Image courtesy of Sly420

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a post taken from the “Motivate Thyself” Archives.

I was reminded of a valuable fact, yesterday, when it comes to staying motivated so you can keep moving forward.  I have a lot of projects on my plate right now and I’ve been putting in “overtime” for the last couple of weeks.  Though, some days I’m a little tired, I’ve been making a lot of progress and it’s felt great.  Yesterday was no different, except for one big difference.  I got a “great idea” for one of the websites I’ve been working on.  It had to do with a lot of complicated, time consuming work that may or may not have been such a “great idea” anyway.  It involved purchasing some software and, after I had some issues activating it, I ended up spending a couple of hours on web forums trying to resolve the issue.

About halfway through this whole ordeal I got this gut feeling that I was really sliding backwards.  After weeks of really making some progress and feeling great because of it, I realized that I had let myself become distracted.  And that this distraction was starting to undo the progress I had made.  In the past I may have continued with the mess and tried to “resolve” it but I instead decided to go with my gut, backtrack to the point that I had started to go off course, and continue with my journey in a positive direction.

I returned the software and just looked at the wasted time as a lesson learned and hopefully one that will keep me from making the same mistake in the future.  The big realization that I came to was the fact that forward progress brings on a sense of hope in reaching your goals which feeds your motivation and aids your success in life.  But getting sidetracked by something that is not helping you reach your goals is a sure fire way of becoming discouraged and loosing site of what you had set out to do.  Because once you stop making progress, you will most definitely start to backslide into the mediocrity that you see all around you.  This journey isn’t about moving forward or standing still.  It’s more like being on a treadmill.  It takes some effort to just keep from falling back, let alone making progress.

So here are 5 tips that I came away with yesterday in my struggle for forward progress.

1: Wear blinders if you have to.

My mistake yesterday was not keeping my eyes on the prize.  I had a set goal when I was in the store but I let myself go off track to “play with some ideas.”  This was when I went off course.  Try not to let yourself become distracted by all that is around you.  You will always be bombarded with advertising of every kind.  There will always be something you “have to have” or that will most certainly “enhance your life”.  But most of the time these are just things that will pull you away from what’s really important.  So be very diligent in keeping your eyes on the prize.

2: Be aware of the time.

This is just a simple, yet very important, tip.  All too often, even when working on something important, we loose track of time and get less accomplished because of it.  Be careful not to let yourself become too engrossed in any one task or you will run the risk of neglecting another.  Progress is made by getting things done.  If you get lost in what you do you will most certainly get less done overall.

3: Do it and be done with it.

In light of tip #2, this one will help you get the job done.  When working toward a goal it is important not to be too picky.  Let’s say you are working on a new logo for a website.  Yes, it’s important that it looks good but you shouldn’t spend all day working on it.  Anything can be tweaked “just a little bit more”.  I have a tendency to be the one who keeps on tweaking.  But all that “finalizing” can really take away from the progress you could have made on other tasks.  Just realize this fact; most things need a rough and final draft.  The rough draft gets the task done while the final draft cleans it up.  These two steps are necessary to accomplishing the task.  Beyond that you are just treading water.

4: Listen to your gut.

If I hadn’t done this yesterday I would have been continuing down the road to progress derailment.  The first thing you need to do though, is be aware of what the right situation feels like so you will know the wrong one when it comes.  How can you know if it’s dark out if you don’t know what light looks like?  Next time you are in a great place in life and making great strides in progress, take note of your gut feeling.  This will be your neutral spot.  Anything more positive than this is great.  But anything less is potentially a backslide.  I’m not saying you can’t have your bad days.  Just be aware of your situation so that you can maintain your forward heading.

5: Don’t be afraid to backtrack.

This final tip is greatly important.  All too often we find ourselves stuck in that place where the only way to move forward is to first move backward.  Just like hiking on a trail, if you were to get lost, you might find that you need to backtrack so you can return to making forward progress.  Often times though, we will just keep moving off course, hoping to eventually run back into the path.  This rarely works and usually ends up getting you more off course.  So don’t be afraid to turn around and go back way you came.  It may at first feel counter productive, but you will be glad you did it once you get back on course.  And while you are working your way back you can use the time to reflect on the importance of maintaining a positive heading.

I hope these tips are helpful to you as you seek your goals and pursue your dreams.  Feel free to add to them with your comments and let me know how YOU stay on track.

Nothing can derail our momentum or make us lose ground faster than a bad day that is handled poorly.

