I’ve been delving recently into how people make life changes in many different spheres, for instance in diet, work habits, organizational habits, relationships … and so I’ve begun listening to an audiobook called Stop Clutter From Stealing Your Life by a man named Mike Nelson. I’m not sure I can recommend it unreservedly (even apart from having not finished it), because some of it sounds a lot like an infomercial, but Nelson really does seem to get to some very meaningful information.

The most interesting thing Nelson, formerly a terrible clutterer himself, has brought to my attention so far is the difference between attacking the problem of clutter organizationally versus attacking it emotionally. As he describes it, clutterers will learn new organizational techniques and yet make no progress with their clutter because they’re running into emotional obstacles that have to be dealt with first. If a person is too afraid to tackle their clutter problem, it doesn’t really matter how many great techniques they have for cleaning out their closets.

So it can be useful, when we look at things that we’re not doing but want to be doing, to figure out whether our obstacles are emotional ones (like being afraid of what will happen if we start the task, or ashamed that we haven’t done it already), mental (like telling ourselves we’re doomed to failure without even trying), organizational (like not knowing where the time will come from to get the job done), or some mixture.

This is not to say that there aren’t external obstacles too, like not having the resources needed or having others who oppose us, but in terms of self-motivation, generally speaking all obstacles wind up being emotional, mental, or organizational.

And in an important sense, all three kinds of self-motivation obstacles are really mental obstacles, in that they can be tackled using cognitive approaches–that is, by changing our thinking. But that’s a topic for another time. For today, it’s worth just asking ourselves: what’s really standing in my way? To get past this obstacle, do I need support from a friend? Help working out fear or anger or guilt? More confidence? A better way to think about things? Time? Better planning? Once we know what kinds of obstacles we face, we can understand better how to overcome them.

Photo by code poet

In my post How to Strengthen Willpower Through Practice back in May, I mentioned how useful I’d been finding a practice I call “decision logging” in terms of building willpower, and I promised to give proper attention to the subject in the future. Here, after some delay, is that post.

Decision logging (“d-logging”) is a practice we can use to become more aware of what decisions come up for us during a normal day, how we are making those decisions, and what in our lives is influencing those decisions. The payoff of d-logging is that we become much more aware of what’s going on in our own bodies, minds, and environments–more mindful. Mindfulness is a powerful and central factor in improving willpower, because willpower means being able to make good decisions, and making good decisions requires understanding what’s going into them.

D-logging takes effort, but is very simple to do. All that’s required is to commit for a day at a time (preferably multiple days in a row for a total of at least a couple of weeks in total) to jotting down brief notes whenever

1. You notice you have a meaningful decision to make
2. You notice something going on with yourself that may influence your decisions
3. You have any insights into your own behavior or thinking

By “meaningful decision,” I mean a decision that deals with an area in which you’re trying to improve your willpower or motivation. It’s not important to d-log about how you pick what to wear for the day or which radio station to listen to unless those are concerns of great importance to you.

The kinds of things that go into a d-log include:

• Moods
• Physical sensations, like hunger, fatigue, or comfort
• Ideas or judgements about what’s going on, like “Everything seems to be going wrong this morning” or “I wish I could remember to be a little more relaxed about driving”
• When and how meaningful decisions are coming up
• Anything else that might influence how you make those meaningful decisions

Writing these things down brings them to the forefront of your attention and causes you to see them clearly for at least a moment or two, and seeing them clearly makes it much easier to deal with them. For example, if you’re frustrated about problems you’re having with your car and later in the day find yourself treating coworkers badly, you may find through d-logging that it’s the car that’s really driving your decisions about how to deal with people. Once you recognize this, you may come to the conclusion that taking that frustration out on the people you work with isn’t what you want to do, and you can focus on dealing with your feelings about your car in a more constructive way.

You can d-log on a computer, on paper, or by any other means that suits you (I often use an Alphasmart), but actually writing things down is essential–it’s not enough for this practice to just kind of mentally note them. It’s also essential to be completely honest with yourself and not to leave things out because you feel preoccupied, anxious, embarrassed, or frustrated about them: those are often exactly the kinds of things that are most helpful to recognize.

Of course privacy can be a concern. If you need to, you can toss out what you’ve noted very soon after it’s written down–even immediately. It is very helpful to be able to look back over your decision logs and learn from them, but if your concerns about privacy would prevent you from doing it otherwise, it is true that just writing things down does that most important job of focusing your attention.

