In cleaning up my office recently, I found several notes to take down from older phases in my health and weight loss process. Over the last few years I’ve lost more than 50 pounds (so far), put on a good deal of muscle, and improved my general fitness and energy levels–but it has taken a lot of effort, and it surprised me to realize how many different approaches I had needed over even just the last couple of years.

And when I look the notes over, I realize they were all good tactics. It’s not that I kept trying things and failing, but really the opposite: I would struggle with a set of goals for a while, eventually make them part of my automatic behavior, and then turn my attention to the next step for me, whatever that was at the time. The notes I pulled down today were tucked in places around my desk where I was guaranteed to see them several times a day. They were each at different times a small part of my self-motivation, and when I needed to quickly remind myself exactly what I was working on at the moment, they were always there.

Generation 1
The oldest note I still had up covered six principles that helped me minimize some of my bad eating habits and improve my nutrition and health in general. They’re not so much universal wisdom as the specific things I personally needed to concentrate on. (These were just for eating: exercise was always pretty much a simple matter of “get active, and stay active!”) My note (paraphrased a little) said:

1. Plan food choices instead of choosing while you’re hungry
2. Know how many calories are in something before eating it
3. Eat only from servings*
4. Fruits and vegetables are good choices for snacks and fillers
5. Eat at regular times
6. Write down everything you eat

* For instance, instead of eating from a box of crackers, I would serve myself some crackers on a plate.

Generation 2
As these things became deeply-ingrained habits, I stopped looking at that list, and eventually I created another, this one of things I could do to not eat if I felt hungry (except for fruits and vegetables, which for me personally are always a good idea). They were things like eating a fruit or vegetable, getting involved in something absorbing, drinking tea, etc. They helped solidify my habit of eating only at particular times.

Generation 3
As that grew to be old hat and both good eating and exercise grew to be pretty ingrained habits for me, I added a new goal, task management. Now my reminder note had to do with always knowing what the next thing I wanted to do was, focusing on making good choices every time a choice was presented to me (regardless of the subject), and going out of my way to find enthusiasm for the most important items on my task list.

A Continuing Cycle of New Tactics
What I hope you’ll glean from all this isn’t so much the specifics of my reminders to myself over time as a picture of self-motivation as an ongoing process of acquiring habits. You identify some behaviors you want to change, remind yourself of them every day, and then as they become habits, you set your sights a little higher or make your goal a little larger. For this new vision, you figure out what behaviors you need to change. One goal gives way to the next, and if things go well, you gradually acquire more and more of the habits you really want to have, and lose more and more of the behaviors you don’t want.

You would think a garage sale wouldn’t be difficult to figure out. You prepare a little, you advertise, you put things on card tables, you wait. I’ve been wanting to help my son set up a garage sale of a lot of things he’s outgrown, where he could be in charge and receive the profits, but I’ve been stopped by the idea that I can’t. I live in a fairly rural area, on a dirt road that doesn’t get any traffic. I’ve been held up by this idea that we should have a garage sale, but I don’t know how to set it up so that people will actually come.

I was thinking about the garage sale this morning and once I really turned my attention to it, I realized the idea that I didn’t know how to make it work was ridiculous. We will either have a garage sale or we won’t. If we do, we’ll either have it here or have it somewhere else. If we have it somewhere else, we just have to figure what lucky friend is going to get us taking over their porch or garage soon, and ask permission. The only reason I’ve been thinking “I don’t know how” is because I haven’t been wanting to face it. Garage sales take preparation, which I don’t feel like I have time for, and they last a whole day, which I definitely don’t have time for, and what if no one shows up and all of the effort is wasted and we still have the things left over? It’s not that I don’t know how to do it, it’s that the idea has been making me anxious. Dealing with anxiety has a lot to do with facing things and answering questions. A few simple answers sorted my situation out. We should have the sale, because my son will enjoy earning the money and will learn about money from it, and because we need the room the old things are taking up, and because it’s a waste to have them here if we can get them to someone who will actually use them. We should have it here so that he can mind the sale and I can do the other things I need to do, checking in with him regularly. And we’ll attract traffic as well as we can by putting signs out on the main road right near us, which will probably give us more custom than we would get in a suburban neighborhood.

Your something may not be as easy to figure out, but there are several useful ways to do something you don’t know how to do. So, what are they?

1. If you really can’t do it, move on
If you really have no way of accomplishing the task in front of you, even after reading the rest of this article,  then the problem isn’t doing the task: if you honestly can’t do it, then it’s not your responsibility. Instead, the problem is facing the inevitable consequences of not doing it. This requires a difficult but powerful tool: surrendering to reality.

The same situation applies if the only way you can do the thing in question is to not do something more important. For example, if the only weekend we could do the garage sale was the only opportunity we’d get for some time to see family members visiting the area, then we’d need to give up on the garage sale. Fortunately, there are often more options than there seem to be at first, which is what the rest of the article is about.

