Ep. 7: Work Your Behaviors (Success)

Learn how to set and make yourself do the behaviors you need to accomplish the goals you've set. Learn the pitfalls, psychological and practical, with getting everything done that you need to.

Chapters

• 0:00 Goals don't get you there
• 8:39 Be realistic
• 19:35 Use your one year goals to build a plan for this week
• 31:13 Start blocking time on the calendar
• 37:17 Examples
• 50:05 It takes time to learn this skill
• 59:46 Behaviors that require restraint, not time
• 1:06:04 Don't expect to become a whole new person
• 1:12:39 What to do when you don't want to do the work
• 1:25:39 The review is critical
• 1:30:47 Conclusion and mantra

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Hi, my name is David Murphy, and welcome to How to Be Happy and Successful, the podcast for and from the Mildly Incompetent. Hello, and welcome to Work Your Behaviors, the second episode on what I call the success side of the site. And you know, I feel that I should start by apologizing in advance for the length of this episode. It was never my intention to make work your behaviors so long. You know, it's it's like I'm turning into Dan Carlin. If you don't know who that is, it's a just really great history podcaster who makes five-hour episodes. And uh, you know, I have a friend who um is very supportive of me doing this uh podcast. I don't think he's listened to any of the episodes yet, but when we have lunch, he asks, Oh, how's it going? And he's you know very encouraging. He asks me, you know, well, how long are the episodes? And when I tell him, like, how long, you know, it's 40 minutes or an hour, he's like, What? He can't believe it. He can't believe I have more than 10 or 15 minutes to say on any one of these topics. But here I am with working behaviors, longest one yet. And maybe that's because I mean it's because there's a lot to say, but also maybe it's because this is a big challenge for me personally. You know, I definitely found getting into a pattern of setting goals much easier than in fact organizing my life enough to go after those goals and getting myself to do the work. So getting myself to do the organization, getting myself to do the work reliably. That's an ongoing struggle for me now, and certainly took a long time for me to change the habits that I had, or I would you know set goals for myself in some form, and then wonder why six months later, a year later, I seem to have not gotten anywhere. Anyways, maybe that's a psychology of me making this episode so long. If that length is useful to you, I'm really glad. If you feel like, you know, I got the point after 20 minutes. Sorry that I go on so much. Uh but there we are. And since I've already done a little bit of inside baseball, maybe I'll do a little more and say, you know, if this isn't the first episode you've listened to, then you've noticed that I go back and forth between an episode giving what I call happiness advice, and an episode giving advice on what I call the success side of the site or the podcast. So this is a success one. Working your behaviors is how to be successful. And I've been planning for so long this idea of doing an episode on happiness, episode on success, that it makes total sense to me to rotate, to switch back and forth. But for a lot of people, it seems a little strange and frustrating. You know, most people would want one or the other. You know, they are interested in at this time in their life in working on being more successful, achieving goals, moving ahead in life. While other people they want to, you know, find more happiness and learn the skills it takes to become happier. Each of those groups would like all of the episodes to be on that topic, not to have go back and forth, which means that you're waiting four weeks in between the next episode that covers either happiness or success. Okay. For me, I cannot understand why people want to work on one and not the other. You know, if you want to set goals that improve your life in that they earn you a better income, make you able better support your family, make you able to achieve your ambitions in life, that's terrific. I support that. It doesn't make any sense to me while you might say, well, that happiness stuff, that happiness mumbo jumbo, maybe, that can wait till later. You know, I'll get happier just by being more successful. And, you know, when it comes to having better inner voices, you know, whatever. That can wait five or six years. There's no need to wait, and waiting doesn't make any sense to me. And if you are, you know, you're looking to increase your happiness. That's what you want. You want these techniques and skills to make yourself a happier person, terrific. Great. In no way does that contradict moving forward with your goals. Now, it might be that you are retired and you don't have any sort of career ambitions anymore, and you've achieved financially what you want to achieve. Maybe you own a home, you're supporting your family, or have supported them. Whatever. Maybe you're there, maybe you're not. I can't think of a time in my life when I'm not going to have goals and things that I want to do for myself and for other people. But especially for people who are younger, there's no reason why you have to spend three to five years just working on happiness practices, and then you can turn to the more ambitious side of life, so to speak. These things do not contradict each other. You know, and each side of things, becoming a much more successful person, learning how to set goals and achieve them, and becoming a happier person and learning the behaviors, especially the internal behaviors that will make you happier. Each side of those things takes years to become any good at them. And I'm sorry to disappoint you if you haven't gotten that message yet. So I think instead of delaying yourself for years, you should work on both sides of the coin at the same time. And that's why I go back and forth with my episodes, which probably pleases just about nobody. But there we are. All right, now I've made this episode even longer. Let's start talking about how you work your behaviors. Uh, if you haven't listened to Set Goals, the first episode giving you advice on being successful, I strongly encourage you to do that. As I said in that episode, you know, succeeding is essentially a simple process. There's three steps. You set goals, you set the behaviors you need to do to achieve those goals, and you stick with those behaviors. In the set goals episode, I talk about setting individual goals, but also using the process to do what Jim Rohn called designing your life, thinking about all the things you want to achieve in your life and working towards those ends. And I talk about using life goals and five-year goals and one-year goals. Now, for this working your behaviors, step two in that three-step process, we're going to be using your one-year goals to try to decide what behaviors you should be doing to get you there. Now, I'm not saying this episode will be useless if you haven't listened to that set goals episode or if you haven't set one-year goals. I'm just telling you the order I recommend you go in. That is why this set goals episode uh comes before this one. Now, it's important that you really put into your head, you totally internalize the idea that setting goals and setting your behaviors, they go together. They must work together. If you set goals, you know, really great long-term goals and really great intermediate goals, but you don't set and sort of work your behaviors, it's like you have a great plan, but you just get in your car and you don't go anywhere. And on the other hand, if you just think about your habits and your behaviors, and you haven't set goals for yourself, well then it's like you get in your car and you just sort of drive around randomly. You might end up getting somewhere that's worth going to, but it's not very likely. So they go together. You know, and and James Clear, who wrote this very successful book called Atomic Habits, he says what I think is true that a lot of people talk about setting goals. A lot of people who are in the personal development world and the productivity world, and not enough people talk about behaviors, on choosing behaviors and getting yourself to do behaviors. So here we are, trying not to fall into that trap. So as I said a minute ago, we are working off our one-year goal list. And again, if you're somebody who has not created a one-year goal list, okay, you should do that. But for now, just follow along. You'll be okay. You'll understand the ideas. Our one-year goal lists are the ones that are useful for guiding our actions now on doing things, much more than our five-year goal lists or our life goals list. So we take our one-year goal list, and we're gonna think about what I want to get done this month to get