Plan to keep your log on days when making notes repeatedly throughout the day will be doable for you.

To d-log, start each day with a fresh file or piece of paper and put the date at the top. Jot down the time whenever you write something down after not having any entries for a while. This helps put things in a time framework, so that you can look back and notice how something you felt at 10:00 in the morning did or didn’t influence something you did at 2:00 in the afternoon.

No one else has to see your d-logs, although if you have someone you feel you can tell anything to and want their help, it could be enlightening to share. You might want to explain what you’re doing to various other people if you’ll be needing to do it around them a lot, but in some cases such an explanation may result in someone asking to see what you’re writing, and since your d-log is meant to be completely candid, this could be a problem.

Over even a relatively short time–days, or weeks–d-logging can help build practices of mindfulness and of thinking through decisions that we’re used to making automatically, acting on habits we may or may not like. The importance of understanding our own thoughts and feelings and how they bear on their decisions is hard to overstate.

If d-logging is highly impractical for you, fortunately there are other routes–though they may be longer or more difficult–to developing mindfulness, especially doing mindfulness meditation.

D-logging will take a certain amount of attention and commitment, but it’s not hard. One beautiful thing about d-logging that’s not true of many approaches to developing willpower is that you can use it to improve willpower in any number of areas at once. Normally if you want to work on self-motivation, it’s important to focus on one specific area, since lack of focus tends to make motivation fall apart. D-logging is different because you’re not concentrating on promoting a particular goal, but only on understanding yourself and your thinking better. Yet this kind of thinking tends to have immediate, noticeable results on achieving goals.

Don’t be too concerned if you start d-logging on a particular day and don’t do a good job of following through. Any of this practice you do, even if it’s not for a full day, helps, and it’s always possible to try and do better the next day.

While d-logging is particularly powerful in terms of developing willpower, there are also other kinds of logging and writing that can bolster motivation, and I’ll cover some of these in future posts.

Writing picture by MikeOliveri
Self(?)-portrait by FotoRita [Allstar maniac]

You may not be someone who’s trying to lose weight, eat a better diet, get more exercise, or in some other way make changes to become more fit or healthy–but if you aren’t, you’re probably in the minority (and I tip my hat to you).

For the rest of us, I’ll skip the prolonged introduction and go straight to the useful information. And while you may have already heard this a thousand times, just in case, I’ll mention that the real goal here has to be becoming comfortable with leading a healthy lifestyle. Anything short of that will quickly turn on you and bite you in the butt.

1. Know what you should be eating and keep careful track
Most of us have no idea how much we’re actually eating in a day, and many of us have no idea how much we should be eating if we want to lose weight. Do a little research to figure out what your daily food intake would need to be for you to lose weight, then faithfully keep track in terms of calories or some other good measure, like exchanges. To find out calorie counts for a particular food, a Google search for the name of the food plus the word “calories” usually does the trick. It can be helpful to keep a list of foods you eat often and what their counts are for reference.

Not keeping track of this information means that we remain ignorant of the impact of the things we’re eating, so that the reasons behind not being able to lose weight remain a mystery. If we know the impact of each thing we eat, we then have the information we need to make good choices.

2. Pay attention to how you feel and what you’re thinking
Many of us eat badly in response to stress or other negative emotions, or for very unconstructive reasons, like wanting to be polite or because an unusual food happens to become available. The more mindful we become of what is going through our heads when we’re faced with decisions, the better equipped we are to deal with our own thoughts and emotions instead of to automatically revert to bad eating habits. To really notice our own thoughts, we have to take a step back right at the moment of choice–for instance, just as we’re deciding what to have for lunch or whether or not to go exercises.

A technique that can really help here, once a thought is recognized, is idea repair. Another is something I call “decision logging,” which means jotting down thoughts, feelings, and any other conditions throughout the day that might influence decisions. Doing this for a couple of weeks can provide a truckload of insight into where our feelings and inclinations are coming from, and it can show where the opportunities are to cut off negative emotions before they really kick in. This process can be useful for much more than weight loss, of course.