2. You don’t have to do it if it doesn’t need to be done
Sometimes we resist doing things because they really don’t make sense for us to do. If it were for me instead of my son, I probably wouldn’t have the garage sale at all, because the amount of money it brought in wouldn’t justify the time. Instead I’d donate everything to a local recycle shop, which would sell the items to lower-income people for very affordable prices. If you feel concerned about how you’re going to tackle a problem, make sure first that it makes sense for you to do it at all before you start worrying about how.

3. Do it differently if there’s a better way
Sometimes difficult problems become much easier if they’re approached in an unexpected way. If you have something you’re worried about doing, consider whether there are other approaches you could take that would simplify things. If my son had a few major items and otherwise mostly things that would sell for next to nothing, he could sell the major items on eBay or Craigslist, still learning about money and reaping the rewards, and we could give the rest away to the recycle shop.

4. If it can wait, improve your position and then do it
Some tasks need improved skills before they can be done well, in which case a combination of practice and patience will put you in a much better position to get the thing done, provided it can wait. Keep in mind that research overwhelmingly supports the idea that practically anyone of at least average intelligence can excel at almost anything if they get in enough deliberate practice. If I were worried my son wouldn’t do a good job of running the sale, we could spend some time doing pretend sales and finding educational computer games about buying and selling to help him learn. We’d have to decide whether the sale was worth the effort and whether we could wait that long to get the unneeded things out of the house, but it’s possible the effort spent learning about money would be more than worthwhile.

Other tasks benefit from a change in situation. If I were going to move in the near future to a location that’s better for a garage sale, I might store the sale items away and have the sale there once we’d moved.

5. If it would work better with help, get help
Sometimes a little advice or active assistance from a friend, family member, mentor, or even a hired professional can go a long way. This might be as simple as getting a better idea of the task from someone who’s done it already, or as involved as finding and hiring a business manager for your new venture if you’re great at the core activity of the business but not so great at marketing, accounting, and the other general business tasks. For example, I probably have friends who have things they’d want to sell too, and a two- or three-family garage sale might attract more people.

6. If it works best to do it now, just do it the best you can
If it needs to be done, if there aren’t good alternatives, if others can’t really help, and if it’s best to do it now (due to ongoing problems, limited opportunity, a deadline, etc.), then you’re in the same place I was: face things and provide answers. If you don’t know the answers to the questions, get the best information you can and answer them as well as you can. If you’re having trouble facing things, it’s probably due to broken ideas, which means it’s fixable.

7. If you know what to do but don’t feel motivated, get in touch with your reasons
Of course, it might be that when you think about it, you realize you really do know how to tackle this goal, and it really is an important one, but you don’t feel inspired to get in motion. If that’s the case, it can help a lot to get in touch with your real reasons for accomplishing the goal. If they’re someone else’s reasons, or if you’re just trying to fulfill expectations or fit some role, then it may be that it’s not such a good goal for you after all. But if the reasons are your own, get in touch with them: write down what made you decide to do the thing in the first place, or visualize what it will be like to do it–or to have gotten it done.

Regardless of what approach you take, remember that “I have to but I can’t” is a logical impossibility. If there’s really no way to do it, you’re off the hook: no one can make you do something you truly can’t do. If there is a way to do it, all you have to do is figure out whether you’re going to decide to, and if so what the best way is. There’s not always a good way, but there is always at least one best way. I hope you find yours. As for me, I have to help my son go sort through some old toys.

Photo by m.gifford

Kelly McGonigal recently Tweeted about a British Psychological Society post in which psychologists talk about things they still don’t understand about themselves. It’s really interesting reading, but the particular thing that I connected with was University of Texas psychologist David Buss saying “One nagging thing that I still don’t understand about myself is why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases … One would think that explicit knowledge of these well-documented psychological biases and years of experience with them would allow a person to cognitively override the biases. But they don’t.”

I know why Buss sometimes fails to act according to things he knows perfectly well, and yet I do the same thing myself, for instance a couple of weeks ago when I had a serious communication breakdown that I later saw wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d  used all of the communication skills I’d been learning for years (see Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High or Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life). Actually, that’s the whole point of this post: just knowing something about how our minds work is not the same thing as using that knowledge.

So what’s the gap between knowing and doing? There are actually four gaps. Lucky for us, none of them is very wide.

1. Noticing opportunities to use the knowledge
The first step is a kind of mindfulness: in order to use, say, a communication skill, I need to be thinking about my communication as I’m doing it so that I can notice, “Hey, here’s a great opportunity to summarize my friend’s concerns!” Mindfulness can be improved with tools like meditation, feedback loops, and decision logging.

2. Understanding how to apply the knowledge
It’s good for me to know that I should try to summarize a person’s concerns back to them, but I need to know more than that abstract idea: I need to know how I go about it, perhaps having a step-by-step method I can use to apply the information I have, or some test I can use on my intended behavior to see if it would fit the information.

