Archive for October, 2009

Inspiration, Perspiration, Motivation, and Grueling it out

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

How do you deal with a lack of motivation?

I know that my dreams of becoming an internet entrepreneur are going to require two things: work, and more work. Work in the morning, work at noon, work in the evening. Since I am weaving all of this work in with a busy day job, it is fairly tiring.

Motivation makes it easy to put in the 99% perspiration required. What do I do when motivation runs out?

For the last week or so, I had lost my motivation for my 101 Woodblock Series. I spent last weekend knowing I needed to crank out about 15 hours of work on this, yet I got nothing done. The motivation wasn’t there. I didn’t have that drive to get it done, and in its place was apathy towards the entire thing.

I think that it has hurt that I went cold turkey off of drinking coffee a little over one week ago. Coffee was largely my fuel, I drank a lot of it. It has been rough to get over the hump on this one. Though this talk of coffee is an extended aside from my main point, it gets to the heart of another point I will write about soon, the connection between physical well-being and emotional well being. I know deep down that I won’t make a million dollars on the internet if I am not physically healthy.

Back on track – last week, this lack of motivation caused me to miss my morning power hours. This set my whole day askew, since my day began with not following my own habits.

so when there is little chance that my motivation will kick in and take care of things, I have to rely on thing: Grueling it out.

Yesterday morning my alarm went off at 5:45, telling me to wake up and write. I had no idea what I was going to write, and this habit is new enough that I haven’t built that innate trust that the power hour will be productive, even when I don’t know how it will be productive.

So my alarm was ringing, and I was faced with a choice. I could reset my alarm for 6:45, and sleep another hour, or I could gruel it out and force myself to sit in front of the computer. Somehow, my willpower took over, and I did the latter.

I sat down with no idea what I would be writing about, and no real motivation to write about any specific topic. I started poking around my writing folder on my computer, and found a draft with just a few lines written that sparked something, and I knew what to write about. After I whipped out the first blog post in about 20 minutes, I had an idea for a second, and I whipped that one out too. I ended up with two blog posts written, edited, converted to HTML, and posted or scheduled to be posted within 45 minutes.

The main reason that I was able to get these two posts written was that I grueled it out and forced myself to sit in front of my computer. As I was sheepishly walking out of bed towards my desk, I remember thinking to myself that I had to do this, even if I just sat at my computer for 45 minutes and did nothing.

Those first 5 minutes sucked. When I was getting out of bed, cutting up a dish of fruit and pouring myself some juice, I was fighting with a part of saying that I could still go crawl in to bed for another 45 minutes. I didn’t have to be awake. Something happened once I began work, and it became a lot easier to follow through and get everything done.

Important lessons from yesterday morning:

  • If I wait until I feel like writing blog posts, copy, content, or whatever, I will never get anything done.
  • If I have a habit in place, I need to follow it, even when I don’t want to.
  • Genius may be 99% perspiration, but a lot of the time, it takes grueling it out to get to the point that you break a sweat.

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Speed Bumps on the Road to Productivity

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Last week I talked about how I schedule my morning to be productive. It’s been going well, and I have gotten a lot done in the few mornings since then. I whipped out two blog posts on Thursday, and Friday got hijacked by fixing a problem with one of my blogs. My buddy, Dr. Wordpress advised that I add alt attributes to images on my blogs. It turns out that if you put a bracket character “>” in an alt attribute it may mess everything up and break a wordpress theme. It took me a while to track down the problem.

I have learned two lessons:

  • I have to have everything I need for my morning habits, or it falls apart
  • I have to have a nice evening before, or it falls apart

Simple habits may be easier for me to implement, but this habit is a pretty big change. I have a lot of negative momentum that tries to keep my old habit of sleeping in, hitting snooze, running late, and picking up some unhealthy muffin or egg sandwich on the way to work.

I say this because this morning I blew it and didn’t get any writing done. I woke up at 7:00, and had an entirely unproductive meeting.

Missing Fruit Makes a Mismanaged Morning

I was in LA all weekend, and I blame my problems on that.

LA itself was great, a buddy of mine opened his home to a few of our friends, and we all had a good old time for the weekend. Lots of male bonding and geeking out.

I got home late yesterday evening, and didn’t have groceries. I was missing the usual fruit that I cut up in the morning for breakfast, and I was out of coffee. Two hits to this new habit of mine.

