Staying motivated is hard: Tracking goals in a transparent way.
- How sharing my goals has helped me stay on top of my game.
Nowadays, it’s hard staying motivated. Your phone’s notifications are always buzzing, there’s always a meetup to attend, a new email to read or reply and money to be made by working more hours.
When working on your side hustle it’s easy to get distracted. If you google for help, there’re just a million tips and advices from SEO-hungry blogs.
🙅
Guess what? Your friends and family also have something to say: some will say to switch the internet off — LOL — others will suggest you go on and do a yoga retreat to find yourself and stop procrastinating (thanks mum, solid advice); others will suggest you take a holiday in a place where there’s barely any internet so you won’t waste all of your time on YouTube…and then there are 10 bazillion apps for productivity advertised all over the web, that will disable all the socialmedia, news platforms, forums, subreddits.
All of that is great advice for many people and maybe it works for them…
but not for me.
Afraid of letting my friend and myself down
As I am writing this I am also working on building my side project. An API to help front-end developers and marketers build images dynamically extremely quickly.
I am doing this with my friend (and maker extraordinaire) olivier and I realised I am the rock that was slowly sinking our launch. Pushing it further and further away.
I felt like I couldn’t focus.
But why? Where did my motivation go?
It’s an extremely interesting project because it uses a lot of cool technologies(serverless functions, chrome-headless, Vue.js & webpack etc.) but it’s so damn tough to ship features out when you have all this other stuff drifting in front of your eyes, ideas flowing through your mind that you need to write down and tons of information available a few taps away from your fingers. I wanted to change that.
I needed a way to stay accountable: I started thinking about a way that would let me take responsibilities for not focusing on my work.
What is the one thing that will make me want to do all this stuff that I REALLY have to do?
At first I thought of asking a friend to take some of my gadgets hostages (goodbye new slick phone), or take some of my money ransom, or all of my social accounts by changing all their passwords…
Unfortunately, these drastic approaches wouldn’t work.
I need those things to function regularly out of working hours.
Then it hit me: I just needed a place, somewhere on the internet where a lot of people JUST LIKE ME, can see what I am doing and IF I am doing it. Make fun of me, support me, or simply nod at the work I do or that I don’t do in the process!
That’s when I started looking around and shortly after finding just what I needed and requesting in, I got an invite to test Maker’s goals.
Use your inner “fears” to your advantage
No one likes to look lazy 😨. I sure don’t.
Using my fear of being considered lazy works to my advantage (and yours probably too) you can help yourself staying focused on what really matters to you.
Makers goals lets you compile all those tasks that you’re working on, or planning to work on and release them into the public, or private, community of makers on Product Hunt. Here you can cheer for progress and collaborate with other makers to “just get shit done”.
I have been using Makers goals for a couple of weeks now and this are 3 things that I love about it:
1. It’s PUBLIC and FREE
Just like my favorite tool in the world for staying on top of to-do lists, Trello, Product Hunt’s Makers Goals is free, and it focuses on listing all those annoying things that come and fly through your head in a simple and neat list for anyone else in the community to see.
I am not a big influencer (and that’s cool.) but I can imagine that if you were someone like Pieter, you probably could get a lot of feedback on features and questions you might have listed in your public Maker List.
2. You can get a lot of SUPPORT from peer makers if you know where to FIND them — and if you don’t it shows you.
If you ever get stuck you can create a new item in your list and tag some of the “most helpful makers” from the list and hope they will see your SOS sign. You always get stuck in life, whether it’s because you can’t do something, you don’t know how to solve a problem or you just need a hand in completing your objective. Don’t be shy and keep looking for help from some friendly folks!
3. It keeps you FOCUSED and GROUNDED onto what’s coming after today, not what’s coming in a year!
When you start adding tasks to your list you will notice that because the list is public you won’t be adding tasks that take too long to complete or that are set too far head in the future. Instead using decomposition and the fact that you WANT to TICK those done checkboxes, it will help you think in a more agile manner. This is how I think every time I add a goal on my Maker goals list:
- What’re some simple tasks that I can get done today and tomorrow?
- What’re some tasks that I need to do later next week?
- What should I prioritise doing in the short term based on my objective goals?
- What should I NOT be working on?
Using these simple questions I prioritise the work that I can done and that I will be adding to my Makers list.
This seems to work pretty well for me, I am getting through my todo lists pretty much faster and I am getting great feedback and help from the community of makers!
So that’s all I’ve learned from building in public as opposed to hiding all my work in a personal Trello board that I often hide from, like a scary monster under my bed at night…
What do you use/do to stay accountable and on track?