3. Surrendering objections
By definition habits are hard to change, and if you’re trying to act a different way, you’re trying to change a habit. Changing habits usually means giving something up, for example pride, less-than-ideal strategies you’ve been using for years, or defensiveness. In my case, if I want to make sure the person I’m talking to knows they’ve been heard and understood, I have to give up the impulse to do a critique of what they just said and instead be willing to understand first, react second. People are much more comfortable hearing someone else’s ideas when they know for sure that their own ideas have already made it across.

4. Making the effort
Putting a piece of knowledge into play requires conscious effort: there’s usually nothing automatic about it. Effort means a decision to devote at least a little bit of time and attention at the right moments to using the knowledge.

In an article on learning and the brain, I talk about how acting on knowledge helps us learn it better. For this article or any piece of knowledge you gain that might be useful, it can make all the difference to use it as soon as possible, several times, both in order to get used to the specific skill and to fix it in your brain. If we don’t go out of our way to bridge the four gaps between information and action–noticing opportunities, understanding how, surrendering objections, and making the effort–then the knowledge isn’t any more useful in our heads than it is left on the page, unread.

Photo by magnusfranklin

In another article on The Willpower Engine I mentioned the useful mnemonic S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound) for checking to see if a goal is a good one. In this article, I’ll get more specific about goals that seem to be good but aren’t: fake goals.

If it’s not entirely up to you, it’s a fake goal
What do I mean by a “fake” goal? A fake goal is anything you want to have happen that you can’t always make happen by your choices and actions. This is tricky, because often people won’t take responsibility for something that really is within their control (like a child saying she didn’t do her homework because it’s impossible for her to remember it), while at other times things are likely to be within our reach but not within our direct control (like being hired to play with a particular orchestra).

It’s important to sort out real goals from fake goals because fake goals screw us up and cause real damage. For example, if my goal is to become first violin in the Peoria Symphony Orchestra, I might practice obsessively for many years to get good enough to play with the PSO and give an awe-inspiring audition, but if they already have a first violinist who is extremely good, happy with the post, and in good health, that dream might never come about, and I might become depressed, frustrated, and anxious while missing out on amazing opportunities because they don’t match my (fake) goal.

On a smaller scale, I might have a goal of winning a local dance contest, then get upset when the contest judge’s sister-in-law wins it instead.

In both cases, the skills and resources needed to achieve the fake goal are in my hands, but sooner or later it comes to a decision that someone else makes, and as I’ve written about in another article, other people are not under our control in any healthy and meaningful way.

Losing weight: a classic fake goal
One very popular fake goal is losing weight. At first glance, this might seem contradictory. Surely getting fit is under our control? And in large part, it is–but losing weight is not necessarily the same as getting fit.

For example, take my own fitness saga. I got serious about fitness in late 2005 by beginning to log how many calories I was eating each day and starting to exercise regularly. Since that time I’ve lost about 50 pounds. So how is weight not a good indicator? Well, there are two main problems with it. First, there’s the fact that weight isn’t the same as fitness (and neither is BMI, which simply uses your weight and height to come up with a number). In the summer of 2007 I went through a transformation from a relatively heavy guy to a relatively fit guy–and didn’t lose any weight, because as I was gradually losing fat, I was also not-so-gradually building up muscle.  And second, weight varies throughout the day and from day to day based on things like water retention, time of day, and the last time you’ve eaten. On the more extreme end of things, yesterday I weighed in several times and found my weight varying five pounds from waking to bedtime!

So if weight isn’t a good goal, why do I pay any attention to it? Because it’s useful information. Often the indications we get of how we’re doing in our progress to our goals are limited or imperfect, but limited and imperfect information is worlds better than no information at all. While it doesn’t convey the complete story of my fitness progress, the fact that I’ve lost 50 pounds so far and am nearing my target weight is one of the clearest indicators I can give myself or others about how things have gone for me.

A bad goal can be a good aspiration
But if winning a contest or losing weight isn’t a good goal, what should we do instead? Give up on goals? Rid ourselves of aspirations?

Definitely not. To motivate ourselves, aspirations (like winning a contest or losing weight) can be powerful tools. In addition to providing valuable feedback, aspirations can fuel our visions of what we want the future to be like, which can be powerfully motivating. However, we need to treat aspirations less seriously than goals. If we’re not achieving our aspirations, there comes a crucial moment when we have the choice of either getting attached to it in a way that will hurt us or surrendering it so that we can focus on other opportunities that might pay off better. What this means is being willing to look at the scale that says I just gained two pounds, reflecting that my diet and exercise have been excellent over the past couple of weeks, and shrugging it off with the thought that unless I’m confused about what I need to do, my progress will show up on the scale sooner or later. It also means looking at the contest I didn’t win or the orchestra position I wasn’t offered and recognizing that there are other contests and other positions, and while the loss or the lack of a job playing violin might be valuable information for me to think over, it isn’t the end or the goal.