there. We are not going to write out some kind of a daily plan that goes for a month. You know, we're gonna if we try to do that kind of thing, first of all, it's not gonna be realistic. You know, you're not actually gonna do the things you set for yourself in 20 days from now. Uh, it's very unlikely you will. And you're going to spend so much time making this nice plan that you won't actually get to doing the work. And for some people, that's very tempting. For some people, and frankly, for a lot of us, it feels great to like set up a calendar or get pages, you know, that we can, you know, where we can block things out and say, yes, I'm this day, I'll do this. And if I do that, then I'll move this over here. And next thing you know, 90 minutes has gone by, and they have this nice little plan in front of them, and they put it away and they go eat ice cream and watch TV or something because they've done what they the brain tells them is useful work, but it's not. So we're gonna look at our one-year list and we're gonna think about what I want to get done this month. And we can you can make a to-do list, you can make a set of goals for this month just real quick. Again, this is not like the life in five-year and one-year goals where you're gonna be rewriting these every, you know, at least twice a week. You can make a to-do list for the month, and you're gonna use that list to help you plan your week. And it's the one-week perspective or the one-week calendar that I'm gonna urge you to use to plan your behaviors to help you get to your goals. You're gonna take that one-week calendar and you're gonna block out the things you have to get done. All of the tasks and responsibilities of your life, and the things you want to get done, because they're on your goal list. Now, it's important to get a principle into your head as we start to do this. When you are making plans for yourself, you must be realistic and specific. So, realistic and specific, not optimistic and vague. Optimism and vagueness are gonna hurt you along the way. It's very easy when we are in the moment of creating a new life for ourselves or a new us or finally achieving something we've wanted to achieve for a long time, then we think we could do anything. And that's a very nice feeling. And we think we can do anything in a short amount of time, and also nothing's gonna get in our way. These are all terrific feelings, but they tend to run up against reality. You don't have time to do everything in the world. You can't just throw aside your life in order to tackle the wonderful goals that you have put on your one-year list. And even if time weren't a factor, and I'm sure time is a factor for you, but even if it weren't a factor, there are other barriers to just achieving anything. You know, it's very hard to say, practice piano 10 hours a day, or work out at a gym 10 hours a day, or do anything for that much time with that much commitment. But again, you don't have 10 hours a day to give up. So you have to face facts. And the first fact you have to face is that your time is precisely fixed and finite. You have 24 hours in a day and 168 hours in a week. If you choose to spend time on one thing, you cannot spend that time on something else. It is totally common to be unrealistic about money and unrealistic about time and not understand that principle. People get confused that if you spend your money on something, you cannot spend it elsewhere. And the same goes for your time. And I might sound a bit judgy here, but believe me, I have been guilty of this confusion in both areas many times in my life. And the time one still gets me because I so want to achieve so many things, and I have many responsibilities that fill my calendar. So I tell myself I have time to achieve more than I really can. Now, when I say people don't understand, intellectually, they understand, they get it, but they and I behave as though they don't. And I don't want to talk about myself too much, but I really do mean this applies to me too. It's totally natural for me, and I've done it way more times than I can count, both to think I can buy that for myself and not think of the consequences, and to think, yeah, I could do that either right now, or tell myself, like I could do that on Thursday, or I could do that in two weeks and not realize the consequences, which means that I can't do something else. Now, the first step to being realistic is that you get in front of you a weekly calendar, whether it's on a computer screen or it's a piece of paper, and you write down all the things that you must do. They're fixed. If you have to go to work, you gotta block that out on your calendar. If you're gonna have to pick up kids from school, you gotta block that out on your calendar. If you go to school, guess what? You gotta block that out on your calendar. If you have a dog and you take your dog out to exercise half an hour every day, both because your dog needs it and because you like it, you gotta put that on your calendar. Now some of these things are inflexible, like your work hours or your class times, and some you can move around, like what time of day you take your dog to exercise, or when you do your studying, or when you go visit your parents or your friends. But if you gotta do them, you gotta account for that time somehow and not pretend the time commitment doesn't exist. Now, if you are already saying your head or saying out loud, oh my god, I'm already overwhelmed with all the things that I had to do without even working on my goals in life. I already cannot get done everything I need to do in a day. Or if you don't say that out loud right as you're listening to this, but you you try to, you know, you get yourself your weekly calendar either on your computer or you take a piece of paper and you do it and you start to block out the things you're responsible for. Maybe then you realize, oh my God, I can't get everything done. Oh, no wonder I feel stressed all the time. Okay, I'm sorry you feel that way. This is the world for many people right now. It is for me, it is for everybody, which doesn't mean, hey, suck it up, too bad. But it's better to know it and to face it. You're more likely to find solutions when you do. Though maybe the solution involves you understanding that you can't get done this year everything you want to get done. I keep using the word realism. It is critical when planning your time and when setting a budget for your finances. I talked about that a little bit in the Set Goals episode. You know, there's a Tony Robbins quote that most people overestimate what they can get done in one year and underestimate what they can get done in 10 or 20 years. It's very easy, again, when we're enthusiastic, to think, oh, this year I'm gonna lose 30 pounds and I'm learning two languages, and I'm gonna work more and I'm gonna save a whole bunch of money. You know, we think all these things as though the rest of our lives and our habits aren't gonna get in the way of that. So you may have to reduce what your ambition is for this year, but not cut out everything you want to do this year. But you might have to make cuts in two ways. One, you might have to cut down those ambitions. You might have to take some given goal or each of your goals for the year and cut them back a little bit. Or a lot. So you might say, Well, I'm gonna get myself to run a half marathon by the end of the year instead of a full marathon. Or if instead of taking six classes at night after work, I'm gonna take two classes at night after work. Or you could say, No, that marathon is super important to me. I'm gonna work on that, but I probably can't take the classes at all. I'll have to push that off to next year, or vice versa. And you might also have to make cuts in your life, the things you're already doing with your time. It's essentially a certainty that unless the goals you have set for yourself take about 15 minutes a week, you will have to cut out or cut down some of the activities that you are currently spending your time on. And that's that's those are cuts that are well worth making. And just so you know, we are trying with this part of this setting of behaviors to be intelligent, realistic, precise. We're trying to be very rational. But your emotions are going to get involved with your hopefulness and your disappointment and your feelings of guilt if you're cutting things out, and your feelings of frustration that you can't do this and this and this. But it is just the truth, what I've already said, that you can't do two things at the exact same time. You can't put 27 hours of work to do in a single day because you don't have that much time in a day. As Jim Rohn said, you know, people often say, Oh, if only I had some extra time. Well, too bad, there is no extra time. The clock runs out at midnight and the next day starts. That's how it is for everybody. There's