3. Visualize your goals
Spend some time on a daily basis–even just a few minutes–imagining yourself having achieved your goal, and allow yourself to enjoy the feelings of having done it. It’s much easier to be motivated by positive emotions (even if they come from imagining things) than it is to be motivated by vague inclinations. Negative emotions–guilt, shame, frustration–are lousy motivators, and are unlikely to be able to keep you consistently working on a tricky task for long. Use encouraging visions of the future as a continuing source of pleasure to associate with your process. The more you enjoy what you’re doing, the better you’ll do at it. And speaking of which …

4. Enjoy the steps
It’s easy to tell ourselves that exercise is painful and inconvenient, or that eating something healthy is boring. And certainly any process of changing major habits has its hard parts. If we focus on those, though, then again we’re associating negative emotions with our process instead of positive ones, and that won’t get us very far. Instead, it helps to focus, again and again, on the positive or pleasurable parts of the things we need to do. If I’m out running, I can put my attention more on the beauty of the park I’m running through or on the fact that I’m getting a quarter of a mile further than I was getting a week ago rather than on the physical effort or concerns about how I look, for instance.

There is something to enjoy in virtually any good step we take. Even hunger can be enjoyed when we have to experience a small amount of it while changing our eating habits, for instance because of the feeling of success and virtue, or because it’s an indication that we’re doing something that’s working.

5. Set up a feedback loop
Unless we reflect on our successes and mistakes, we tend to repeat the mistakes and only stumble on the successes now and again. At least once a week, and preferably more often, it can be a huge help to reflect on what you did, how it went, and what you want to do in the future. This will help keep you on track.

There are a variety of ways to set up feedback loops. Some commercial weight loss programs offer weekly group meetings and weigh-ins, which can work very well. Buddies can also work well, as can blogs, online forums, and journaling. More public ways of getting feedbacks (like groups and blogs) also can up the stakes for doing well, which can be very motivating to some people (but too much pressure for others). Choose the method that works best for you and make it a priority to do it regularly. If you miss a round of feedback, be sure to include that in the things you consider the next time. In other words, even your feedback loop can benefit from feedback.

6. Cut short arguments with yourself
Many of us are used to looking at choices we really want to steer clear of–often about a food that we don’t need and that would throw off our calorie count for the day–and then debating with ourselves, trying to convince ourselves to follow the virtuous path. But between a piece of chocolate cake and some vague idea of virtue, chocolate cake very often wins, so an alternative strategy is to turn around and walk away, immediately–even if the debate is still going on in your head. You don’t have to convince yourself to avoid something that would be bad for you or to do something that would be good for you if you simply go ahead and take the best available action. Concentrate on the simple physical acts: turning and putting one foot in front of the other, or putting on your workout clothes. These kinds of behaviors can shortcut the endangered decision-making process and help support automatic positive behaviors.

As always, there’s a lot more we could say on this subject, but this is a good start for now. And just so you know: I’m neither a professional nutritionist nor a psychologist. I’m also not qualified in any way to give you personal medical advice.

However, I’ve been studying the factors that go into self-motivation intensively for some time now and have myself lost upwards of 40 pounds while becoming much healthier. Don’t make me post before and after pictures, because I will if I have to. Regardless, I hope you’ll find these ideas useful and comment with questions or about your experiences.

Bike picture by Erica_Marshall
Shoe picture by Fey the Ferocious Feyrannosaur

Writing–especially writing and trying to sell large projects, like novels–is a clear-cut example of an area where self-motivation is essential. While this post is written especially for writers, the techniques I’ll talk about can be applied to practically any kind of project where self-motivation is needed.

Motivating ourselves to write can be hard: blank pages stare at us implacably, or we get 75,000 words into a novel and then realize there’s a basic flaw that will require a huge rewrite, or we’ll get dozens of rejection letters for every acceptance.

Writers generally need enthusiasm for a story to do a really good job of writing it, need to sustain their involvement in a project for months or often years, and need to be able to face rejection after rejection without giving up. Even very good writers typically see many rejections before they sell their work (Stephen King, when he started his career, put a big nail in his wall and spiked each of his rejection letters on there as he went. Fortunately, it turned out well for him in the end, although he collected hundreds of rejection letters before he really got off the ground). Self-motivation is tough in this kind of environment. Here are some tools for maximizing it. These notes can be useful to any writer, but they’re mainly written with fiction in mind.