Real goals are about what we do, not what we’ll get
The most powerful and productive goals are ones that are connected with a change in habits and the immediate, reliable benefits of what we’re doing. (For example, read about this related research finding.) Instead of having a goal to lose weight, I can (and did) strive to get in the habit of eating more healthily and mindfully and to exercise regularly. My goal in doing these things is to constantly become healthier, have more energy, and improve my mood. I certainly had aspirations of looking better, being strong, and winning Taekwondo sparring matches, but if I had focused on those instead of on progress, I would have been disappointed when I didn’t look much different after the six months, wasn’t noticeably stronger for some time, and lost at my first Taekwondo competition (though I won at my second).

The violinist would be better served by a goal of getting in a certain amount of good practice every week, and the dancer by the goal of perfecting a new dance routine for every competition that comes down the line. Both people are likely to have a lot of aspirations about things they can’t entirely control, especially other people’s opinions of how well they do, but can take these in the context of their specific goals.

When several small goals = one big goal
A note here about multiple goals: in other posts, I’ve talked about the importance of focusing on only one new goal at a time. It would probably be more precise for me to suggest focusing on only one new area of accomplishment at a time, since a violinist could simultaneously be working on the related goals of practicing twenty hours a week, mastering a particular piece, and making certain bowing techniques available by reflex. At the same time, it’s worthwhile to consider whether some goals would benefit from being broken down. For instance, eating better and exercising are complementary parts of an overall fitness goal, but both of them can take a lot of learning, planning, and effort to achieve, and it might work best for many people to get one on track before really digging into the other.

Photo by Dennis Sylvester Hurd.

In past articles (How To Improve Willpower Through Writing Things Down: Decision Logging and How to Strengthen Willpower Through Practice), I’ve talked about things you can do to make willpower stronger. Today I’d like to talk about how doing nothing for at least 10 minutes a day can strengthen willpower and provide a lot of other benefits. Of course, I’m talking about meditation.

Benefits for here and now
Many people use meditation as a spiritual practice, which of course is great, but the benefits I’ll be talking about here have nothing to do with spirituality. When I meditate–even though I’m not especially good at it and have only been doing it seriously for a few months–my attention comes back to the present moment, tension drains away all by itself, and my mind becomes (intermittently) serene. I usually spend from 10 to 25 minutes in the morning, but the effects ripple out through the rest of my waking hours. On days when I meditate, I usually feel less conflicted, less distracted, more focused, and more at peace. On days when I don’t, I’m more likely to be struggling with myself. It’s not a big, dramatic change in how my day feels–at least, not for me–but it is an important change. The difference is most obvious when I look back and see what I’ve accomplished and how I feel about the day.

How meditation helps
The way meditation strengthens willpower is by providing a calmer and more balanced state of mind. In the same way that a person who meditates is less likely to get sucked into dumb arguments with other people, they are also less likely to get sucked into dumb arguments with themselves about excuses for not exercising or about how we don’t want to apologize after accidentally creating a problem for someone.

As Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence (among other books) puts it in this article, “My own doctoral dissertation found (as have many others since) that the practice of meditation seems to speed the rate of physiological recovery from a stressful event. A string of studies have now established that more experienced meditators recover more quickly from stress-induced physiological arousal than do novices.”

Good ways to learn how to meditate online, with books, or with audio
Meditation is easy to learn, and it doesn’t involve any particularly mystical or mysterious techniques. It does take practice to clear away mental clutter and experience a clear mind for more than a few moments at a time, but the benefits come even if most of your meditation is spent realizing that you’re getting distracted.

You can begin to learn to meditate in just half an hour or so. Mary Jaksch of Goodlife Zen offered some good resources for getting started: there’s her own article How to Meditate: 10 Important Tips as well the Zen Mountain Monastery page Zen Meditation Instructions . You may also be interested in the article here on this site, “15-Minute Online Guided Meditation from Kelly McGonigal.”

Or you could go to your local library or bookstore and find books or audiobooks by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who teaches medicine at the University of Massachusetts, and whose life’s work is teaching mindfulness meditation and stress reduction. For example, he has an audiobook called Guided Mindfulness Meditation that offers easy and very effective meditations for increasing mindfulness and relieving stress.

Photo by premasagar

On Monday, I talked about how especially well-thought-out tools can make work more enjoyable and productive. Today I’ll be moving on to the topic of work environments and how subtle differences in your surroundings can attract you to your work and help you work better. I won’t go into great detail with each item: I think you’ll get enough of the idea to be able to apply it to your own workspace from just visiting each piece of the puzzle.

The essential question is this: what could you do to the space where you work that would

• make you happier or remind you of things that make you happy
• make it easier to concentrate
• put things more easily to hand or more conveniently out of the way
• attract you to your work
• remind you of why you do the work you do, or
• put you in a good mood or frame of mind to focus?