no extra time, you have to use the time that we all have. So, step one, get a calendar in front of you, a weekly calendar in front of you, and make a realistic picture of what your life is like. So, I'm going to talk now about how to use your calendar to look at what your life is like now and how to build time on your calendar for your goals. Now, this is a two-part process. There's two factors in this. We have to look at our one-year goals and think about what we want to get done this month and this week, even. And as a quick recap from the set goals episode, we create our one-year goals list largely, though not entirely, from our five-year goal list. And we create that list largely, but not entirely from our life goals list. And we're going to look at what we're spending our time on right now. So at the beginning of the month, you go to your one-year goal list and you go to each goal and you say, Do I want or need to get going on this goal right now, this month? So if Start Nursing School is on your one-year list and applications are due at the end of this month, hopefully you have a better head start than that. But if they're due at the end of this month, obviously on your month list is get applications in. And there can be any number of goals that must get started now. And there can be goals that you just want to get started now. If on your goal list is start eating better, start eating more healthy food, you want to get that going this month. On the other hand, there are some goals that you can't get started now. Maybe you have to wait for the summertime. You have to wait for somebody else to finish a project before you can even begin. Or you have goals where you know they can wait. You have other things you have to do this month. This particular goal can hang on for two or three months. Now, two things. One, remember, your one-year list is not just about things you want to get done in your life, but also things that you have to get done this year. So if you have to move this year, that's probably not on your life goals list or even your five years goals list, but it's required this year. So you put it on your one-year list so you can account for it, and maybe you've got to get it going on that this month. I don't know. Number two, you go through your whole one-year list, you say this month or not this month, when you create that list of things you're going to get after this month, realize that may or may not be true. You might find that even this shortened list is unrealistic when you start to block it out on your weekly calendar. So let's get back to that work. Now that we've dealt with the sidetrack talking about realism, you get your calendar in front of you on a piece of paper or on a computer screen, and you start blocking in the things that you have to do, the time that is taken up by things like work, school, picking up children, whatever it is. It doesn't just mean the things you have to do to stay alive. It doesn't just mean I'm going to work at this these hours, or these are times that I have to, you know, bring my kids to school. It will also include the night that you play board games with your friends, or the twice a week that you watch your favorite TV show with your partner, the hour it takes you to wash your dog every Sunday. Block out the things that you have to do and also the things that you regularly do and that you want to keep doing. If you regularly sit around after dinner and spend 90 minutes scrolling Instagram, but you want to give that up, you don't need to block that out. Now, if you just put these things down, you're probably going to have a lot of blank spaces. Those aren't all real blank spaces. So, first of all, there are errands you do. You might go shopping, you might have to go to a laundromat to do your laundry. If you don't go to a laundromat, you get your laundry even at home. And I'm guessing you didn't block that out. You have tasks that you have to accomplish that take up your time. And this is a little trickier. I think it's worth putting down things like, well, I usually go out with my friends after work a couple of times a week. So put that on there. You know, I usually, you know, or sometimes I'll go over on a uh weekend and watch a game with friends of mine. You don't actually have to block all of that out, and it can be hard to do that well because it's kind of random. But at the same time, if you just leave your spaces blank, you will have an unrealistic picture of just how much free time you have to start working on your goals. And remember, realism is our friend. It's our tough friend, the one that gives us the hard truths. But it's our friend, and optimism seems like our friend, but it's actually our enemy. Or our frenemy, as they say. If you don't choose to block them out, you gotta keep in your head that those things exist. Now let's say that you have done all the blocking on your weekly calendar. Well, some people might actually see that they are from the time they get up to the time to go to bed, they are booked. As in they get up, they get themselves sort of ready to go in the morning, get their kids ready to go in the morning, after kids off at school or at daycare, they get themselves to work, they get out of work, they have to go pick up kids, then they have to go take their kids, you know, and go over to their parents' house and they help their mom or their dad get dinner together, and you know, they take care of them and help them do laundry or whatever, and then they take their kids home and maybe do some homework or just you know get them ready for bed or give them a bath, and then they do that, and they you know they do laundry for themselves or clean the house and then they drop into bed. And their day really is booked from morning to night, maybe every day, hopefully not, but maybe at least some days a week. And some people, if you want if that is your life, you want to be able to see that in front of you and know that if you don't know it already. You know, see it sort of from an objective point of view. But also, if that's not your life, if you write down all the like the obligations that are booked and you see a lot of blank spaces, know that the blank spaces are not really blank. You do have other things you have to get done, and that you do get done in that time. But some of that time really is very flexible. You can make changes in what you're doing. If you're seeing blank spaces, maybe half that really is full of things like using the restroom, brushing your teeth, taking a shower, taking the trash out, whatever it is, things that you have to get down, but you know you haven't blocked it out in your calendar. Half of that blank space is still left in your calendar is taken up by stuff like that. But if you look at your calendar and you see three hours between the time that you get home from work and you go to bed, you might in fact have an hour and a half, or somewhere between an hour and two hours, to actually do work towards your goals. That might be real time that you can choose to use to get where you want to go instead of, you know, spending your time somehow and not even realizing afterwards how you spent it. Now, if you've never done this kind of blocking out, do it. It's a useful exercise. Just see what your life is shaped like in a way. And you can really see, oh my God, I really am just so busy four days a week. No wonder I feel so stressed in those days. And you might think, what can I move? What can I cut out or what can I move around? And maybe the answer is nothing. But you know, for most people, there are ways to reduce some of your stress or your obligation times, especially if certain days just seem just jam-packed. But the main task right now, what we're mostly trying to achieve with this exercise, is to arrive at the realistic estimate of how much time do I have this week to work towards my goals? Do I have 20 hours? Do I have 10 hours? Do I have three hours or 90 minutes to put towards these one-year goals? If you say, I've got 20 hours a week, well, that's fine. If you really have a lot of blank spaces on your if you have about 40 hours of blank space in your calendar, you could probably put 20 hours a week towards your goals. But if you crowd up all over the empty space and add to 20 hours, well then as I suggested a minute ago, you should estimate about 10 hours that you will dedicate to your goals. And please realize as well, you're not suddenly bec going to become some person who never watches a minute of TV, who never scrolls through YouTube videos, who never sits around texting their friends. I'm not even trying to get you to become that person. Maybe you should do some less of that time, especially the TV and the internet thing. Connecting with friends is terrific, even if it's not as terrific electronically as it is face-to-face. But you're not