Pick Your Project Very Carefully
A certain kind of writer tends to write whatever they’re most passionate about, regardless of length, genre, marketability, and so on. Another kind of writer tends to write whatever seems to be the most salable, whatever the market seems to be crying out for. A third kind of writer tends to follow some particular pattern dictated by their writing practices, being propelled neither by passion nor by saleability but by process. All of these approaches have their good points, and each can have real drawbacks under certain circumstances. The approach I would suggest is different from all of these: it’s to put extra effort into brainstorming, then making a careful selection from the possibilities.

What I mean by this is that when it’s time to start a new project–say the last project is finished, or has been scrapped, or needs to sit in a drawer for a while before you can get any perspective on it, or this is your first novel–instead of looking for an idea for a new project, you look for a lot of ideas for new projects, using a variety of methods to come up with them. Review ideas you’ve jotted down or the ones that have been in your head. Look at some of your favorite books and see what you like most about them. Sit down and brainstorm at least two or three ideas out of the blue.

But why go to all this trouble when you have an idea you already know you’re burning to write, or that you think will sell well? Because our first ideas are often not our best ones, and a little time spent picking the right goal can save a huge amount of time working on the wrong one. It’s well worth slaving away at this brainstorming phase for a few hours even if at the end of it you opt for the idea you were interested in in the first place, if for no other reason than to understand deeply and clearly exactly why that idea is the best one for you to work on. And many times careful consideration of possibilities will yield a much better idea than anything that would have come up on its own.

Then comes the choosing. Passion counts for a lot: it’s very difficult to make a reader passionate about a book that the writer wasn’t passionate about when it was written. But other factors should probably figure in too, unless you’re only writing for yourself. Marketability? If you really want to sell your work, it would be ill-advised to ignore this unless you’re of the opinion that it’s impossible to tell what will sell. So writing a vampire novel because you love writing about vampires isn’t a bad idea, and writing a vampire novel because they’re in demand (let’s suppose) can work out well, but by far the best reason to write a vampire novel is that you’re passionate about it and someone’s clamoring to buy that kind of thing.

This applies to any decision: we often try to make choices based on one overwhelming factor, like buying something because it’s the cheapest or because we’re enchanted with it. But any of our priorities we put aside when making an important decision will come back to haunt us later. If the cheapest item breaks long before the more expensive version would have, or if the thing we’re enchanted costs so much that we end up short on the rent …

But what does choosing well have to do with self-motivation? There are two key things: first, it’s not that helpful to motivate ourselves toward a goal we don’t actually want to reach. While even working toward a wrong goal can be educational, the same can be said of working toward the right goal, and the right goal has the additional benefit of paying off, which is an educational experience in itself.

Second, if we are working toward a wrong goal, sooner or later we will realize it isn’t something we really want to achieve (or we’ll achieve it, and the expected payoff will never materialize), and then we’ll be back to zero, with the sense that work gets us nowhere.

Always Keep In Mind What Excites You
Whatever gets you excited about writing a book is worth thinking about regularly. If you find your writing has turned into drudgery and you’re just trying to slog through until the end, you’ll have a lot of trouble motivating yourself and may not produce particularly great writing either (though there can be exceptions to that last part). If you hit this point, one approach that can propel you forward is to ask yourself “What would really get me excited about this project right now that I’m not already doing?” Kill an important supporting character, cause a disaster, give the protagonist what they’ve been striving for and see them realize that it isn’t their real goal at all, add a new character who churns things up … this is another case where more excitement for the writer tends to mean more excitement for the reader. All of this has to be kept in balance with your vision for the story, but if you can’t think of anything that keeps you excited about the writing and is consistent with your vision, maybe it’s time to rethink the vision.

The exception I know of in which drudgery can yield good writing is when you know your story much better than your reader, and so what feels like old hat to you is new and fresh for the reader.

If You Stop Feeling Motivated, Retrace Your Steps
Here’s a question that can be handy in projects that seem to have lost their drive: where was my motivation when I last saw it? Sometimes feeling like you’ve lost your enthusiasm means that you took a wrong turn somewhere. Maybe your interest in the story was being kept up by a minor character who according to your outline (if you use outlines) needed to leave the story a little while ago, but the story hasn’t interested you as much since. If so, it might be worth rethinking that decision. Maybe a character did something that violates who you were hoping for them to be, or made a choice to serve the plot instead of doing what they would really want to do if left to their own devices. Maybe you’re writing a section of the book that isn’t really needed.