In answer, here are eight elements you can look at improving to make your work environment work harder for you.

Light: Is there enough of it? Is it prevented from glaring in your eyes and reflecting off screens? Is there a way you could get more natural light, or a lamp with a quality of light that is more comfortable for you?

Space: Does your workspace feel open and uncrowded? Can you easily move in it without bumping into things? Can you see and get to things without being obstructed?

Music: If music helps you work, do you know what kinds of music fit your working habits the best? Have you experimented with different kinds? Do you have a convenient way to play music? If you don’t have a library of music available to you where you work (or even if you do), I highly recommend Pandora, a free sort of jukebox where you steer the music selections by naming artists and songs you like. In case your musical tastes turn out to be anything like mine (which are a little unusual sometimes, I admit), you can hear my Pandora stations at http://www.pandora.com/people/luc2 .

Comfort and ergonomics: Of course it’s more expensive and takes more trouble to get a good office chair or a drawing table that you can set to exactly the right height, but if you spend long hours in a particular workspace, problems like back pain or a crick in your neck can tend to make your work unenjoyable or cut your work sessions short, so some extra effort and expense might be worth it in the long run.

Neatness and organization: Your workspace only has to be neat and organized enough that you can easily get to everything you need to use, nothing’s in your way, and you’re happy. For me, having a place for everything and everything in its place is an ongoing process, but one that makes me noticeably happier to sit down to work whenever I make progress at it; for you, a little more disorder might be joyful–or like many people, you might find a little time spent on organization goes a long way in lifting your spirits.

Beauty and personality: Photographs, objects that make you feel at home, artwork that puts you in a good mood, or anything that makes your workspace more comfortable or beautiful is likely to make you more eager to get things done, as long as it isn’t distracting.

Refuge: Both in commercial buildings and home work areas, it might be an option to have privacy and peace or it might not, depending on the way things are arranged.

If you have some say about your workspace, you might consider whether you would be happier and more productive in a more peaceful setting than you have now–or in a setting where you get to interact with others more. If you would prefer peace but need to work in the midst of chaos, remember that it is possible to adapt. I used to be nearly unable to write in a room where I could hear anyone talking; after a couple of years of writing, by necessity, in a room that was also a playroom for two young children, I grew nearly immune to distraction. One large writing project was finished in the midst of a bunch of writers having a half-convention, half-party–and it was a lot of fun to work in that context. We’re adaptable creatures.

The directions of things: Though I was skeptical at first, I learned some valuable techniques from a feng shui expert who came in to talk to a group of us at a former job. Not all of the teachings of feng shui necessarily struck me as constructive for offices (though admittedly, I know only a little about it), but the ones I like are:

• Avoid having things (corners of tables, pens, etc.) pointing at you while you work, as it can set you on edge.
• Try to work in a position where you can easily see the door. This prevents having to wonder who might be behind you.
• Arrange your workspace so that things meet in curves or open angles rather than corners. For instance, turn one piece of furniture 45 degrees where it meets another to create a more harmonious line.
• Add plants to your workspace; some easy ones to maintain that are tolerant of offices include ficus and jade plant

I’d be interested to hear your suggestions on creating more inviting and productive work spaces. What do you do to make your work environment work better for you?

Photo by my friend, Diana Rowland, of her Writing Lair. Diana is the author of Mark of the Demon, which just came out in June from Bantam Dell

Most of the articles on The Willpower Engine have to do with our mental state and not with outside things like rewards and assistance. There’s a good reason for this: in research, intrinsic motivation (motivation that comes from within ourselves) shows itself to be much more powerful than extrinsic motivation (anything that happens outside us) time and again. Carrots and sticks are nothing compared to ideas and desires.

But there are some ways we can change our environment that in turn make a big difference in our mental state, namely by setting things up invitingly. In this article I’ll talk about one specific tool (Scrivener) for one specific kind of goal (writing), but if you’re interested in how tools and environment change things, read on.

Scrivener is Macintosh-only (later edit: no longer Mac only! A Windows edition is now available) software for writing novels, non-fiction books, screenplays, and other large projects–I’m using it to write the Willpower Engine book, for example. It allows you to organize and switch around among a lot of different pieces of the same project; to add, delete, and move around these pieces; and to store research information (including pictures, videos, notes, Web pages, and so on).

So what’s so great about that? Well, nothing earth-shaking, but when you’re working on a writing project with lots of pieces–whether those pieces are chase scenes, eras of Roman history, or moments that change a character’s view of the world–one of the biggest problems is focusing on each piece intensely as you write it while still being able to keep the whole project in mind. I can be in the middle of writing a chapter when I think of something I need to include in a later chapter. Using Scrivener, I can click on the document that has the outline for that later chapter, stick in the the thought, and be back to writing within 10 seconds.