being honest if you think you're gonna enact military discipline on your life and give up all the pastimes you now enjoy. So that's the advice for people who think, oh, I've got just tons of time to put toward my goals. Now, if you look at your life and you think, I've got about three hours a week to put into these goals. I wrote these life goals and five-year goals and one-year goals, and I'm excited about the one-year goals, and I could put about three hours a week into them if I, you know, really put some effort into making that time. Okay, that's not a lot of time. I'm not criticizing you if that's how busy your life is, but it's not a lot of time to get to goals, especially if they're big goals. Know from the outset that you can't accomplish a big task without putting in a lot of effort. You need time to be able to put the effort in. So if you don't have a lot of time, then you can't put a lot of effort in, at least not in the short term. You know, if you have three hours a week for five years, you can get somewhere, but it'll take all that five years to get there, probably. I'm not trying to discourage you, but I don't want to set you up for feeling bad about yourself in six months. So you should, if you can, see if you can diminish how much time you spend on something else. That's not as critical as your goals, as the life you want to build for yourself. If you can't do that, realize okay, right now it's gonna be a slow walk towards your goals. And think it's important to face that. It doesn't mean you give up your goals, but the worst thing is to think, well, I'll just figure it out, or it'll figure itself out because it won't. And then you'll think, well, listen, I've I've only got three hours a week, but I'm gonna get in so much better shape, and I'm gonna learn a language, you know, and I'm gonna, you know, get back into playing piano and just all these things. I'm gonna read to my kids all the time. Time and I'm gonna read books myself. You know, you're not gonna be able to, and it's really gonna hurt your progress. It's gonna make you quit when in three months you think, Why have I not gotten anywhere? It's because this is how your life is. You're too busy to put a lot of time into getting to your goals. Okay, the calendar, you seeing the calendar can help you realize that and can realize that you're making choices with your time. Just like with a budget, you're making choices with your money, with your calendar, you're making choices with your time. We must handle our obligations and really most of the time we should be glad, we should be grateful that we have these obligations. In that, you know, yeah, we have to go to work. And for me, I'd rather you know be hanging out at home or sleeping or something than going to work. But I feel lucky to have a job. Those of us who have jobs are lucky to have them. And you know, kids take up so much of our time. But those of us who have kids are lucky to have them. So, okay, you've got to hand your obligations and you want to build time to get to your one-year goals, the more you can make that second category, you know, five hours, maybe up to ten hours, the further you're gonna get this year. Okay, so we have our calendar in front of us, and we have blocked in there the things we have to do. We can't get out of it. Those are the times we're doing these things, and we have blocked out the things that we don't necessarily have to do, but that we're going to do. We do them regularly, so we know we've got to block that time. Now we look at that one-month list we made, and we think, what are we gonna work on this week? Now, we have to consider where our time is gonna go. This is like having a little bit of money we pulled aside to do something, but we have four things we want to do with it. We have to decide where the money is gonna go. Same with your time. Again, if you have 15 hours free, that's probably enough time for you to get some work done on every goal you have on your one-year list. You know, probably, assuming you have a reasonable amount of goals and not 42 goals on your one-year list. But if, like most people, the most you can sort of push aside and set aside for this goal work is like five hours. That's probably not enough time to work on every single goal you want to work on this year, and maybe not everything you were hoping to work on this month. You have to decide where that time is gonna go. All of that time could go to exercising. All of that time could go to helping their kids more with their schoolwork. One of the great tribulations of middle-class parenting life these days, as you will know if you talk to any middle-class parent, is how much time they spend taking their kids to their activities, their sports teams and their martial arts classes, and whatever other extracurricular activities the kids or the parents have decided those kids should do. So if that's you, there surely aren't enough hours in the week. All that time could go towards learning how to be a great cook. Or you can divide up the time. But you had to make choices, and those choices might be disappointing to you. You might be filled with excitement at the idea of designing your life and finally creating the life for yourself that you want to. That's great. I love that enthusiasm. But that doesn't mean that this week you won't have to make some choices that can be disappointing, where you have to put off achieving some of those goals. That's how it is. And frankly, that's how it's gonna be for years. It's not gonna be the case that in six months or in three years, you're suddenly gonna have more time than you know what to do with. You're always gonna have to prioritize and make these choices. Making these choices can be disappointing and unpleasant, and that tends to make people not want to do it. People don't like making money choices, and that's part of the reason they don't budget stuff, and they don't like making these time choices. And so it's part of the reason they won't get to work on their calendar in this way. But the fact that we have to make these choices with this precious resource of time is all the more reason why we must make ourselves do this. This is part of the maturity required for us to work towards our goals intelligently and reliably. So make choices and start writing them on your weekly calendar that's in front of you. On Tuesday at 5 o'clock, I'm gonna do this. On Thursday at 8 o'clock, I'm gonna do this. Saturday at 10, I'm gonna do this. It can be the same thing, they can be different things. First, let urgency guide you. If there's something that must get done, then you've got to put that on your list first. If it's important to you and it has to get done this month, they have to go on this week's calendar. And that might take up all of the hours you have on this week's calendar, all of the free hours to get to your goals might get taken up by this school application or prepping your apartment for moving, whatever it is. So you might not this week get to spend any time doing the stuff that you're excited about, like you know, joining the local book club or starting to go to the gym more or whatever that might be. That is frustrating. There's a saying, do the things you need to do when you need to do them, and you'll be able to do the things you want to do when you want to do them. I think the saying is accurate. In the long run. You know, if you can get done the responsibilities and the targets you have set, get done what you have to get done, that will give you time and opportunity to do things that excite you in your life. But some weeks we gotta put off those fun things and do things we have to do. That's just part of the deal. It can seem very obvious, you don't need me to say that, but so many of us do that, right? We don't do the things that we need to do because we're either we're lazy and we sort screw around with our time, or else, you know, we get excited by some of those other things that we have now set our sights on. Okay, do not put off what you have to do. You're being mature and realistic, you're looking at your calendar, block out the tasks that are urgent. Otherwise, if you don't have urgent tasks that absolutely demand your attention, decide what just feels most important to you, the project you most want to work on, put those in there and maybe along with other goals too. Do not agonize over it. You're gonna do this process again next week. So this is not gonna be a permanent decision for your life. You're gonna reevaluate these decisions. Just pick tasks, but pick it and mean it. And what I mean is don't write down something now on your calendar and think, well, I'll just decide then actually what I'm gonna do. Don't do that. Choose something you want to work on at 6 p.m. on Tuesday evening and work on it when you get there. And we're gonna talk more about what it takes to