Have you ever felt excited thinking of a fresh business idea or had those passionate feelings to start exercising and eating right? Those were some pretty spirited sentiments that make us feel like we can take on the world in a single day. It is what makes us more enthusiastic to jump out of bed in the morning and begin putting agendas into action.
Unfortunately, these feelings don’t often last as motivation disappears a few days or weeks later. Eventually, you find yourself justifying not hitting benchmarks and missing deadlines.
If you want to get things done, focus on doing what you’ll say you will do. This sounds easier than done, though. People nowadays rarely keep their promises, barely keeping up with what they say.
Oftentimes, excuses like something came up, deliveries were late, and budgets were delayed gets into the conversation just to make up for the shortcomings. But you shouldn’t be like that because that will give you and your client or boss a wide berth. Trust will fade off.
This article would teach you how to be reliable and dependable, making other people trust you to great extent. Moreover, this would also orient you to the areas you’re lacking and the things you can do to improve them immediately.
Let’s kick-off off our list on how you can get things done when you don’t want to!
Loss Aversion
Loss aversion is a phenomenon where a potential or real loss is perceived by individuals as emotionally or psychologically more serious compared to a corresponding gain. For example, the distress of losing $100 is often far greater than the pleasure attained in finding the same amount.
Putting it simply, loss aversion is looking at an equal loss as far greater than an equal gain. Thus, if someone robs you of $50, you would be happier than if someone gave you $50.
People have the tendency to function better when standing to lose something they already have and acquire something they didn’t have before.
Visualization
Visualization helps in achieving successful outcomes. It activates the imaginative capacities of the subconscious mind, encouraging it to work assiduously at creating solutions. You will also witness new tiers of motivation and find yourself accomplishing things you would normally avoid.
Not many people are aware of the power that visualization can yield, but many elite athletes, peak performers, and the super-rich use it. It is a “mental rehearsal” that quite a few have been using since the 1960s.
Spare a few minutes or hours a day to visualize the things you want to accomplish and the benefits you can obtain by carrying them through. Look at what kind of person you would look like in that kind of alternate reality. Once you grasp what you want the future to look like, the next step is to transform that alternate reality into your present reality.
Reducing Friction
Your journey to getting things done will be full of impediments. These obstacles may either already exist around the corner or you have placed them out without even being aware of them.
For instance, you need to get in touch with many people. It may be a client or potential customer. Perhaps, you don’t have enough email to base your messages on or accounts on various social media platforms. And when the time comes that you need to message these people, you realize that you have other things before that.
The small stumbling blocks make tasks seem a lot more complicated than it actually is. If you would spare time to go over these obstacles little by little every day, you will eventually have it easy.
Think about the obstacles that are present in your life right now. For instance, your obstacle is you need to contact a lot of people, but you cannot construct a proper message. You can just hire someone else to do it for you. If you need to do a lot of tasks on your computer but it’s not working well, it keeps on changing, you can buy a new one, allowing you to do your job more conveniently.
Getting things done means getting rid of all frictions or unnecessarily hard labor. Avoid justifying why you are underperforming behind such petty obstacles.
Healthy Sabotage
If you have a lot of things to do but can’t get your eyes off the computer screen while watching your favorite series— you won’t be able to get anything done. So, it may be a bit too extreme, but to get your mind off what you are watching, you could try healthy sabotaging yourself by cutting off the internet.
Ian Fleming, a renowned writer who made billions of dollars through his job, hated writing. If you haven’t heard of the name, Fleming is the famous author of the James Bond film series, which has garnered the attention of millions of people all over the globe.
However, despite his success in writing, he mentioned that there is one particular thing in the writing process that he couldn’t stand. Hence, to finish the James Bond series, he decided to go to the most boring cities and book the worst hotels in those areas, making it his goal to check out only if he would finish his craft.
Now, what is this story telling us?
Sometimes, the things you need to get done can be a bit of a hassle, so you won’t really have the motivation to do it. Yet, you need to remember that at the end of the day, you will need to finish it, so you better put yourself in a position where you’ll have nothing else to do but get that thing done.
Outside Accountability
You can beat yourself for not actually doing the things you said you would do, but you could also make allowances, forgiving yourself for the shortcoming you have committed. Either will be fine, but if you tell these things to people you respect and trust, chances are, things would be a lot different.
If you think of it, many individuals who go to the gym often know how to do some routines. Yet, they still hire an instructor to guide them.
Most often than not, they pay money not for guidance but to oblige themselves to follow what the instructor is doing. Perhaps, this is because the fear of disappointing someone drives people to shake a leg.
When you use outside accountability, you will not only disappoint yourself when you fail to accomplish what should be done. You would also disappoint other people. When you think of it this way, you would be pressured and encouraged to carry through with your plans in order not to dash the hopes of the people who depend on you.