Before Scrivener, in order to prevent getting off track or distracted, those kinds of notes would tend to end up in a big document that would eventually have to be organized and re-organized, requiring me to write some, organize some, update my outline, and then go back to writing again. In a normal word processor, I have to impose organization. In Scrivener, organization is the whole idea, and in the normal course of using the program I automatically put things in their places.

It’s only a few clicks and a few seconds easier and faster than doing the same kind of thing with a couple of folders full of files, but because it’s so easy to do things in an organized way in Scrivener, I do much more more of it there than I would in any other context. This means that almost all of my time and attention when I use Scrivener is focused on what I’m writing or planning out at that moment, and it also means that as I finish one thing, the next thing to do is often sitting there, ready for me to plunge into it without having to go back and figure out where I’m going next.

If you’ve read many of my other posts, you might begin to recognize these pieces as being the kind of things that help a person get into a state of flow. Flow, briefly, is a state in which you’re highly focused on a task, working enthusiastically at your highest level of skill, to the point where the time just seems to fly by while you get things done. As you can imagine or may know from experience, it’s both very productive and a ton of fun.

I don’t mean this article to be an advertisement for Scrivener (although it’s a great tool, and I recommend it for writers who have Macs), but when we look at how for some writers using this program instead of even a very good word processor affects getting things done, it’s clear that the right tools can do a lot to create a productive and enthusiastic mental state.

Later addition – If you do happen to be interested in Scrivener, you can get 20%-50% off with this offer. There’s a 30-day free trial available on the Scrivener site.

So what kinds of tools help make work inviting, improve focus, and boost productivity? Search out tools that

• keep your work organized with little or no effort, like tool trays for graphic artists
• let you break your work up into smaller pieces, like a long workbench that offers room for a series of components to be spread out
• are attractive or appealing, like a comfortable pen that makes a good line
• work smoothly and effectively all the time, like a top-notch pair of hair cutting scissors
• keep your tools or components in front of you (rather than hiding things you might need to remember or find), like pegboard
• are intuitive, like an iPod

In Wednesday’s article, I’ll turn the discussion to work environment itself and what kinds of changes we can make to turn a space where we’re trying to get something done into a space that actually helps us get things done–and make the process more enjoyable. And I’m curious about tools that you’ve found help motivate you. What’s the most exceptional tool you own?

Multitool photo by 2:19

It can be truly humiliating. Maybe it’s never happened to you, but it certainly happens to a lot of us: you’ve been grappling with something for years–your weight, organization, starting a novel, getting the house in order, changing how you act with other people–and a day comes when you’re inspired to do something about it. So you do it! You change your eating habits or start running or create a strict rule for dealing with all incoming e-mails. Then a week or two pass, and you find you’re gone off the rails: your eating habits are worse than ever, or a busy day put you behind on your organization and you never caught up, or the trick you were going to use to remember people’s names has been forgotten itself. What happened?

There’s a simple answer to this and a more detailed answer. The simple answer is that we start things in different circumstances than we continue them in. A New Year’s resolution made at a party with friends on a full stomach (for example) turns into a thankless, lonely grind week after week, and it loses a lot of its sparkle that way.

Don’t worry: the detailed answer is much less depressing than the simple answer. But the simple answer reminds us of something essential: inspiration may drive us to start new things, but it’s our own efforts to rise above obstacles that get us through in the end.

Certainly there is such a thing as a badly-chosen goal, or a good idea for a goal that’s not practical at the moment. But for goals that are worthwhile, there are at least seven ways something that started well could run into trouble. Here’s what those seven kinds of problems are, and how to get past them.

1) The novelty wears off
Annoyingly, somewhere in our evolution we acquired a built-in trait that only allows us to enjoy something for a little while unless it changes. A dish that tastes “amazing” on the first bite and “really good” when we have it again in a few days continues to wane in amazingness as long as we keep eating it regularly. This is known as “hedonic adaptation,” and it means that anything that was delightful and new and exciting eventually becomes old hat unless there’s something renewing that excitement. When we first take on new goals, it helps a lot to understand that we need to not only take the steps to reach our goal, but to keep actively renewing our enthusiasm.

2) Our mood changes
Everyone has better and worse days, days when we feel we can do more and days when we’re mainly just trying to keep things from going wrong. What may seem easy to do on a good day can be the last thing we care about on a bad day. Fortunately, we can stop having bad days if we try, but it also helps to use tactics like rule-making and decision logging to keep ourselves happy with our goals.

3) Things get harder; complications arise
Sometimes we’ll start pursuing a goal when things are going well, but then things get harder: there are new demands on our time or finances or attention, for instance. It may become harder to find time to follow our goals. When the going gets tough, the tough organize and prioritize so they won’t lose track of what’s most important. Goals that aren’t nurtured through busy times tend to get lost in the shuffle.

