If you need guilt to motivate yourself, your productivity system is broken.

“Are you procrastinating?” my roommate asks me. Three exams the next day and I wasn’t studying.

“No, I laugh, procrastination means I intended to do some work. I never planned on working tonight, so technically it isn’t procrastination,” I respond.

This was a conversation I had last week, during an exam period. Although my review schedule before exams tends to be a lot lighter than most, the biggest difference isn’t the time. It’s that I refuse to use guilt as a motivation tactic.

Stress-Cases VS Relaxed Achievers

Here’s the process a typical stressed-out student or worker uses to motivate himself:

1. Worry.
2. Be unsure where to start.
3. Take a break.
4. Take another break.
5. Feel guilty about breaking for so long.
6. Do 15 minutes of work.
7. Chat on Facebook.
8. Repeat.

Although there are probably a lot of problems in this situation, I think the worst is step #5. When you use guilt as a motivation tool you increase your stress without accomplishing anything.

Worse, guilt tends to be a lousy motivator, resulting in a little bit of effort but nowhere near the effort needed to succeed with your plan.

Now contrast this approach to the way a relaxed, effective student motivates herself:

1. Worry. (Hey, sometimes you can’t help it)
2. Stop and form an action plan with specific tasks.
3. Create a list of the tasks to be done.
4. Break the list down to a daily basis.
5. Work hard to complete the tasks.
6. Relax guilt-free.

Instead of guilt, there is a system. It’s this system that not only creates the results, but eliminates the wasted stress and time.

The System Doesn’t Need to be Complicated

If I’m making it seem like the second approach requires a black-belt level of mastery in GTD, that’s not my intention. A system doesn’t need to be hard or complicated to still work extremely well in 95% of cases.

Here’s the system I’ve used for the last few years of relatively guilt-free work:

1. Make a to-do list.
2. Chunk that to-do list into a list just for today.
3. Complete the list, without adding new items when you finish it.

Now, this may sound too easy. Sure, this might work for some people, but my work is too difficult, my academic program too intensive and the competition too fierce to limit myself in this way.

Wrong on both counts.

First, that attitude is wrong because this system works even better the more difficult your program is. The systematic approach to productivity, with pre-established limits, excels when your workload is hellish.

I’ve used this approach when managing full-time classes, international competitions, two volunteer positions and a part-time business simultaneously. Cal Newport has used a similar restrictions-first approach to get a PhD at MIT, build a wildly successful blog and publish several books.

Don’t tell me you’re too busy. You’re too busy not to have a system.

Second, this attitude is wrong because it assumes guilt is even remotely effective. It’s not. Guilt may be used in the 5% of situations where your system breaks down. But when you’re using it on a regular basis, it wears out and becomes useless.

Studies have shown that willpower is an internal resource. If you use it up on one task, you have less of it for the next task. So if willpower is this scarce, why force 100% of your work to rely on it?

Martyrs of Busyness

The real reason a lot of people like using guilt is for a secondary benefit that has nothing to do with accomplishing anything: social status.

When you tell people you have a killer workload, you aren’t just complaining. You’re also trying to tell people you’re important enough to have a killer workload.

Some tribes put discs in their lips or brand tattoos. Ours walks around telling everyone how “busy” we are, grinding away hours of our life in half-productive work. Whose is more destructive?

Guilt Free and Accomplished

January 2010 was the second best month for income I’ve ever had on the website. It was the number one for direct income. My health and fitness are nearing a personal best, last week I was able to complete 10 one-arm pushups with each arm in a row. Academically my grades will likely be staying high during my year abroad, and I’ve made significant progress learning to speak French.

Despite this progress, I’ve been more relaxed this year than perhaps any in my life. Tonight will be my forth night out in a row, in a series of going-away parties for friends leaving France. I’ve enjoyed enough free time to practice my cooking, read more books and enjoy the weather, women and wine in the south of France.

I’m not saying this to brag, but to point out a contrast. In other years I’ve had considerably more stress, a lot of it being self-inflicted. Also, during those years I arguably accomplished less towards my main goals.

I think that’s evidence that the burnout, guilt-soaked approach to work not only isn’t sustainable, it often doesn’t even get the most done.

Imagine that your main goal in life was to have as much fun as possible. What would your life look like?

I’m asking this question because I reject the idea that the pursuit of fun, in its maximum, would result in a life of non-stop television, fast-food binging or substance abuse.

Instead I’d argue that, even if putting fun as the highest goal wouldn’t lead to the ideal life, there is still a considerable overlap. I want to make the case for two points:

1. That serious fun requires effort. Giving up all discipline and effort results in a local maxima of fun which is far lower than the maximum possible enjoyment.
2. That fun supports work-related and nobler goals, rather than distract from them.

