Laying down on your bed, eyes closed but your mind still whirring. You think of how productive the next day is going to be! Wake up at 6 am, go for a morning hike before anyone is even up. Follow that up with starting to work on the app you’ve been meaning to try and develop and maybe even sprinkle in fully preparing for the exam you have coming up!
What actually ends up happening … you wake up at 11 am, procrastinate for two hours, get some studying done, procrastinate some more, maybe watch TV, study for 30 more minutes, and call it done for the day before scrolling through endless streams of social media. You go to bed thinking “what the f***” did I do today?” and planning for the next day, hoping for a fresh start.
Why did the day not go the way you had envisioned? Was it because you stayed up too late the night before? Did you think you would have more time than you actually did?
The problem lies in not just how the day was executed, but what was actually thought about and done the night before. Having the motivation to do something is one thing, actually doing everything you set out to is a whole other deal.
So let’s break down what actually happened and what you can do to improve your productivity and happiness with yourself.
The night before …
1. Can’t imagine ✨ without planning
It can be incredibly fun to imagine what our life could look like, especially when we’re only thinking about the next day. I used to often find myself watching motivational and productivity youtube videos before going to bed, only to think about how I was going to accomplish all the goals I had been pushing off.
Thinking about the goal ≠ Thinking how to accomplish the goal
When we imagine without thinking about the steps to actually get to where we want to be, we’re basically screwing our future selves.They won’t have the motivation we have at the moment and will basically be left out to dry. They then have the humongous task to actually muster up the will to start working.
Make it easy for your future self by thinking about the physical steps you’ll do when you wake up. For example, if you’ve been pushing off exercising, think about
- what other chores do you need to get done
- will you have energy in the evening when you’re freer?
- What usually stops you from going to the gym and how to remove that?
2. Perfection ruins everything 💔
I love the idea of being able to do more than I currently am but it’s highly unlikely to change overnight. That’s probably going to require decent habit-building but we’ll get into that another time.
A lot of the times I get the nighttime motivation high, I end up thinking of accomplishing every single one of my backlogged goals the next day. It’s a very human thing to do. We’re terrible at predicting the future. Realistically, I won’t have nearly as much time as I think I will.
The day will be riddled with chores and responsibilities I’ve conveniently avoided thinking about. Instead of thinking of the perfect-productivity-plan, we need to do two things:
- Get rid of the idea of doing everything
- Get rid of the idea of doing things perfectly
What we’re trying to do after the night is to set us onto the path of accomplishing the goals. We just want the first leap to get us to actually start.
We procrastinated accomplishing our goals before because we think they are big tasks that will take a lot of time and it’s important to do them perfectly. Those are the two biggest creators of friction of actually getting things done. If we wake up with the idea of perfection, the task is still going to look as daunting as ever.
3. Not writing down what you actually thought about
Okay, so you actually thought a little bit more than just imagining becoming a millionaire the next day, and actually thought of steps to get you started on the path.
But you forgot to write anything down. Come morning, you’re basically starting from scratch. All that effort … wasted.
WRITE IT DOWN!✍🏼 Even if you have just your phone next to you, and you’ve already closed your eyes. Write down what you have planned to do tomorrow. Make it easier for tomorrow you to not have to rethink everything.
The morning after …
So you’ve successfully woken up from a night of motivation high .. and it’s all gone by now probably unless you followed some of the steps I mentioned above. If you did, great! Let’s talk about what you can do now to keep that momentum going.
1. Don’t even think about thinking ❌🤔❌
The biggest hurdle to getting things done in the morning, at least for me, is thinking about everything I have to do. It just makes me want to stay in bed longer, destroying any hope of actually doing the things I want to.
So what do you do? Get out the door! Don’t worry about the plans from last night, just focus on doing something, anything, that doesn’t require thinking. I love to do groceries Saturday morning because it gets me out the door and doing something. I’m willing to wake up early for that since I know it doesn’t require much effort on my part.
Getting these menial tasks done creates productivity momentum. Just make sure it’s not something that takes up too much time.
2. Still No thinking Part 2: getting started 👩🏾💻
Now, let’s actually start with what we wanted to do! Hopefully, you have the handy list of steps you need to do in order to get that task done. It’s time to start working through the list without thinking about the final goal.
The idea here is to just get started without worrying about the future.
It’s not the time to get bogged down by the details. Details add friction when we have to think about them. They overcomplicate things making the task even more daunting. Start off with a simplified version, however hacky or naive the idea may seem.
It doesn’t matter if your goal turns out to be more difficult than you thought. We want to just make sure you have something to latch onto. Investing some time in actually doing actionable stuff for your goal makes you that much more likely to continue.
3. Productivity momentum 🚀🌙
Awesome!!! You’ve just started actionable items in working towards the ideas you had at night. Even if those ideas seem far-fetched, explore them as much as you can and don’t let the productivity momentum go to waste. If you start to feel overwhelmed again, re-simplify the problem into something naive and keep moving forward.
The goal is to not sink back into a state of helplessness about all the things you want to do.
It’s okay if things go wrong. It’s okay if you try something, and fail horribly because at least you tried.
Sometimes, we fail to do one of the tasks and we stop because we think if we failed midway, what’s the point of doing the rest since it’s all shot. Sure, it won’t be the perfect vision you had but it’s better than what you could end up with if you stopped.
We really really like fresh starts. new day, new year, but time is going to continue. Waiting for a fresh start means you waste the rest of the time. Instead, that time could be used to fail many more times, learn from those, and still have a fresh start!