actually motivate yourself when the time comes. But I'm urging you not to just leave things up in the air and think, well, I'll just figure that out later. Because for most people, I don't think that's a good plan. It's much better to learn the skill of setting a task for yourself and getting yourself to do that task. So let's go through a few examples just so you can see some of the thought you have to put into finding time in a calendar for some of the goals you set. Uh let's start with one very common exercise time. So we're gonna exercise more to lose weight, get in shape, enjoy ourselves if we like different kinds of sports. Terrific. And you could do that where you start just going running from your house, or you're gonna join a gym, or you're gonna start playing sports with friends or some local club. Who knows? So, what does exercise time take? It takes time, obviously. And you gotta do it regularly. You don't want to say, Oh, I'm gonna get in shape, you know, by through exercise, and I guess I'll do it 15 minutes at a time when I have the time and and feel like I'm in the mood. That's not gonna get you anywhere. You you gotta do it several times a week. Twice a week can't work, you know, especially if you work hard on those two times, and it's certainly better than zero times, right? But ideally you're hoping more for at least three times a week. And you have to consider what you're going to do, how much time your actual activity will take, right? If you're just gonna put on shoes at home and go for a run, okay, that could be just half an hour of your time. So take a little more time to tie your shoes. When you get home, you gotta shower and uh change your clothes. So maybe book an hour for that. If you're gonna go to the gym, you're probably talking about two hours, right? Because you gotta drive there, change, get out and do whatever you're gonna do, either shower or just change again and come on home. Two hours. If you're doing things like, you know, I don't know, playing soccer in some local club or starting to play tennis with friends, who knows? That's an hour and a half at a time, let's say. Well, you have to book that time for yourself. It doesn't mean you have to do it at the same time every week necessarily, right? If you run from home, you can do it three days a week. Maybe you have a flexible schedule where you could do that at six in the morning if you're an early bird person, or you could do it at six in the evening, you know, or you could do it, you know, two days a week at uh 7 p.m. if your neighborhood is safe, and you could do it uh once on the weekend, maybe you have that flexibility, but the time has to be booked somehow. Now, if you actually have a lot of free time in which to do this exercise, however you're gonna do it, well, that's very helpful. In other words, if you don't have obligations, responsibilities that you've got to that that fill up your time. There are plenty of people for whom if you say, okay, you need to find four hours in your weekly schedule to start exercising and improving your life that way, and exercise, you know, look, that's gonna be number five on my list of things to do to make you a happier person. It's the fifth episode and article on the happiness side of the site. So I certainly consider exercise to be very important. If you see a lot of people find four hours a week for exercise, they would have a very hard time finding those hours uncommitted. They already have responsibilities for helping their kids or helping their family or they're volunteering somewhere, or committed in some project like you know, going to school. You know, they're working and they're going to school as well, so they got to spend that time in class or studying. Now, if that's you, okay. Don't just throw your hands up to go, well, look at me, I don't have any time to exercise, so no exercising for me. You got to find a way, right? So you gotta cut something in your life that's going on. And I mean cut it, I mean reduce it probably. Maybe literally you get to cut something out that is you know responsibility doing, and you say, like, I just can't do that anymore. Or you have to push things around some and uh maybe reduce how much time you spend on those things, which involves dealing with other people uh and explain to them you're gonna do this. Or I don't know if you you have to explain to them or not, but you've got to make it clear I'm not doing as much time. And these days I'll be an hour later, or I can't work with you on these days, whatever it is. You got to tell if it's your kids and your family, if you're expected to go home and you know, cook for your family four days a week, you have to tell them two days a week I'm not doing the cooking. Because two days a week after work, I'm gonna be going and exercising. That is a sacrifice they should definitely be willing to make for you, the person in your life, to get healthier and happier. Now, suppose you actually have free time. It's actually the case that most people do have a lot of responsibilities and obligations taking out their time, but also have a lot of time that is we might call free time. It's not being used in some important way. And, you know, free time is important for our happiness. But we spend a lot of our free time doing things like watching television shows or scrolling at the internet. And a large part of that, frankly, is wasting our time. Uh I don't mean to insult you if you love doing that stuff, but it's it's not a great use of your time compared to your goals that you have set, you said to yourself are important to you. If that's the case, okay. You can have that time available to you. It's easier to make that time available for your exercise. But realize two things. First, again, you must book the time on your calendar. You can't just say, all right, I'm gonna watch less TV and I'm gonna exercise more. Just saying that out loud and not putting it on your calendar isn't gonna help you. And realize as well, it is not easy to pull ourselves away from these habits that we have. Never underestimate the strength of your old habits, especially if they bring an instant gratification. And frankly, just doing a habit you've done for a long time, whatever that habit is, it can bring a gratification. But especially if it really is, you know, it does bring some pleasure. You're watching some show that makes you laugh, or sort of laugh, or you're you find something online that you want to share with people. There is a gratification there. But as James Clear talks about, the guy who wrote Atomic Habits, you know, it's very often the case that a bad habit brings a reward right now, and a good habit brings a reward later. So just don't underestimate the pull of those habits that we're trying not even to totally break necessarily, but we're trying to pull back on them in order to create more time for getting to our goals, like exercising more. So my point is that even if you have time that is free of obligations, you're going to find a challenge in making yourself turn away from whatever you're doing right now at that time into doing something that is more useful to you. Let me pick another goal people sometimes have cooking at home more. Right? We we want to cook at home more because we know that it is healthier and it will save us money. And maybe you want to learn how to cook well. That's a great skill in life. It can be enjoyable, you can be proud of yourself, you can please other people in your life. So, for whatever the reason, you want to learn to cook at home more. That is terrific. Sanding, this will take time. It'll take time in ways you might not as easily predict. You have to maybe read articles or watch videos on how to cook something, right? Suppose you don't know how to cook that well, you gotta put time into learning it. Just getting in front of a stove by itself is not gonna do it. So you gotta spend some learning time and to build in time for shopping. If you already go food shopping, great, you just have to add a little more time to figure out what new ingredients you need and to go find them in the store. If you're really taking on a whole new way of life when it comes to cooking at home, okay, that's really a time commitment to figure out the ingredients you need and go find them all. Stock your pantry. So that's some time you gotta put in your calendar. I don't know how much it's gonna be. And then, of course, you gotta book the time for actually uh doing the cooking at home. If you go out to like, you know, pretty good restaurants, cooking at home doesn't take much more time than that. If you go out for a from you get home and you get you and your partner or someone go out to a dinner, that could take you two hours. You can cook a pretty good meal in that amount of time as well. But if you are your habit is while driving home, you pick up food, whatever, Chinese takeout, or again, a fast food place, cooking takes more time, and you got to book that on your in your calendar. And you should definitely start off like twice a week. Twice a week, I'm gonna cook a new meal for myself and the family or whoever, and just start building that time. It don't say, like, oh, from now on, I'm doing nothing but cooking at home. You know, unless it's very important for you, for dietary reasons or some other reason, to make that kind of a big change. But realize what a huge change it's gonna be in your life. It's really gonna dominate everything you're gonna be doing in your life over the next two months or three months, making that kind of complete transition. And you could take that as a reasonable rule. If you're making a really big life change, you're gonna need two to three months of almost complete focus just to get that habit set up. So if you have a relatively small goal and you say, okay, I'm gonna read 20 minutes every day before I go to sleep. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna turn off the TV earlier and I'm gonna start reading. That's terrific. It's not gonna require you to change your life a whole lot. You just gotta make that happen 20 minutes before you go to bed. But if you're making some big change where you say something like, I'm not eating out anymore, I'm cooking at home seven days a week, that's gonna be the new me. Terrific. Know that it's gonna take a lot of your time, and also you need just focus all of your mental energy on making this change. There will be big aspects to it and little aspects to it, and it will end up being very rewarding for you, but it will be a challenge. So again, expect two to three months of real focus just to get that going. After that beginning period, life will still get in the way and old habits will still want to re-enter your life. So I'm just talking about the initial commitment to some kind of life-changing behavior. But if you're willing to start off slow, which is what I recommend, because those big changes are just so hard to maintain, twice a week. Start making that change, and then you can spread it more. Let's pick one more topic. And I just want to show you that they're with different goals, they're all going to take your time in some way, but maybe in different ways on your calendar. So let's say learning a language, right? You decide you want to learn Spanish. Swahili, Cantonese, Pharisee, so many good choices. Good for you. That's excellent. There's lots of different ways these days, especially, where you can do that, right? So, and it's it's much more flexible. So you can have things like a Duolingo app and you can find some time to do that. You can't just do it three minutes a day in fact to get anywhere. So let's say you want to do like, I don't know, 20 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day, somewhere in that range. But the nice thing about it, it's on your phone. You can pull it out, maybe you have a break at work, maybe while you're commuting to work, if you're not driving a car. At home, you can make a rule for yourself that you know you don't get to play a video game until you've done 10 minutes of work on your language. But it's easier to find that time than it is to go to the gym for two hours. And when you're learning a language, you should do more than just working on an app, be listening to audio a little bit. You could do that, you know, again, while you're commuting. So that is the kind of a goal where you're not giving up as much of your obligation time, but you still have to realize, okay, 30 minutes every day I'm gonna be working on this language. It's gotta be on your mind. And if you you gotta create a weekly calendar, you've got to put it on there so that you realize I'm gonna be working on this skill and on this goal of mine, because then you can review it and say, oh, I this past week I spent maybe 15 minutes total on learning this language instead of the 30 minutes a day I had planned for myself. And as I'll talk about more a little later on, that review is very important. And one idea that I want you to understand is that this practice of blocking out time, clearing time and setting time for working on your goals, it's a process and it's a skill to learn. You're not gonna be great at it right away, you're gonna get better at it the more you do it. The first thing you learn to do is to do it. Make this a regular practice. As you do it regularly, you'll get quicker at it. So if it takes you, I don't know, an hour, the first time sit down on a Sunday evening and plan your week, that's fine. In six months, it'll take you ten to fifteen minutes. So you get quicker at it and you get better at it in that you get better at estimating how much time is really there. You start to see, like, oh, I you know, I forgot to write these things down, or I I thought I had four hours free there, but really all the stuff goes on in the evenings, and so I only have an hour and a half free. And you start to realize, okay, what is it that I do want to work on? And you just get better at negotiating which of the goals need to be worked on now. And part of that process of improvement comes from evaluating how you did this week. So at the end of the week, maybe when you're setting up the next week's uh uh calendar, you say, Well, how did it go? Did I actually set the time aside properly? Did I do the work on this uh these goals? Did I at the moment decide I don't want to do this goal so I want to do other ones? So my prediction of what I wanted to do was not very good or my follow-through was not good. You make an evaluation, and that's how you learn how to get better at things, and you make that evaluation without a bunch of judgment. As I will talk about in an episode called Blame the Process, it does not do you any good to sit there and like, well, I didn't get that gun because I'm a loser, and as usual, I screwed things up. I'm probably not gonna get to these goals. You know, letting your inner voices run amuck with you know how much you suck does not help. You just gotta look and say, did well on Tuesday, did nothing on Thursday and Saturday, so so. Something like that. Just an honest evaluation that you would give to somebody else. You'd give to some friend of yours, give yourself some worthwhile feedback that you implement as you move forward and create new plans. There are 52 weeks in a year that's a lot of opportunity to get good at this skill. By the end of the year, if you're doing it consistently, you're going to be quite good at planning out your week. That's not the whole battle. It's not even, frankly, half the battle, but it's an important step of getting yourself to do the behaviors you need to do. And one last thing to say about creating this weekly calendar and about evaluating your performance, is that sometimes you have to let things fall apart a little bit to get to your goals. If you're someone who spends an hour a day cleaning their place because you like a really nice, neat, organized place, you might need to cut back on that and let some dust balls accumulate some of the time, even if it drives you crazy. If you're someone who watches movies with their kids or their partner several times a week, that's a great use of your time. But you might need to cut that back to once a week, at least for a while. If you're somebody who's really regular about cooking at home, maybe you do need to start picking up dinner on the way home. Hopefully you find some healthy options to do that with. But you might need to let some standards drop a little bit in order to spend time getting to your goals. That is okay. That is again a realistic view of the limits of your time. You can't do everything, and you likely can't get done everything you want to get done just by cutting away the junk, right? If you say, God, I spend four to five minutes a day on TikTok, yeah, you could drop that down, you can cut all that out entirely. I don't spend a minute of a day on TikTok. I'm not bragging. I have no interest in it. You can cut it out of your life and be a-okay. And but it's likely that you can't find all the time you need to get to your goals just by cutting away the nonsense. You probably have to cut away for now some of the stuff that's worthwhile in order to make time to work towards your goals. Do that. Make that temporary sacrifice or temporary acceptance that this is how it's going to be for a while while I get things done. Now I want to add a point here that can help you maybe understand and plan your one-year goals a little better. While you're looking at your one-year list, you can notice there's a couple kinds of goals. There are goals that have a finite endpoint, so a finish line. That might be like prepping your house for sale or applying to college or throwing a big family reunion. You know, something where