Why People Don’t Like to Think About Fun

What if I told you that you weren’t maximally productive. That is, your current behaviors don’t accomplish the most for the time you invest, you probably wouldn’t require much persuading. After all, we all sense our deficiencies when it comes to procrastination or laziness.

But, if I told you that you weren’t getting the most fun, you might require more convincing. Somehow we feel that work is something that can be enhanced by analysis and introspection, but fun is not. Fun is something magical and trying to think about how to have more, destroys the very enjoyment we seek to create.

I’m not going to disagree with you. The act of trying to figure out how to have more fun, when you’re playing a game or socializing, usually makes the activity less fun. Fun is spontaneous, so thinking about it too much can undermine it.

However, while I believe a mindless, go-with-the-flow approach works best in the moment, that same logic doesn’t apply when structuring your life to have more fun.

Serious Fun Requires Sweat

Take travel as an example. You might feel that going on a trip will be more fun than staying at home and playing video games. But, the video games don’t require any advanced planning, whereas the travel might. So if you don’t apply any thought, you’ll end up staying at home.

Look at sports. Sports are a classic example of the frustration barrier. When you are lousy at a sport, it isn’t much fun to play. But as you gain skill, the sport can become almost obsessively interesting. If you didn’t apply the foresight to practice through the frustrating phase, you would never experience the intensely fun phase of mastery.

Being a connoisseur of fun doesn’t mean all your leisure time needs to require years of practice or planning. Instead it means that, as far as having fun is a worthy goal, there are benefits to putting some thought into designing a more entertaining life.

I’d rather live an adventurous life, which has richer fun experiences, than a merely entertaining one, which occupies itself with shallower fun.

Mindless Fun vs Serious Fun

I don’t want to categorize certain activities as always being mindless fun and others as being serious fun. I’m not going to say Shakespeare is inherently better than South Park, simply because I feel those comparisons are so corrupted by people using high art to signal status.

The difference isn’t the activity, it’s the way you pursue it.

Imagine one person watches television for six hours straight, because he has nothing better to do on a Friday night. Compare that to a person who, spends the same six hours watching television, but it’s in the deep appreciation of a favorite story. Reveling in the character details, completely fascinated by the broader themes of the work.

The difference is between being an aficionado and a drone.

Why Serious Fun Supports Serious Work

I don’t believe that fun is the ultimate aim in life. However, I do think it’s useful to think about because I feel fun supports other goals. If you’re saturated in adventures and enjoyment, those experiences enhance the other aspects of your life, rather than detract from them.

I get a lot of emails from people wanting to give up online gaming or partying so they can focus on working more. That’s fine, if in their honest assessment, they’ve decided that there are more satisfying ways to use their spare time.

However, in most cases, I feel people want to abandon these pursuits, not because they’ve found something better to replace it, but because they feel they should. That watching television, playing World of Warcraft or going to a club is working against their bigger goals.

I’ve fallen into this reasoning trap myself. I’ve previously written about giving up television, and while I enjoyed the challenge (I still don’t have a television), I think I pursued the goal for the wrong reasons.

Instead of trying to eliminate all those distracting sources of low productivity, I should have been embracing them. Embracing serious fun.

How Fun Improves Productivity

The truth is, for almost all my goals, if you asked me whether I’m more productive now or years earlier when I had a more obsessive focus on work, I wouldn’t have to think about it. I’m definitely more productive now.

I believe a big reason for this is that seriously pursuing fun, making sure life is as fun as possible, gives you the energy to put back into your more focused pursuits.

Again, however, I want to draw a distinction between mindless fun, which is usually done just to occupy time, and serious fun, which is the conscious effort to make your life as adventurous and entertaining as possible.

Making my life more fun has occurred on many levels:

• Improving my business, so that the creative work I find incredibly fun is something I can get paid for.
• Living abroad, so even acts like going to buy groceries are interesting challenges.
• Building my social network, so I’m connected to other people’s adventures.

Even more, it’s been accepting that the serious pursuit of fun is productive. And that the ideal life not only accomplished but thoroughly enjoyed.

Everyone procrastinates. Heck, you might be procrastinating right now by reading this, instead of doing something that should be done. That isn’t news.

What I feel is more interesting is where people procrastinate when we do. Even the most productive people have Achilles’ heels, types of tasks which they procrastinate on. Similarly, even the people who claim they have no willpower still have some work they always do on time.

Why is that? And how can you use that knowledge to fix the problem?

I’m a Productive… Except When I’m Not

I’m not superhuman. I have bouts of laziness, procrastination and every other typical human failing.

But, when it comes to my normal work, whether it is assignments for university, tasks for running my business or personal goals, I usually show up. I’ve written according to my 2-3x weekly schedule for this blog almost without exception for nearly 2 years.

I’ve also exercised for nearly 6 years 3-5x per week. I’d guess that in those past six years, I’ve never missed more than 2-3 weeks in a row, and only then because of travel or illness.