Regardless, always be ready to take advantage of this great advantage of writing, that you can make a complete mess of something, but then go back and do it better and get full credit as though you had written it perfectly the first time. There’s a post on this subject on my writing blog: Avoiding Your Story

Use Support, Encouragement, and Deadlines
One of the best motivators for a project is to have a real deadline, with a real person is waiting to see your results. This can be accomplished through joining an active writer’s group, blogging about your writing and including planned deadlines, getting one or more writing buddies and reading each others’ work, signing up for a writer’s workshop for which you’ll need something to be completed by a given date, working on a project for a contest or market that has a firm deadline, or getting truly interested friends or family members to read your writing as you go. It’s powerfully motivating to realize that someone is waiting breathlessly for the next chapter of your book.

If you use this last approach, by the way, you may want to ask the person to write down any feedback they have, but only to give that feedback to you right away if it’s absolutely crucial. The rest can be collected at the end so you can consider it for the second draft. Getting constant feedback can cause constantly reworking what you have, which … well, let’s just make that subject a section to itself.

I don't think you can get into this particular writers group any more, but there are others.

Don’t Spend All Your Time Reworking
Yes, often writing can be improved by editing or rewriting, but only to a certain point. After a while, more work on the same project will begin to suck the life out of it. Make your story as good as you can make it at the moment, then send it out without spelling errors or major problems. You can set it aside and revisit it once you have perspective, or rewrite it after a rejection if you have a major new insight about it, but don’t just keep fiddling with it it’s perfect: nothing ever is, to the best of my knowledge.

Writer’s Block Is Just Fear of Writing Something That Isn’t Good Enough
On my writing blog I have a lengthy post about writer’s block, which I’ll summarize here as it applies to motivation: it’s always possible to write something, even if that something turns out to be meandering gibberish. So writer’s block doesn’t prevent a person from writing: it makes them hesitant because they might write something bad. Since everyone writes something bad sometimes, this isn’t as dire a situation as it may feel like at the time. Screwing up is an appropriate thing to worry about with surgery or disarming bombs, but it usually just gets in the way to fret about it with something like writing. Remember, you can always fix it in the next pass, and sometimes bad writing ends up being an exploratory draft (a great term I first heard from Orson Scott Card) that will reveal exactly what you need to do to write the really great draft you’re going to put together next.

Don’t Get Too Attached
It’s hard sometimes to look at something you’ve put a lot of work into and decide to scrap it, whether it’s plans for a new business venture that isn’t going to work out, a relationship that turns out to be between the wrong two people, or a brilliant passage in a novel that doesn’t belong there. When you’re faced with these problems, take a step back and ask yourself what will really give you the best result in the long run, then keep the thing or remove it based on that choice (and if applicable, whatever responsibilities you may have taken on).

This doesn’t quite add up to “kill your darlings,” as writers are often urged to do, or as Samuel Johnson put it “wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” That’s overstating it. Some things you do that you love will just not fit in the project you’re working on, and it’s important to focus on making that project as good as it can be instead of on justifying all the great things you did along the way. Doing great things is its own justification, and it tends to be instructive as well, whether or not they work out in the end. Fortunately, contrary to Johnson’s point, sometimes great passages are doing exactly what they’re supposed to and ought to be left in.

There’s more I could say on this subject, but I’ve covered the main recommendations I set out to cover, and future posts will have more. In the meantime, how do these recommendations work for you? And writers, what particular self-motivation issues do you run into in your writing?

Writers group photo by ShellyS.
Writing desk photo byBright Meadow

There are times when I feel a little overwhelmed with everything that is going on in my life. It’s my own fault: I have multiple, powerful interests, and follow them energetically, regularly creating new projects to add to an already busy schedule. In recent years I’ve learned to hold back, to mostly stick to just the most important and rewarding projects, but my task list is still long and varied.

This kind of life keeps me engaged and interested, and I get a lot done, but some days I feel as though there are so many things that it’s hard to know where to start. Fortunately, there are specific steps I can take to get back on track. There are also long-term practices I can follow to be more focused and serene in general, but I’ll tackle those in other posts.

1. Take a step back
Your first reaction to this might be “I can’t take a step back! I need to get these things done! And I’m right in the middle of ___!” That’s OK: that may be true. On the other hand, sometimes our general sense of anxiety about needing to get a lot of things done can make us feel as though the particular thing we’re focusing on–which sometimes isn’t nearly as crucial as it seems–absolutely requires our attention. Sometimes it does, but often this is a trap: if we’re always preoccupied with whatever we’re doing right then, we have no time to figure out whether we’re even doing the right thing.