4) We begin to forget
Goals and new habits need to be nourished and maintained by a process of regular feedback. If we don’t regularly remind ourselves of what we were doing and review our progress, our goals become vague, distant, and easy to forget. Once we’re no longer actively thinking about what we want to achieve, we’re sunk: those habits aren’t going to change themselves. Focusing on our priorities consistently can save them from being forgotten.

5) Just when we start flying, someone shoots us down
There will always be naysayers, whether they’re people who feel threatened by another person’s success or people who genuinely want what they think is best for you but aren’t ready to support your choices. If any of them get to you, figure out what it is they’ve told you that has sunk in and use idea repair to pull it up by the roots. Recruit them to your cause or harden yourself to their criticism: we’re each responsible for our own lives, so while it makes sense to consider good advice, if we’ve considered it and decided to go a different way, we don’t need to consider that same advice again: we’ll need our energy for other things.

6) A new interest takes over
Since things we’re getting used to become less exciting through hedonic adaptation, we human beings are seekers after novelty. This can be fine in a lot of circumstances, but not when it repeatedly derails us on old projects by tantalizing us into taking on new ones. We generally have the resources to undertake only one new thing at a time. After we’ve been in the groove on one goal for a long time, we might consider adding something else, but add something else too early and like it or not, the old goal will very likely go by the wayside. When you’re tempted by a new direction, think carefully about what you’ve invested in the goal you’re already working on and about why it’s important to you in the first place. Of course we have to keep some flexibility, but guard your progress jealously against all but the most important replacement goals.

7) Just announcing it was enough
One interesting psychological study with law students found that students who announced a study goal tended to do worse at achieving that goal than students who kept their goals private. One of the reasons this may be happening is that sometimes, a person can get enough positive feedback for just committing to something that they don’t feel the need to actually follow through–and very often the people who are there to encourage us when we start something aren’t going to be looking over our shoulders to make sure it gets done. Not following through under these circumstances isn’t so much a character flaw as it is a logistical error. Who knew that we would feel so much more satsified and resolved with our current situation just by announcing the intention to change? The enthusiasm for the actual change leaks away, and we may not even realize it’s happening.

If you might be in danger of falling prey to the announcement trap, the safest course is to only announce your goals to people who will be holding you accountable to them. Note that this is hard to do over the Internet; it’s too easy to avoid the subject, or the place where you announced it, or to say vaguely that you’re working on it. Someone who’s going to greet you in person every morning and say “Hey, how’s the novel coming?” is going to be much more help than an online friend who asks the same question, and someone who doesn’t listen to the answer isn’t going to be helpful to you regardless of where they are.

Starting new things and failing at them is so common in human experience that we tend to mark it down as a character flaw, to think that we “just don’t have the willpower.” Fortunately, willpower isn’t so much something you have as something you do. By anticipating the efforts we’ll need to make to move forward with our goals and by proactively handling the kinds of problems we’ve just talked about, we can keep ourselves on track and find ourselves just as committed on day 100 or day 1,000 as we were on day 1.

Photo by greekadman

In my last post, “How to Get a  Lot of Different Things Done Without Going Crazy,” I mentioned molecular neurobiologist John Medina’s point that our brains are structured so that we can only focus on one thing at a time. In Medina’s book Brain Rules, he asserts, “the brain cannot multitask.” It’s a really important point, but he is making it in a confusing way, because Medina goes on to say he’s only referring to “the brain’s ability to pay attention.” As you know if you’ve ever driven the wrong way because your mind was on something else, doing a thing doesn’t always mean paying attention to it. Medina is telling us that we can’t multifocus. Multitasking is not only possible, it’s a terrific way to get dull things done without getting bored, if used in the right way.

But since we can’t focus on more than one thing at a time, that means that if we’re multitasking, we can have at most one thing tying up our attention at a time: past that first thing, anything else we do can’t be something requires attention: it has to be something we’ve done over and over the same way.

I like folding laundry, because I always use laundry folding time to watch a movie with my son. We dump all of the clean laundry in the middle of the living room, sit around the pile, and gradually transform the pile into neat stacks of folded clothing. We take our time, talk about the movie a little when we feel like it, and when we’re done we hardly feel like we’ve done any work. It’s my son’s favorite chore, and I count it more as leisure than work.

But it’s easier for me than for my son, because I’ve been folding clothes for decades, while my son has only been doing it for a few years. Several times every folding session, I’ll notice he’s stopped folding, his attention fully on the movie. Usually this happens with a trickier item of clothing or with a particularly gripping part of the movie. Not being as used to folding as me, he can’t do it entirely on automatic, so his brain needs some of his attention for the folding, and his attention is already taken up by the movie. Since he can’t pay attention to two things at once, the clothes folding just stops, and since he was doing it automatically, he may not even notice: he may just sit there holding the shirt, transfixed.

“Fold,” I remind him, and he takes the few seconds necessary to focus on the clothing and start folding it, at which point his brain can go back to the movie.