Despite that, I have my own Achilles’ heel. Certain types of tasks I’m no better than average at getting them done on time. Others, I forget to do, delay them when I remember and generally fare poorly at getting them done.

What’s my Achilles’ Heel? (And How That Can Help You Fix Yours)

In looking over my weekly/daily goals for the past few years, I would say there are two types of tasks I’m most likely to procrastinate on:

1. Maintenance tasks.
2. Non-routine errands.

Maintenance tasks are things like backing up my computer or website, reorganizing my filing system, tidying or doing laundry. For example, on that last point, I pushed doing laundry off my daily goals list for about 5 days before finally getting it done.

Non-routine errands are another weak-point for me. Things such as calling a support line to cancel a subscription or renewing a driver’s license. Especially if these things have no clear deadline (a subscription could renew indefinitely, unless I stop it).

Why do I procrastinate on these things? Also, how can the self-knowledge of your weak points allow you to improve on yours?

Two Reasons: One in the System, the Other in Motivation

The first reason certain tasks are procrastination trouble spots is that the system you use to organize your life doesn’t accommodate them well.

Obviously, if you used a system like GTD to the exact specifications, keeping every list and folder and using it perfectly, there wouldn’t be any tasks that don’t fit. But nobody uses those systems perfectly, and even if they do follow it closely there are certain types of work that will more easily slip through the cracks.

This seems to be a major reason errands occasionally are sources of procrastination for me. Because they don’t take much time, or have any significant advantage for completing them early, they don’t get much weight in my weekly/daily goals system. I do use a calendar to funnel date-sensitive tasks into the system, but if the errand has no deadline, W/D Goals tends to ignore it.

This is especially true with errands which may not get finished just because you invest time in them. Last year I continually procrastinated on making phone calls to difficult-to-reach people. The reason was simply that my productivity system didn’t manage those types of tasks well. If I call and get a busy signal, am I finished?

Correcting Systemic Errors

Fixing problems in your system usually isn’t too difficult. The solution is just to create a way of elegantly capturing those tasks so that you don’t forget about them. Defining deadlines for errands without deadlines will probably go a long way to solving my procrastination problem with these kinds of tasks.

The difficulty is sometimes in fixing a system problem, you make your life more complicated. Now instead of just having one to-do list, you have three. The bulkier your system, the less it pushes you to work. I’d rather have a 95% successful system that was ruthlessly simple, than a 99.5% system which was horrendously complex.

The Other Problem is Motivation

The other reason for an Achilles’ heel is psychological. There are certain types of tasks that you just don’t like to do.

I think maintenance tasks fall into this category for me. In theory, they shouldn’t be procrastinated in my W/D Goals system. Exercise and blogging are similar tasks in terms of work, frequency and consistency, but I rarely have procrastination issues with them.

Somehow, backing up my website or reorganizing my filing system just feels a lot less satisfying than finishing a blog article or going to the gym.

I could give up and claim that the situation is intractable. That blog writing and exercising are just naturally more fun, so I’ll always be doomed to procrastinate on the other items. But that isn’t really my style.

Instead, I’d like to probe into why I don’t have motivation to do these tasks, and maybe see the beginnings of how to correct it.

Looking deeper, I think the main reasons I lack motivation to work on these tasks is that:

1. Deep down, I don’t feel they accomplish anything meaningful.
2. I don’t take much pride in their completion.

Now for some maintenance tasks (polishing cutlery, for example) these two points are probably true. But that’s probably why I never put them on my to-do list in the first place.

The problem here seems to be that consciously I recognize that regular backups or reorganizations are necessary and important, but I don’t sense that on a gut level. Second, I don’t reward myself enough for sustaining these types of maintenance tasks. I congratulate myself for keeping the blog regularly updated and feel guilty if I don’t exercise, but I don’t have the same internal rewards for keeping my desk tidy.

Obviously recognition of these motivational weak spots is just the first step. The next is to start installing habits to correct it. That will take more time and effort, but it isn’t an impossible problem to solve.

However, just as I have current procrastination weak spots, I used to have even more, and patient habit adoption helped cure many (if not all) of those weak points.

How to Spot Your Motivational Weak Spots

I think just about anyone here could go through a similar process to what I went through. Starting with fixing the gaps in your productivity system and then identifying why you don’t put energy into accomplishing certain types of tasks.

Procrastination strikes unevenly. Fixing the weakest links strengthen the entire chain, so spotting these glitches in your approach can have a huge impact.

photo credit: sevenfloorsdown

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else. – Benjamin Franklin

When was the last time you made a resolve to achieve something, set a deadline and then achieved it? Can you even remember the last time? I’m struggling. And the reason I am struggling to remember such a time is because of excuses. I make them for everything; consciously and unconsciously. Without noticing it, excuses have become a habit that I am struggling to shake.