I’m one of those ‘got to have 8 hours of sleep or I’m in a bad mood’ kind of people.  But this post isn’t about sleep, but how we handle ANY of those circumstances that leave us with a short fuse and/or a skewed perspective.  I’m talking about those moments in time when your glass suddenly becomes half empty and you’re tempted to take it out on the world around you.

Yesterday was one of those days.  I had been going to bed late for various reasons and started to feel the effects.  Suddenly my optimism had been cut in half and my fuse along with it.  I had a busy day of consulting ahead of me and I wasn’t looking forward to it.  Just the ‘people interaction’ alone was something I was dreading (even though I usually quite enjoy that part of my business).

As I went through the day I found myself struggling to smile at my client’s attempts at lite discussion.  I felt crabby and started to realize that I was just moping around and drudging through my work.  Once I saw the frown on my face I quickly forced a smile and did everything I could to get my head in the game.  I managed to get through my jobs and the rest of the day without any major mishaps.

DANGER!!!  DANGER!!!

This may sound like a regular story of a guy who just needed some more sleep, but if you read between the lines you will see major negative ripples barely averted.

Think about it.  How much work does it take to build up someone’s trust and respect?  And yet, how easy is it to bring that house of cards crashing to the ground? I know that my consulting business hasn’t grown into many hundreds of loyal clients by me moping around doing just enough work to get by.  I’ve worked my butt off to not only bring my most focused mind to a job site, but my most positive and encouraging mindset as well.  And yet all it takes is ONE BAD DAY that is handled poorly to turn all your hard work into wasted time.

You can talk all day long about how to prevent bad days and that’s great stuff to know.  But whether we like it or not, we are going to find our happy juices running low now and again.  And when this occurs, we need to be very mindful of our responsibility to our own success, as we make our way through the day.

Here are a few thoughts that might help the next time you find yourself in this dangerous territory.

• Look people in the eye and smile. We tend to keep our eyes to ourselves when we’re in a bad mood.  This not only comes across as rude, but let’s us remain in our frowning facade.  Often times it’s our actions that need to come first and our feelings will follow.  Force yourself to give the other person a big fat smile and you’ll not only make them feel good, but you’ll most likely melt some of your ‘frozen features’ as well.
• Take ‘mini breaks’ whenever you can. When every moment of your day feels like a struggle to stay positive, it’s absolutely essential that you take breathers between ‘missions’.  Use the time to rest your mind and breathe deeply.  Pushing yourself is great when you can stand the pressure, but on these days you need to just do what you can to stay afloat.
• Give yourself something to look forward to at the end of the day. Just like that big piece of chocolate cake will help a child push through the peas on his plate, so too do we sometimes need a prize to keep our drive alive.
• Practice the ‘Golden Rule‘. It’s as old as time, but has never gone out of style.  When you’re having trouble being nice to people that you need and/or want to be nice to, try to step outside yourself and treat them the way you’d like to be treated.  It will not only help you keep a healthy perspective, but you’ll be more likely to maintain those healthy relationships.
• Know that tomorrow is a new day! Sometimes the only thing that gets me through a rough day is the knowledge that I’ll get another crack at it in less that 24 hours.  I make a game plan to NOT repeat whatever put me in my funk in the first place, and then just put ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER!

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Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Sean Platt of Writer Dad.

We each blog to the beat of our own lives.  Different schedules and rhythms require a multiplicity of approaches, but there is a constant.  If we want to be the best blogger we can be, without becoming a prisoner of our posts, then it is necessary to approach each day no different than a sunrise on the farm.

Farmers don’t waste the sunlight.  They make every minute matter.  So should we.  Bouncing around from task to task only carves us a tunnel leading to nowhere.  Modern innovation has led to an endless array of distractions; email, twitter, YouTube, Digg…  I could continue, and easily turn this into a two part post.  We must focus, or risk drowning beneath the billions of bytes.

I’m married, with two children.  I run a preschool, and a successful blog which posts five times a week.  I’m also writing a book, editing a second, and have a few other projects in various stages of development.  Even with all that, I’ve never thought of hiding under the covers and hoping it would all just go away.

The key is in how we organize our time.  We can not simply run up and down the court and hope to sink the shot.  We must first aim and then release.  When I first started blogging, I believed I could juggle a dozen things while dancing.  Alas, I can not.

I successfully sweep through my days by tackling a single task at a time.  I start each morning with a list of everything that needs to be done.  Then, I set my priorities.  Of course I check email, tweets, and comments, but only when it’s time.