I can understand if you don’t think of watching a movie and folding clothes as multitasking (though since I write a lot of fiction and analyze movies for plot, character, pacing, and emotional impact as I watch, watching movies for me is fun work instead of just fun), but even using our attention for fun can make boring work enjoyable.

So multitasking is simple, but multitasking attempts are doomed to fail unless the extra tasks being done are near-automatic ones. In terms of prioritizing tasks if we want to get a lot done, this suggests that it’s helpful to save the really mindless ones for a time when we’re doing something else with our mind: planning, talking on a headset phone (they’re not expensive, and they’re a good way to get housework done painlessly for some people), or even relaxing with a movie. But since even automatic tasks require a little bit of attention from time to time, we generally can’t focus intensely on one thing while automatically doing another: for example, we can’t multitask and still expect to get into flow.

I’m not suggesting we need to fill every moment of our lives with as much productivity as possible, but when we have a lot of things in front of us to do, it can help to know that some of the dullest tasks can be done while our brains are elsewhere. While there are other good ways to accomplish boring tasks, there’s a certain satisfaction in getting two things done at once: it makes us feel organized and confident, and that feeling itself is a great motivator.

Replicated guy cleaning photo by waveking1
Photo of unicyclist Tom James by Elsie esq.

As I write this it’s Saturday, the beginning of the first mostly-free weekend I’ve had in about a month. Because scheduled things take up almost all of my time during the week, I’ve amassed a list of about 30 tasks, large and small, that I’d like to get done this weekend. They probably won’t all get done, because there are only so many hours in the day, and that’s OK as long as I make good use of my time, enjoy the weekend, and get the most important ones taken care of. The question is, what’s the best way to do that?

I’ve gotten better and better at juggling multiple tasks over my lifetime, especially since I started intensively learning about the psychology of self-motivation, but it wasn’t until I came across a section on attention in molecular neurobiologist John Medina’s book Brain Rules that I understood why I’ve been getting better at managing a lot of tasks, and how to improve even more.

When Medina talks about attention, he describes how we change our focus from one thing to another: for each separate activity, we have to send a message throughout our brain telling it to first search out, then activate all the neural resources we have for that particular activity, letting the resources that have been active for whatever we were just doing go dormant. This is called “rule activation,” because as we learn, our brain developes specialized rules for how to act in different circumstances. Rule activation takes several tenths of a second, Medina says, and we can only activate rules for one task at a time. (What about multitasking? That’s a special case, and I go into it in more detail in the post coming up on Wednesday, “How to Multitask, and When Not To.”)

So why should this switchover matter? After all, if our brain can change modes in less than a second, we should be able to move from one thing to another with only a tiny hesitation. And that is possible–but only after we decide what we’re going to do and focus. Until we decide, until we’re certain about what we want to do and start to focus our attention on it, our brains don’t switch over: we’re in a holding pattern, still hanging onto the tools for the last thing we did and not sure what the next thing is. Just thinking about doing a thing is not the same as being ready to do that thing, even though we can very quickly move from thinking to committing if we try.

In other words, in order to get something done, we have to choose one and only one thing to concentrate on, discarding uncertainty and distractions. The problem with this is that our lives don’t present us with one and only one thing to do at a time: often we’ll have several things that need our attention, all of them important, with new ones coming in all the time. How do we reconcile our single-focus brain with a wide variety of tasks? We need to narrow our focus to only one thing at a time, and to do that we need to temporarily dismiss everything else. We also need to have an easy way to move on to the next thing once we’re done the current task.

We often don’t do this. Often we start one task, shift to another task, check e-mail, remember something we wanted to get out of a drawer, get up to get it, get involved in a conversation, forget what we got up to fetch … in other words, we let our attention shift from one thing to another, requiring a complete brain reorientation every time.

The discipline of getting a lot of different things done, then, is a discipline of choosing one thing and ignoring everything else. If you don’t know what the one thing to choose is, the answer is easy: focus your attention on prioritizing your next selection. Putting the extra attention in the choice makes it easier to focus once you move on to doing the thing you selected, because you’ve already had the chance to consider and reject all the other things that you could be doing for that moment.

To get an extra boost of productivity from there, it’s sometimes possible to keep a queue of maybe up to three or four things in your mind. As soon as you’re done the first one, focus fully on the next, and so on. This can be fluid: you can change the order before you start doing something, but once you start, try to stick with it to the end unless things change drastically. Once you get your focus on something else, it’s not always easy to bring it back, so each time you focus your attention, focus it completely and confidently, knowing that you’ve chosen the object of your attention carefully. The secret to doing a lot of different things is to not try to do them all at once.

This process of focusing isn’t just efficient: it’s relaxing. What’s stressful about having a thousand things to do is having to deal with all of them at once. By prioritizing, you really are dealing with all of them while still freeing yourself from having to think about all of them at once.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to schedule this post and put my attention in exactly one other, entirely different place.

Photo by Jonathan Caves