So immediately if possible, or at worst some time soon when the opportunity presents itself, take a step back, breathe, and remind yourself that you’re only one person and, like it or not, will only get a certain number of things done that day. The priorities are to make the best use of your time and not to drive yourself crazy while doing it. Breathing and brief meditation exercises are sometimes helpful for taking a step back, as is simply getting into a quiet room and shutting the door for two minutes. Another good approach is to talk briefly to a friend who’s a good listener. Yet another, which is especially useful for people who like to be in action, is to briefly write out or type out the thoughts that are going through your head.

2. Write down what you need to get done
If you don’t write down the things you need to do, they may tend to chase each other around in your head, and worrying that you’ll forget one can be a source of additional anxiety. If you take a few minutes to list your tasks out, it’s true that it can be daunting because of having to face the whole list, but it’s also calming because it creates focus.

It’s helpful to write things down in a word processor instead of on paper because of the next step, but either way can work.

3. Get the unimportant things out of sight
There may be a lot of things on your list that would be nice to do, but that aren’t essential. It can help a great deal to move these off onto a secondary list. Depending on how much you have going on, you may never get to the secondary list, or by the time you get to it, it may be too late to do some of the items. This is OK! It’s far better to miss out on doing something unimportant than to fail to do something important because of being tied up with these secondary tasks.

If you keep the secondary tasks on the same list as the main tasks, though, they can add to feelings of distraction and anxiety. If you don’t need to do them now, get them out of your way, and remind yourself that they don’t need any of your attention right now.

There are some tips about prioritizing and feeling less distracted by secondary tasks in my post How to manage multiple priorities.

4. Pick the most important thing on the list and get started
This is just a little bit tricky, because we always need to balance importance with urgency. Importance is how much impact doing (or not doing) something will have, while urgency is how pressing it is to do it in the near future. More important things need to win out over things that are less important, but importance doesn’t always win out over urgency: that’s a judgement call.

One way to choose the task you should be doing at the moment is simply to ask “Which thing on this list will I be most happy to get done?”

And while it’s important to do a good job of picking the top task, it’s even more important to be willing to commit to doing the task you pick and not to let yourself be bamboozled by conflicting priorities into doing something unimportant.

That’s the short version, but while there’s certainly more to say on the subject, the sequence of taking a step back, reminding yourself of what’s important, focusing on that, then taking action on the most important thing for the moment will rarely let you down.

Photo by Cape Cod Cyclist.

There’s something in the blogosphere this week that is getting people to post about their strategies for making motivation easier. A post today at Capitalism Magazine came to my attention, in which writer Jean Moroney talks about her strategies for clearing the path to good choices.

Moroney starts the piece off by saying “I think willpower draws on a kind of reservoir of emotional energy. Because it is so important to be able to call on willpower when I need it, I do several things to conserve that energy by reducing how often I need willpower.”

Moroney’s tactics are interesting and worth sharing, but her idea that willpower needs to be conserved is only half right. From a physiological perspective, we do indeed have limited resources we can plow into changing habits on a daily basis: see my post “Self-Control Fatigue” for more on this.

But it’s true as well that we can improve our willpower across the board by exercising it regularly. In other words, if we avoid situations where we need to use willpower, we’re lowering the level of willpower we have available to apply to other problems in the future. There’s more on this in my article “How to Strengthen Willpower Through Practice” .

None of this undermines the value of Ms. Moroney’s resourceful ideas, but it does suggest that we’re best off when we strike a balance of making it easier to make good choices on the one hand and finding challenges for our willpower on the other.

I came across an interesting post today on a blog by Ross Hudgens, which talks about managing his immediate environment to aid his willpower in losing weight: for instance, he takes only a set amount of cash with him when he goes out to bars, leaving his ATM and credit cards at home, making it very difficult to go out and binge eat. He also keeps his cupboards bare of junk food so that unhealthy snacking requires a separate trip to the store. (There are other interesting posts on Hudgens’ blog, although I can’t recommend all of them. While Hudgens turns up a number of good ideas, I think some are more useful than others.)