you're going to get somewhere and then you're done with the task. And there's kinds that don't have endpoints that are just lifestyle changes. It could be things like losing 30 pounds. Now it seems like it has an endpoint, but really the goal it takes a long time to get there. You've got to change your life for years in order to get to lose that kind of weight. And then when you get there, you don't want to regain it all, right? So you've got to keep that lifestyle of change going. Uh, it could be it could be keeping my apartment clean from now on or learning French, which again might seem like it has an endpoint, but it's gonna take years uh for you to develop it. So it's really a lifestyle change. So you've got the the finite goal and the lifestyle change. The finite goals one, the one where you're gonna do something like apply to school, they have the advantage that they're not generally working against some kind of ingrained behavior that we have to make you know totally different. Getting ready a school application is not usually as hard as uh quitting smoking. Now, it might be like if the reason you're applying to school this year is because you haven't applied the last four years, because you have this sort of aversion to getting things together, okay. Well, now we're working against behaviors. But in general, these kind of big projects, and that is a disadvantage of these kind of things, is that they they're generally kind of a project. You've got to plan it out. So if you have that kind of a goal, you know, by September or in September, I've got to throw a huge family party and it's gonna involve 40 people from around the country. Okay, it's gonna be a lot of planning involved in that. Your job there is to make time on your weekly calendar and decide what's gotta get done this month, what's gotta get done the next month, and so forth. As opposed to the other goal, improve my eating habits, get in great shape. Those goals don't require as much advanced planning, but again, you're working against behaviors that can be very hard to change. Another difference, maybe disadvantage of the short-term goals, one with an endpoint in mind, is that they sometimes don't come with the enthusiasm that other goals can have. You know, the the idea of this is the year I'm gonna I'm gonna learn Spanish, this is the year I'm gonna learn how to play the piano, this is the year I'm gonna lose 20 pounds. People are enthusiastic about that. Well, this is the year I'm gonna move or you know, fix up the house or do whatever, those things are often, you know, those are chores a lot of the time. They don't come with enthusiasm. So that could be a downside. But at the same time, as I'll talk about more in two episodes, which is stick with things beyond enthusiasm. Enthusiasm itself can have its downsides. And the practice I'm recommending you do of setting out a weekly calendar and blocking out your time that's already booked and then seeing where space can be created for your goals, that itself might be very much against how you handle your life and your schedule. Maybe you're a different form of organization, or maybe you're just not organized at all when it comes to your time. This practice is one that's very useful to you working towards your goals. But what I don't want is that it becomes an obstacle to you if hearing this idea, like, oh, you're excited about getting to your goals and you want to work on your behaviors, but then you think about I gotta get a calendar in front of me, whether I'm a computer or not, and start blocking things out. And that whole thing is just sounds awful to you, and it's gonna get in your way, but don't let it. Don't let this organization work actually stop you from getting to work on your behaviors. Just start working on the behaviors that you think you need to do to make improvement in your life. To look at money instead of time for a second. You know, there are people in the world who are actually pretty good at controlling their finances and even saving money without actually doing a budget. They're just good at not spending money. They realize they shouldn't eat out all the time and they should, you know, whenever they want to buy themselves something, they question, do I need that? And the answer is usually no, so they don't buy it. And so they don't have to use a budget. I recommend using a budget. I think most people who are successful at their finances track their spending and use a budget. But it's not absolutely required. I recommend it. It's not absolutely required. My point is here, I think most people who want to find time to work towards their goals should use a calendar. But if that's an obstacle to you, don't let it be. Start working on the behaviors without doing the organization first, if that's the only way that you're going to get going with the work. Now, I want to talk for a second, or you know me, or a few minutes, about a sort of special category of goals, which is when you're not trying to achieve something through work, you're trying to give something up, right? You're trying to change your Behavior that's bad for you by leaving it behind. So you're trying to, you know, eat smaller portions with your meals, you're trying to quit smoking, whatever it is. And the sort of ironic challenge there is that it doesn't take time on your calendar to do those things. Right. So I've talked about how hard it is to find time on your calendar, which is totally true. But at least goals that require your time, like you know the task. If you want to do 50 push-ups by the end of the year, okay, you put some time in your calendar, and when that time comes up, you go and do push-ups. Carry that forward with other goals. What do you do if you just say, well, what I don't want to do is pull out a cigarette and smoke it? It's hard. And we usually start with enthusiasm, and often we start with some activity. You know, we talk to people about how we're gonna quit smoking, maybe read a book about quitting smoking, that's what gets us going, or we watch some videos. You know, there's some kind of activity to start with, and we said, this is it, I'm gonna do it. Well, first of all, if you're trying to break a habit like that, I really recommend that you do get advice and guidance from people or programs that help people do those things. Helping to reduce your calorie intake, stop yourself, you know, smoking cigarettes, and of course, much more serious addictions like uh alcoholism, drug use, you know, smoking itself is a you know very costly addiction in your life, but things like alcohol or or harder drugs will have a much worse effect on you. So with uh quitting these behaviors that are bad for you, get some guidance on them. You might need to go to detox or the hard drugs, but even again, the light of things you're trying to change your eating habits, you know, use a coach or just read books and watch videos on them. And my advice here on those things is actually treat them, treat these habits as though they require your time. Give them time on your calendar. So, in other words, you know, let's talk about the eating thing. You want to change your eating habits, eat less junk food, eat fewer calories with each meal, etc. You know, part of that process is okay, watching videos, talking to friends about what you're gonna do, uh, you know, reading articles or books on these things, and often what's recommended is you go through your kitchen and your pantry, you start getting rid of some of the stuff that is, you know, just gonna pull at you and ruin you. You you gotta get rid of the cookies, you know, and get rid of the ice cream and get rid of some of the triggers. And that could be something like cereal, you know, something that triggers you to just make you eat and eat and eat. You know, and that takes activity. And that activity, it actually feels good. You know, you feel enthusiastic, you maybe believe in yourself in a way that you haven't believed in yourself for years. So you're gonna do it and you do this activity. It's a problem when the activity is done. And so I think you should try with every week to literally build time in there so that you can sort of repeat these processes. Build a few hours every week where you are. I know it sounds funny, you have to keep clearing out your pantry if nothing's there, but you know, sometimes in the midst of this trying to, you know, get better eating habits, we have picked up food that we shouldn't be having. So you go through your clear out again. Maybe it's people in your life who keep bringing in food to your house that you shouldn't have. So you spend time every half hour of a week just clearing stuff out. But also, you know, obviously, if if getting in better shape and losing weight is an issue, you can, you know, or is the goal, well then you can do exercise. But you know, I think you should