Late, wasted evenings make a late, wasted morning

In addition to my lack of morning supplies, I stayed up late and had a couple beers to relax. I had been on the road for 8 hours, and I didn’t really have it in me to get anything done and be productive.

I fired up my computer, watched a few shows, threw down a couple beers, and in general had the alone time that I need to recharge. I was up pretty late, and 5:45 am came just a little bit too early.

It didn’t help that I was up till 2 or 3 am each night over the weekend, and up around 8 am every day. I was running on low sleep. When morning came around, I decided to not get any writing done, and sleep in till 7. It felt good, and I probably needed it.

Schedule for a productive evening

The big lesson for me is that I am gonna have to schedule my standard evening as well as my standard morning if I am gonna keep to my productive schedule. This might be a little more challenging, because my evening activities vary a whole lot more than my mornings.

I think I will need some evening habits in place to make this work though. As I work this out, I’ll be writing about it here.

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The Schedule of a Productive Morning

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

This morning, I had a glimpse of the habits that it will take to succeed. My morning was very productive and invigorating. This was a step to success.

This may seem odd and trivial at times, but it was very much planned out.

My alarm went off at 5:46am this morning. After a minute or two of clock radio, I hit snooze, which resets the alarm for 9 minutes. I got out of bed at 6am. Stumbled into the bathroom. My joints were stiff, my feet didn’t want to carry weight yet, and my eyes were half shut.

I got into my kitchen at 6:04. I started my laptop, started a pot of coffee, and opened my fridge to pull out some juice, a peach, and a nectarine. I drank a glass of grapefruit juice (the last of the container – I need more), and cut up the peach and nectarine and put the slices on a plate.

I told you there were going to be some trivial bits in here.

It was 6:10 at this point, and I spent 5 minutes stretching. I was determined to be able to touch my toes by the time I was done stretching. Mission accomplished.

While I was stretching, I thought about writing, and tried to figure out what I was going to write about.

At 6:15, I sat down in front of my computer with my sliced fruit and mug of coffee, and fired up my text editor of choice.

In 20 minutes I banged out a blog post about what my 101 Woodblock Series is about, and got it formatted for the web and posted by 6:50.

At this point I put on some shorts and a sweatshirt and left my apartment to move my truck. I was out and about last night, and got home fairly late. I parked in a meter spot the night before and had to find a street parking spot this morning. It took about 15 minutes. This situation only happens about once a week.

I got back in front of my computer around 7:05, and whipped out another post for another of my blogs (written with a pen name) in about 20 minutes. I already had half of the content written for this post, and it took about 20 minutes to get it up and ready to post.

7:25 rolled around, I fired up my email, cleared out my inbox, read a little news, then started to get ready for work. I packed up my lunch and mid-morning breakfast (when I eat breakfast this early I need an early morning breakfast and a mid-morning breakfast), and made it to work about 15 minutes earlier than usual.

So why bore you with these details?

This kind of habit that will lead to being successful.

I have a time management problem. I work 8 hours a day, and when I get home, it is difficult to focus on writing. When I get home, take off my suit and tie, and get some dinner in front of me, I want to relax.

My ability to focus drops significantly after 5pm.

I can’t focus on writing while I am at work, and I usually spend my lunch break exercising.

Mornings are really the best time for me to get my writing done.

I also realize that writing is the limiting factor to the growth of my projects. Every one of my projects revolves around content driven marketing, information products, or something that is written.

Without writing, my projects stagnate.

My goal, then is to create a morning habit of writing. If I can dedicate 1 hour every morning to writing, I will accomplish quite a bit.

Yes, it was deliberate

I actually wrote this schedule out on paper last night. Habits can be difficult to change, so I thought through every bit of my morning, and wrote down what and when I would do.

Seriously. I scheduled waking up and going to the bathroom. I even scheduled hitting the snooze button.

I had the piece of paper with this schedule on it sitting on my nightstand so I could grab it and reference it in the morning.

It worked this morning, and worked pretty well. Two blog posts in a morning’s work makes me pleased.

I’m planning to keep the schedule on my nightstand again tonight, to repeat the process again tomorrow. The real test will be next week, when the momentum of motivation from trying something new decreases.

Anyway, expect updates.

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