Imagine you’re in the kitchen cooking.  You’ve got something on each burner, and something else is in the oven.  There’s frozen food thawing in the microwave, and a rainbow of ingredients spread across the counter.  You smell something burning, and run to check the oven.  Smoke spills out, and you grab a potholder.  One of the pots on the stovetop is bubbling; spilling angry liquid over the edge.  You reduce the flame, and begin to rapidly stir a series of sauces.  Sweat drips from your face as you wonder what went wrong.  Why you didn’t start out with a plan.

Too much blogging at once will never burn our houses down, or ruin our dinners, but it might make us wish we’d never even started.  I treat each day as a collection of minutes, where each one matters as much as all the others.  It is the only way I could ever hope to get everything done without wanting to run from the room and find a place to cry.

If you enjoyed this post, you can find more great writing by Sean at his blog Writer Dad.

“Well, I guess. I started off OK but then I got sidetracked for a couple of hours. Then So and So came over and we talked for awhile. By the time they left the day was pretty much shot anyway, so I just set my To-Do list aside and decided to mess with it tomorrow.”

I don’t know about you, but this kind of thing used to happen to me all the time. I would start the day off with a positive mindset and a list of things that I was GOING to accomplish, but then I would get sidetracked or start to procrastinate and eventually throw in the towel. The idea was that my momentum was gone so I wouldn’t be able to get much done with the time left in the day and I’d be better off starting fresh in the morning.

Sounds reasonable, right? WRONG!!! This is a terrible way of doing things if you are REALLY trying to get things done. By going this rout you are giving into your lazy side and letting it win. You might think that you are not giving in by intending to continue your tasks the following morning, but your lazy side knows that tomorrow is a new day for IT as well. You will be just as tempted to repeat these unproductive habits as you were the day before. And not only this, but you will be throwing away the precious time that is still left in that day.

How to recover from this.

It’s quite simple actually. Just hit RESET! When your computer gets bogged down, resetting it is the best way to refresh its performance. Here is what I do when I have procrastinated half the day away and still want to get things done.

• Go into a quiet room (turn the lights off if it helps), close your eyes and clear your head. Focus on your breathing and just relax. This is your actual reset button. You are recreating the experience of getting up first thing in the morning.

• After a short time of doing this (how ever long it takes to reboot) go strait to the place you normally plan for your day (office, dinner table, etc…) Get out a piece of paper and re-create your To-Do list. Be sure not to use the old one. The idea is to restart, and using the old list will just remind you of what you DIDN’T get done. Write out the new list as if it’s the first time you’ve seen the tasks. Assuming that a chunk of your day is already gone, make sure to create the list according to the time left. There’s no advantage to running around like a crazy person as you try to do a full day’s tasks in half the time. The point here is to try to recover what’s left of the day.

• Once you’ve re-created your list it is important that you think positively. Remind yourself that you would normally have been on the couch watching TV, but are instead taking responsibility and ‘Getting Things Done’. Be excited that you are actually pulling yourself out of the rut of procrastination that you would have normally laid in for the rest of the day. Then use this positive energy to start knocking out the things on the list.

• At the end of the day be sure to make note of the things you accomplished. Point out to yourself the fact that these are things that would have otherwise been put off until tomorrow and that, even then, they might not have gotten done.

• Finally, write out a new To-Do list for the following day. Not only will THIS now be accomplished, but you can then see all the things that would not have been accomplished had you continued to procrastinate and pushed your responsibilities onto tomorrow.

There are three reasons why this ability to RESET is SO important.

1: How ever you react to certain situations you are training yourself to be a certain way. If you give in once, then it will be easier to give in the next time. And it just goes down hill from there. Anyone can keep up a strong momentum, but what we are doing here is much harder and a much more crucial skill. We are going from a dead stop to positive momentum in the same day.

2: How you end your day has a great affect on how you start the next one. So if you had thrown in the towel you would not only be less productive on THAT day, but you wouldn’t be giving the following day any momentum to work with.

3: One of the goals I have when I make my To-Do list is to accomplish some of the things that will help me get closer to my life goals and dreams. Every day that I REALLY push through my lazy side and ‘Get Things Done’ is one day closer to reaching those goals. So it is that much more important that when I have a rough start, I am still able to finish strong. There is nothing more un-motivating to the pursuit of your dreams than to be no closer to them from one day to the next.

