have the option of writing or studying or watching a good movie? If I do the writing, the fact that I have studying to do might continue to bother me. If I do the studying, the ignored writing might be the pain in my neck. But if I watch the movie and like it, I might be so swept up in the story that I don’t think about either writing or studying–so that the only solution that gives me any relief is the only one that in the long term doesn’t help me at all.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this. Actually, there might be a bunch of solutions to this, but there’s one solution that I know (and that I’ve recently been using more and more). It has three parts: listing, prioritizing, and resigning.

Listing: If you have a lot of things to do, it helps to list them out. If a lot of things are bothering or distracting you, list them all–but if there are only a couple or a few major issues to tackle, don’t bother with all of the lower-priority ones, and instead just list that couple or those few.

In this way the part of your brain that has been devoted to keeping track of them all can rest, because you now have them all on paper and aren’t in danger of forgetting. Listing also allows you to start

Prioritizing: Looking at your list, you decide what one or two or ten things are really the most important for you to tackle right away. Some might call for a quick action but not be of desperate importance (for instance, calling your friend back and confirming that you’ll be at a party tomorrow), but most of your top items should be chosen for importance, whether or not they would need to be done immediately. Try to avoid prioritizing things that are in your face but that don’t matter much in the scheme of things. For instance, you might have noticed for the hundredth time today that you have a little trouble finding any CD in your CD collection, and it may occur to you to organize your CDs. This idea could be very much on your mind, yet not really at all important in the scheme of things. This shouldn’t “float to the top” unless you really have nothing more important to do (in which case your life must be far, far more peaceful than mine!)

Keep in mind that it’s not remotely necessary to prioritize all your tasks: just figure out which are the top ones, and then of those, make sure at least the top few are in priority order. If two things are exactly as important, choose whichever one you’re more enthusiastic about. If a task is very large, try to break it up into sub-tasks and then prioritize those. For instance, if you have three years worth of personal papers to file, break the list item “File all those papers” down and start with a task “Spend 15 minutes starting in on filing.” You can take the rest and make it a task, “Continue with filing,” which can spawn other tasks in future.

I know I’m getting into organizational techniques instead of obvious motivation techniques here, but among the elements of motivation are knowledge of what you need to motivate yourself to do and goal-setting. The listing step covers the knowledge, and this step covers goal-setting. When you’re done with prioritization, you should have a sub-list of Important Things and single thing at the top of that list. This now allows you to begin

Resigning yourself to the idea that you can only under normal circumstances do one thing at a time. (Note: a later post of mine goes into more detail about resigning ourselves to making good choices.) If you decide to study, for instance, your brain may pipe up “But … I have to do some writing!” This is a broken idea, a lie that you’re telling yourself. In fact, you don’t have to do some writing right then. Writing will come later, and as good as it might be to get some done now, you can’t write at the same time as you’re studying, and for the moment you’ve chosen to study. If you’ve broken up your large studying task into chunks, then perhaps what you have decided to do is study one particular chapter, or study for one hour. And you know that when that hour or chapter is over, if you are still on discretionary time, you’ll be able to switch over to writing then. Get at peace with the idea that nothing is going to get done right away except your top priority. When you catch yourself manufacturing broken ideas, repair them one by one until you feel calm and ready to begin. It’s not an easy thing, but once done, the need to do anything other than what you’ve chosen to do goes away, and you can get to work without distraction.

TV picture by Qfamily; writing picture by Ed Yourdon .

Here’s an issue Merrie Haskell, a writer, mentions in a comment to an earlier post: “I’ve noticed that I go through periodic surges of willpower. (I guess that’s what I mean.) I will be in a rut for months, and really feel stuck; then wake up one morning, and like a switch has been thrown, go into hyperdrive.”

Merrie’s hyperdrive clearly works for her: she’s sold well over a dozen short stories, including sales to two of the most demanding science fiction and fantasy markets, Asimov’s Science Fiction and Strange Horizons. Clearly doing something well isn’t the same as feeling motivated to do it all the time. So what’s happening?

The short answer is that self-motivation–whether for writing or for any other project–is complex, and there are a number of factors that can influence it. The longer answer names some of those factors, and as we name them, we can begin to see that they influence each other, so that one advantage can turn into a lot of advantages, and one obstacle can turn into a lot of obstacles.

We won’t be able to look at all of the elements of motivation in this one post, or go into any in depth, but we can see some of the more prominent pieces and how they fit together.

Motivating ourselves has some basic requirements. For instance, we usually need to believe what we are trying to do will provide the result we want, to care about the result, and to believe we’re capable of achieving it. In addition to those basic requirements, there are some pieces that can really support and enhance self-motivation, like the support of others, feedback loops, and recognition. Lastly, to consciously pursue a goal, we need to take certain steps, like clarify what the goal is, gather the information we’ll need to make good choices, and figure out where the time will come from to achieve our goal.

If any of these pieces falters, the others can be disrupted, or at least slowed down. For instance, if I’m in the middle of writing a novel and lose faith that anyone will ever be interested in reading it, my enthusiasm is likely to crash. This is a crisis of believing that the goal will achieve its purpose, one of those prerequisites I mentioned.

What makes this worse is that even if I regain that confidence soon after, it has already had a chance to influence other elements. For instance, losing confidence that the novel will be read makes me stop writing, and when I can’t get up the enthusiasm to write, I could lose the belief that I can finish the thing at all. Losing these beliefs can cause me to stop feeling enthusiastic about the goal I picture myself achieving. I stop having writing to show to friends and downplay the importance of the project, which could cause the friends to decide I’m not interested in it any more and withdraw their support for it, which deprives me of the feedback I’d been getting that helped keep the project going. And so on.

So what do we do about these insidious slides? Tackle them one piece at a time. Fortunately, we have an advantage in getting back on track, which is that just as the failure of one element tends to lead to the failure of others, getting one element working encourages the others to work, too. For instance, seeking out someone who’s been enthusiastic about pieces of my novel that they’ve read so far can help rekindle my enthusiasm for the project and my belief that it’s worthwhile, at the same time that it brings in the support of others and provides me with feedback. Clarifying my goal for the book (say, a novel in a given genre of a given length, finished by a given date) and making a plan to meet that goal can get me writing regardless of whether I feel enthusiastic or not, which moves me closer to the goal, which tends to make me more enthusiastic.

This process may sound familiar: it has a lot in common with mood congruity, which I discuss in another post. In either case, the solution is the same: if you break out of the pattern you’re in to do one positive thing, you’ll be going in the right direction.

Takeaways:

• Strong self-motivation means a number of elements are working together to move the project forward.
• Problems with one element of self-motivation can cause problems with other elements.
• If you find yourself losing momentum on a project, find one motivating thing you can concentrate on and focus on doing that, regardless of whether you feel enthusiastic about it at the moment or not.

Photograph by V’ron

A writer friend/acquaintance whose work I quite like was discussing a short fiction project (the Daily Cabal, which is very, very short science fiction posted every weekday morning) today and said “For some reason I can’t quite fathom, most of SF readers are also SF writers.”