In this post I want to talk about the excuses culture that we have develop within ourselves and why we use excuses to protect ourselves from feelings of failure and fear. Hopefully it will spur some readers out there into action.

Why we make excuses

Photo credit: Franzi in der Wiese

A few years ago I was sitting in the car with a friend of mine having a conversation (argument) about how I always seem to find a way out of things. At the end of the debate he said something that has stayed at the front of my mind, something that I think about whenever I am feeling like making an excuse. He said:

“You have always found things easy. You are good at everything. But you aren’t great at anything because you make excuses. You would rather be the ‘potential’ to be great than actually try and fail. And that is sad.”

He was right. All my life I have been naturally gifted at sport and academics. I didn’t have to work hard to get good. But I never really excelled at anything. I never worked really hard to become great at a certain activity. Why? Because I was afraid of failure. I was afraid of trying and not getting there.

My parents role in this habit
I never blame my parents for anything in my life. I simply do not feel like it is a productive exercise. But I can see how certain things they did impacted the way I turned out. And one of those things was how my mother always told me how amazing I could be. She would constantly tell me how smart I was, how good at soccer I was and how I could become something truly special.

But rather than spurring me on to excellence it seemed to do the opposite. I was comfortable being the potential for greatness. I was afraid to actually give it a shot for fear that I wasn’t actually as smart, talented and athletic as she thought. So I made excuses. Excuses so I wouldn’t have to try.

And we all do it. All the time.

Fear: the reason for most excuses
So why do we make excuses? Why do we find ways to get out of things? Well, for the most part, it is because we are afraid. We are afraid of trying and we are afraid of failing. We are afraid of change and we will do anything to keep the norm functioning. Fear is the reason most of us make excuses.

If you look deep into your own mind and your own behavior you will see that you make excuses to protect your sense of self. We spend our whole lives developing and ego and decorating it with friends and family and money and success and we will do anything to protect our concept of that self. Even if it makes us depressed and unfulfilled. And ultimately that is what excuses do, they make you feel unfulfilled.

How to stop making excuses and move forward

photo credit: Triphamr

People say that the hardest thing you will ever do is quit smoking. But quitting excuses is 10 times harder. Excuses are the reason you started smoking, drinking and eating bad food. You make an excuse not to be healthy and an excuse not to be happy. Breaking the excuse culture is damn hard work. Here are some things you can do.

1. Realize that you do it all the time
As always, you need to take a look at yourself and really truly realize that you make mistakes. Find concrete examples of where you have sabotaged your progress by making an excuse and remember that incident. Bring it to mind whenever you feel like doing it again.

2. Look at your (lack of) progress
Take a look at how much progress you have made with your meditation, athletics, mortgage repayments or family weekend time. See how many excuses you have made and how that has affected your progress is a very real way. Until you can see that it is doing damage you will have no real impetus to stop.

3. Realize that death is coming
People always send me emails saying that I am too depressing when I talk about death. I always reply saying “it is depressing not to talk about it”. For too long our species has made death a taboo subject when, in fact, it is the only thing in life that is certain. Understand that death is coming and that you have no time for excuses. Not any. Its too hot, too cold, too nice inside, I’m too tired, I have a headache… all of those sound like absolute bullshit when you are on your deathbed looking back at what you didn’t achieve.

4. Realize you do it out of fear
If you go up to a fat man in the street and tell him that he is a coward he will probably punch you in the face. Men don’t like to be considered afraid, but that is exactly what we are. We make excuses because we are afraid. Why, then, do we still do it? If someone told us that we were afraid of something else we would do everything in our power to change and prove that we are brave. Do that now with excuses. Prove that you are not afraid of failure, change or losing the norm.

5. Be different in five years time
How different are you now to five years ago? Are you more loving, compassionate, patient, strong, rich, happy, thin, etc.? Take a look at whatever goal you have in your life and see how much closer you are to it now than you were five years ago. If you can say you are happy with your progress then chances are you don’t have a problem with excuses. If you are almost exactly the same then you can bet your right eye on the fact that you are stagnant because you are sabotaging your progress by saying “its too hard” or “its too cold outside”. Be different in five years time and stop making excuses.

Do you make excuses?

I would love to know how many of my readers consider themselves to be excuse makers. What kind of excuses do you come up with and how (if at all) have you dealt with them? Have your excuses held you back from being all that you can be? And how have you felt the weight of this “potential” slowing you down in life? Is it easier to not try?

Random Posts

• History’s Great Speeches: How to Make Work Presentations and Speeches Like the Greats
• Gordon Ramsay: 4 Lessons this Angry Chef Can Teach You About Success
• 5 Ways to Destroy Your Daily Depression
• Growing Up: The Train That Can Never Stop