Life Lessons: How I Jump-Started My Motivation During These Tough Times
A step-by-step action plan to make consistent progress towards your goals
It all started a month back when I was sitting alone on my balcony. I was reflecting on how 2020 has been such a tough year for so many people (including me). In the past few months, I have spent most of my time trying to stay up to date on information related to COVID-19. However, this often resulted in general information overload (mostly pessimistic). I began to realize how this, in turn, was negatively affecting my motivation and, thus, making it tough for me to accomplish 2020 goals. With a strong propensity towards taking action to solve problems, I knew it was time to tackle this issue head-on and proactively reduce feelings of anxiety or frustration. That meant creating a plan.
High-Level Process:
First, I picked a timeframe. In my case, I choose a 30-day window as it felt like a decent duration to practice the new plan and evaluate whether it was working or not. Once a timeframe was defined, I went ahead to create a personalized strategy using below steps:
- Decide your areas of improvement.
- Pick high-level goals for each area.
- List down all the actionable tasks needed to accomplish those goals.
- Build a daily to-do list/tracking system to track progress for each task.
#1: Pick your areas of improvement
The goal for this step is to find growth buckets — the areas where you would like to make tangible progress in the next 30 days (or your choice of timeframe). For me, this step was relatively easy because I had already done this work earlier in the year while planning for my 2020 goals. My areas of improvement were health & fitness, personal development, career, and finance.
If you’re curious to learn how I identified my growth buckets, please let me know in the comment section. I can write a separate article on it.
#2: List down high-level tasks and a goal for each task
This step involved identifying a set of activities with a specific target for each one. For me, I also spent time making sure that these tasks could be easily measured. Most often, I have always felt more in control when I can view all my growth buckets in a single view. Therefore, for better visibility, I created one for this time too. Below is a screenshot of what I came up with for each growth bucket:
Although there is nothing radical about the above goals, they serve as a solid blueprint towards building an execution strategy.
#3: Develop an individual 30-day approach for each bucket
Now, this is the step where I invested a good chunk of my planning time. The goal was to drill down into each bucket and create a rough execution plan. In my case, I spent more time planning the task order instead of writing the task itself. After spending a couple of hours, I built a 30-day plan for each growth bucket. Here is a screenshot for my health & fitness bucket:
Interestingly while working on this step, I was already starting to see improvements in my mood. The sense that I was defining a path for self-improvement even during these difficult times gave me a sense of hope and optimism. I felt I was again in control of my destiny.
#4: Build a To-do list each day
After accomplishing step-3, I had the goals and a personalized 30-day plan. Now, every day my job was to finish daily tasks from each bucket. At this point, the approach looked very promising. Furthermore, I knew if I was able to perform these daily tasks, then in the end, I would see noticeable growth in each area. Therefore, I made a habit upon waking up every day to copy all the daily tasks from each bucket and write them in a single to-do list. This step only took a few minutes with all the heavy-lifting already done. I did this activity while waiting for my morning coffee. As I drank my coffee, I would create a plan on how to best tackle these items. Below is a sample of my daily to-do list:
This step helped me immensely to stay focussed on the daily tasks and to evaluate progress each day.
My Learnings:
In short, the plan was quite successful! It helped me stay focussed and motivated throughout the whole 30-day period. I faced a few hiccups, but mostly, everything went smoothly. I have developed plans in the past too. However, this time one factor was different — I had to set up a plan that had small wins from the beginning to reignite my low motivation level. In the past, I have always started with motivation and a balanced headspace from day-1.
Below are some of my learnings:
- Upfront planning = success: I felt the plan was much easier to execute successfully due to upfront planning. I had spent minimal time deciding on the next task to work on or how much I needed to accomplish each day.
- Motivation compounds each week: As I was accomplishing tasks for each bucket daily, I could see progress each week. After a couple of weeks, this resulted in a massive motivation boost.
- Checkpoints made it easier to stay focussed: I was recording my progress at a regular interval. All this made it very easy to keep going and trust the process.
- Fewer tasks per day were ideal: As I went through the process, I realized that the days where I had three major daily tasks (in addition to some minor ones) felt the most productive. Those days resulted in a better work-life balance and did not leave me feeling overwhelmed.
There is no doubt we’re going through unprecedented times, facing challenges on almost all fronts — professional or personal. After working on this plan and performing all these tasks, I am definitely in a better headspace — each day feeling that I am learning and growing as an individual. Some progress is better than no progress. I hope my approach will provide you with a few actionable insights to help tackle your own goals. I’m rooting for you all.
Remember:
“Tough times don’t last, but tough people do” — Alonzo Mourning