Having a daily routine is very important for anyone trying to stay motivated and on task. I know, for myself, without a routine I would be at the mercy of my easily distracted mind. I have many interests and therefore many temptations to get off the path to productivity at any moment. This is not to say that you should never do anything on a whim or have time to just play around. This is very important for keeping a healthy balance in your life. But concerning the time that you choose to “get things done” I find that routine is king.

Keys to an effective routine:

• Sleep patterns.

This should on the top of your list. Going to bed and getting up at the same time everyday is very important. Not only does it clearly set your internal clock, which allows for deeper sleep, but it gives your mindset a clear starting and stopping point each day. Think about like this. If you work 9-5 everyday than you eventually train yourself to be in work mode during those times which can really help your productivity. But if you’ve ever worked a job that had constantly changing hours you probably know the struggle that occurs to get yourself in work mode. One week you’ve got the day shift and the next the night shift. Toward the end of the week you may start to get used to the current shift only to be shaken up again the following week.

• Meals.

It is also important to eat your meals around the same time every day. Not only does it give you a sense of consistency but it also helps keep your blood sugar steady throughout the day (assuming your eating when your body needs the fuel and food that aids in it’s health and well being). I would also suggest eating the same or similar type of food for each meal. So if you find that eggs, toast and milk is a good breakfast for you than make that your breakfast everyday. Not only will you know for sure that it will work day after day but it will be one less decision to distract you from the more important things in your day. (I know that some people need to mix it to enjoy the meal and that is fine. Just try to keep it similar it type so you can rely on the same kind of fuel everyday.)

• Getting ready for the day.

I would suggest that you get ready for your day as soon as you can. I do so right after breakfast. Depending on what you do everyday you may have no choice but to do this already. In my situation, I often have the choice to stay in my PJ’s until late morning. But I have found that until I brush my teeth and get dressed for the day I am not quite in full “work” mode. And I’ve also found that if I am not dressed and ready to go when I get an unexpected call from a client, I will feel more caught off guard. So, if you can, try to do whatever needs to be done to be ready to walk out the door. Then, even if you just end up going back to your computer (or whatever you do in the mornings) you’ll be more prepared for whatever comes your way.

• Lay out the things that have to get done.

Make sure that by the time you are into the flow of your day, you have a clear idea of the things that have to get done. Then, as you make decisions and take action, you will do it with these tasks in mind. There’s nothing more frustrating than laying in bed at the end of the day knowing that you didn’t accomplish the “Must Do’s” on your to-do list.

• Exercise.

If you don’t already, try to incorporate regular exercise into your daily routine. It gives you a way to escape from the stresses of the day as well as builds your strength and endurance to take on more challenges. And did I mention the fact that it makes you feel really good too? If you already do exercise every day I would just make sure that you do it around the same time if you can. This, like the other steps of the day, will give your mind something to count on.

• Family and friends.

Try not to ever miss this daily task. It is greatly important that you clearly incorporate your family and friends into your daily routine. If you don’t they will most certainly become something that you do “if you still have time”. So make sure to not only have a set time to enjoy their company but feel free to spend time with them whenever you can.

• You time.

Everyday you should have a time when you can sit back and just BE. Kind of like a mini vacation, this is a time when you don’t have to answer the phone, reply to emails or even talk to anyone if you don’t want to. Try to make it a time and location that allows for the most relaxation for the best affect. Without this kind of time you will not only get less done throughout the day but you will eventually burnout from stress and frustration. For me, this time is in the morning when I first get up. Since I wake up at about 4:30am I have the world to myself and everything is peaceful and quiet. I look forward to this time at the end of each day and when I have a particularly stressful one I absolutely crave it!

The common theme you see in the above information is that of consistency. I talk a lot about doing the same things at the same times and in the same way. You may think to yourself that this is counterproductive. That this will stifle the imagination and put you in a rut. But the opposite is most often the case. By having these things laid out for you each day you are freeing your mind from having to make all of these decisions and allowing it to focus more intensely on the decisions that matter most. Think of a soldier in combat. Does that person have to think about where their weapon is or how to use it? Of course not! Does this hinder the soldier in their ability to meet the goals set before them? Absolutely not! Because using their weapon feels like breathing to them, they are able to put 100% of their focus on their objectives with no distractions whatsoever. In addition to the already stated benefits, by doing what you know works, everyday, you are avoiding the things that may not. All it takes to knock you off track is ONE BAD DAY. And what better way to avoid a bad day than to repeat a good one over and over?

So what things work for you and how do you stay on task to meet the goals of the day?