Modifying our immediate environment can be a useful tactic: it not only helps support good decisions in the moment, but helps foster habits and expectations of good decision-making. However, I think Hudgens goes too far in referring to these strategies as willpower itself: it seems to me that unlike “self-control,” “willpower” refers solely to our decision-making mindset, not to the limitations of our environments (even if we set up those limitations ourselves). In other words, not having the opportunity to easily do something you’d rather not do is not the same as deciding to do it despite having the opportunity.

And I think there are costs to this kind of approach, just as there are costs to any kind of external approach to self-motivation: depending on external factors can cause our success in moving toward our goals to vary wildly when externals change–for example, someone interested in weight loss who is depending on not having junk food available may have little or no self-control in a situation like a party where junk food has been set out. And just as successes can add up and boost mood and confidence (one of the benefits of setting up our environments), failures of the kind I just described can quickly erode confidence and enthusiasm.

Fortunately, some kinds of external modifications can help both with immediate behavior and with long-term attitude, for instance when a person helps encourage progress on a project by making the work environment for that project more inviting. Over time, this can lead to more pleasant and attractive ideas about working on that project and about applying oneself in general. In short, controlling the external environment can be a positive factor and is usually worth some effort, but depending on that over other approaches sidestesp the real issue, that of changing our mindset.

Photo by smallestbones.

Not everyone has an elephant lurking in the downstairs closet, a brachiosaurus in the garage … but a lot of us do. And by this I of course don’t actually mean elephants or dinosaurs, but projects. Big projects. Big, ugly, scary projects that are disturbing to even think about because they’re so big and we haven’t even started on them (or have left them sitting around for much too long). It might be a major house repair that needs to be done so that the roof won’t start leaking, or a long overdue class assignment, or a book project that got tricky and has been sitting there on the hard drive, mocking you, for months now. Regardless of exactly what your beast is, there’s a simple, immediate way to take the first step toward vanquishing it. Unimpressively enough, it’s called “Do any little part of it … right now.”

Don’t take “right now” too literally: “right now” could be this weekend, or later today, or for two hours on Thursday. But don’t mess around with “right now” too much, either. As big as some projects are, there are very few that couldn’t benefit from a little attention very soon, even if it’s late at night and you’re tired and the project is unmentionably huge.

“Do any little part of it right now” may sound simple, and it is very easy to act on, but it has impact far beyond the effort required for it. Consider this joke:

Q: How do you eat an elephant?
A: One bite at a time.

It’s true. Humans are designed to eat things in bites, so the size of the what you’re eating doesn’t matter. To put it another way, you never, ever have to do a huge task: you only have to do small steps that over time add up to a huge task. That may sound like just playing with words, but it’s much more substantial than that: all large projects are accomplished through small steps, so the only way to do a large project is to do one small step. Then do another. Then another.

And honestly, the first small step breaks the whole thing wide open. Instead of having to say “I haven’t worked on my book in four months,” you can say “I worked on my book last night, even though it was only for 20 minutes.” Instead of saying “Someday I have to clean out that junk room,” you can say “I spent 45 minutes this morning gathering up all the spare linens I had in the junk room, and now the ones we need are in the linen closet and the rest are in the car, ready to go to the Salvation Army.” Zero small steps is a dead stop. One small step is being right in the midst of getting the job done.

Sometimes it may be hard to see what the small steps are, either because there’s so much to do that it’s all a huge tangle or because the big project consists of just doing one thing for a long, long time. In either case, there are ways to proceed. If you have no idea where to start, then the first step is figuring out what your next few steps are going to be. It’s organization, cataloging the problem. For instance, if your project is making a garden, make a list of things you need to do to be able to break ground: plan the size of the garden, choose what you’ll plant, look up the planting schedules, buy the seeds, etc. Making that list is itself the first step, and by the time you’re done, you’ll know what the second and third steps are already. If at any point you don’t know what to do next, that means that what you need to do next is figure out where you are in the project and what action needs to come next in the sequence.

And if the project is just a whole lot of one thing, then your steps are just pieces of that thing, of any size. Writers face this issue all the time, when the goal is to write a novel of, say, 100,000 words. While there might be (depending on the writer) a lot of preparatory work to do (or none at all), at a certain point the job is to sit down and churn out a lot of words. While you do that, you can count chapters, pages, words, hours at the keyboard, plot points completed, or anything else that gets you through the night, but if the project is daunting, figure out how much of some measure you need to do, then start doing that thing–and counting it.

Of course, after that first step there is always a second, and so on, and this discussion doesn’t delve much into the question of how to keep on track. On the other hand, keeping on track is much easier than getting on track in the first place, so if you have a big project you know you need to tackle, try starting in on any constructive piece of it, and if you don’t find yourself plowing ahead naturally, come back here for more ideas on how to keep the engine moving. After all, I’ve got a lot more I’ll need to post on this site over the course of years, and the only way for me to do it is one post at a time.

Elephant picture by Omar Junior.
Blank screen picture by Simon Scott.

Use these individually or in combination. You’ll find more details about every one of these subjects in past and future Willpower Engine posts.

1. Write down exactly what you want to accomplish and why
2. Figure out where the time is going to come from to work on your goal (don’t wait until you “have free time”!)
3. Make a list of the things you’ll need to know to succeed
4. Find one way to make the environment in which you work on your goal more enticing or comfortable
5. Picture yourself having achieved your goal and getting the rewards (even for just a minute or two) as often as possible until you’re actually there
6. Whenever you’re doing something that furthers your goal, find at least one thing to enjoy about that effort
7. When you start feeling fearful or avoidant, ask yourself what you’re scared of or avoiding and whether it’s really that terrible
8. Make yourself accountable to someone: find a buddy, blog about your intentions, join a group, etc.
9. Keep a journal of your progress
10. Whenever you start feeling resentful of the things you have to do, remind yourself that you personally are taking full responsibility for seeing it through
11. Take the first step, however small, within 24 hours of the moment you read this
12. Figure out what your biggest motivation problem is and talk about it with someone–or post it as a question right now in the comments box!

Photo by Darcy McCarty

Imagine it’s morning, and you’ve got a few minutes when you can really relax. Maybe you’re just sitting down with a cup of coffee, or your commuter train has left the station and you’ve got your headphones on, or hell, I don’t know, you’re taking a short break before work to sit in the dark with your collection of antique textiles. The point is, here is a time when your mind can be serene and undisturbed. It’s a perfect time to motivate yourself–just not a perfect time to actually  do anything.

This means you have an opportunity for some motivational groundwork–visualization, for instance–that can make good decisions during the rest of your day easier and more enjoyable, because most of the time when we actually need to motivate ourselves, serenity and lack of distractions are hard to come by.

Now, you may be thinking of visualization as one of those flaky pseudo-spiritual things where you tell yourself things that aren’t true or visualize money sneaking out of people’s wallets to come stay with you, its true master. Those are emphatically not the kind of visualizations I’m talking about. So what kind am I talking about? Daydreams, dear reader. Sitting there are making yourself happy by picturing a situation you might be able to get yourself into in the future. For instance, you might picture yourself burning a copy of your mortgage (because it’s completely paid off, not because your heat has been shut off), or doing a job you would love that you aren’t yet qualified for, or accomplishing amazing acts of physical fitness.

You might also be thinking “Forget that! I don’t want to spend the one serene moment of my morning slaving away on mental improvement!” But why not? Visualizing your goals is an exceptionally pleasant way to spend time. What’s more serene than daydreaming that something wonderful has happened (apart from reflecting on something wonderful that has already happened, that is)?

The glories of visualization are threefold: first, you can do it at any convenient point in your day. Second, the better you visualize the thing, the more enjoyable it is. And third, visualizing things makes it a lot easier to be motivated to accomplish them.

After all, if you’re trying to get your finances on track and have a choice of spending $38 on an attractive geegaw or not, it’s a lot easier to feel good about not spending the money if you can easily associate that decision with something pleasurable, like the image (still fresh in your mind from visualization earlier that day) of you paying off the last dollar of your credit card debt and being able to tweet “Debt free at last, debt free at last!”

The expression “you have to see it to believe it” applies here. If we aren’t picturing the futures we’re trying to create, they have only a weak and theoretical pull on us. The more time we spend in those futures, reminding ourselves of why we’re trying to shake ourselves of problem habits or to take difficult steps that will really help us, the more naturally motivated we’ll feel to actually follow through.

For effective visualization, honestly try to do it every day. Leave yourself a reminder in the spot where you’d be most likely to have time to do a little visualizing, if that helps. And if you experience an odd sense of déjà vu when the wonderful things start happening, it’s a small price to pay.

Photo by *PaysImaginaire*.