book time and spend time renewing your enthusiasm. So I use a budgeting app called WineAb. It's Y N A B. It stands for you need a budget. It's very popular. They don't pay me a penny. I just recommend them because that's what I use. And I don't think it's the only budgeting app you have to use in the world, but it's a very useful program. And on their website, they have videos of people who've had success stories, people who started off really in the hole and have made changes to make their life better over time. And you can go on YouTube and find videos of people you know talking about YNEP who work for WineApp, but also people who don't work for WineApp who just talk about successful changes, positive changes in their life for budgeting. Spending time every single week watching videos like that or doing anything that reminds you of your motivation. That is worthwhile. If you can spend time each week, book time in your calendar and spend time each week reminding yourself, why is it that I want to quit smoking? What are activities I want to do when I feel better, I can breathe better? What is it, you know, is it because I want to spend time with my kids? To spend at least 15 minutes a day, three days a week, thinking about these uh these motivations that help you. Is it gonna make changing your behavior completely easy? Absolutely not. But the point here is I think with these goals, they actually don't exactly take time on our calendar because they they require reduction of something, they're reducing a behavior. I still think you need to book time on your calendar to do some activity around it and remind yourself why it's so important to you. I think that'll help you get to that goal. Okay, let's say we have looked through our week, we blocked time for ourselves. We said on Tuesday at 5:30, I'm gonna do the behavior that's gonna get me to my goal. I'm gonna go for a run, I'm gonna clean the house, I'm gonna cook dinner. Now the question is, are you going to actually do it? Because there'll be plenty of things, there'll be voices in your head, and there'll be distractions in your life that'll make you not want to do it. But you can't just plan the work, you gotta do the work. So there's different scenarios here. The one that's most likely to make you or get you to do the work is where you feel enthusiastic. You know, you're turning a new leaf, you get to make this change in your life that you know you should make and you want to make it now that time is free, so you jump at it. In fact, sometimes, again, we're so full of enthusiasm for one of these new plans in our life, one of the goals in our life that it doesn't matter if our time is free. We will push things out of the way, ignore things we have to do in order to go get at this new behavior. And that's great. Sort of. You know, we it's not going to ignore responsibilities, and it's also a problem because it's not going to last very long. But let's say you have cleared the time like you should, you're full of enthusiasm, terrific. Now, another scenario is let's say it's a month later, and it's the same goal that you're very enthusiastic about. You still think it's important to you, but the enthusiasm is waning as enthusiasm will. So now you're not as excited about cleaning the house, putting on the running shoes and going for a run, cooking dinner, reading books, whatever it is. Another scenario, you have cleared some time in your schedule for getting at a goal you know is important to you, but you have never for a single moment had any enthusiasm for it. This is not you doing something you always wanted to do. This is you finally, after years, trying to clear out your garage. You know, that's either it could be like a life-changing behavior that you know you should make, but you don't want to do it, or uh it's one of those goals where you have to, you know, it's a finite goal you have to achieve this year. You just, you know, you don't want to clear your garage. That's it's part of the process you have to do in order to rent out this your garage to somebody and make some extra money in your house to help pay you the bills. First up, you have to clear the garage and it's full of stuff, and you don't want to do it. So, whatever it is, you have no enthusiasm. And that sounds bad and it is kind of rough, but at least, at least you haven't you don't get led down this path where you're fooled by enthusiasm for a while, and then your excitement drops out from under you. And then maybe the last scenario is where you want to do something, but it just feels overwhelming. You have no idea where to start. It seems like too big a project to you, even now that you have the time cleared. That could be something like clearing out your garage, but it could also be something like applying to school or who knows what. You get to it and you realize you have no idea how to get going. And it'd be just much easier just to do something else right now. Yeah, maybe, maybe later in the week when you have some time clear, you'll you'll do it then, or maybe next week, or maybe just never. Now, I think the first thing to understand here, to get into your head is that you are not suddenly going to become a whole new person as you start this project, as you start to change your life in a way where you set goals and try to plan your behaviors and get at your behaviors in order to get to your goals. You're not suddenly a perfect machine who you know has tremendous willpower and you know does not get distracted and never makes excuses for yourself and always succeeds in using your time well. That's not gonna be you. I'm sorry to disappoint you, and I know this messaging is contrary to what you often hear. And sometimes the introduction to books you'll read about, time management systems, you know, organization systems, you know, whatever, life planning systems, they can give you that impression that not only is this system good, but you are gonna become a perfect machine as you work the system, as you really learn to implement it into your life. Hey, look, I'm not knocking the idea of a system that helps you achieve things very well. And I do think it's possible for everybody to learn skills that make them much better at things. And as you learn to become more organized, you can feel more relaxed and more competent. That is terrific. But I certainly had never experienced myself, and I really think the very large majority of people, even who take on these systems and work them, I don't think those people feel like they've conquered all of their demons, that they have put away all the voices in their head that make them feel bad, and also all the habits that in fact do make them bad at being perfect, efficient time management machines. In other words, you're not going to become procrastination free because of this podcast or anything else that you listen to or read. Now, obviously, I'm not saying all this so that you can just give up hope right now, but rather so that you can realize number one, you're gonna be a big challenge to yourself. You are gonna be the barrier that gets in your way here. But also, you don't need to beat yourself up when at the end of the night you realize, oh my God, I had that time there, I had it booked and I didn't use it, or I started to do this thing and I got distracted, or I just was lazy and I know it and I didn't want to do it. Whatever. You don't need to beat yourself up. Realize, okay, that's that's me being a human. That's what I was told was gonna come. You can still make progress, and the progress you make will help you. You can get better and better, but you're always gonna get in your own way, and even with that happening, you can improve and work towards your goals. Just like in the self-compassion episode, I say, I'm not asking you to lie to yourself and tell you're the most amazing person ever in the whole world, uh and to always cut yourself slack, even if you do something wrong. I'm not asking that, but you should be fair to yourself and realize that you're not the worst person in the world either. Just because you dropped the ball this week. Okay, so how to get yourself to do things when you don't really want to do them. Well, I'm actually not gonna talk a ton about that right now because the next episode about success, which is gonna be in two episodes from now, will be called Stick with Things Beyond Enthusiasm. And that's gonna talk a lot about how to get yourself to do the work when you don't feel like doing it. You know, I as I've said way back with the what a success episode, you know, there's three steps to being successful and getting to your goals. You set goals, you figure out the behaviors to get to the goals, and then you stick with those behaviors. All right, so that next episode on the success side will be sticking with things beyond enthusiasm, but I will run through some of the basic ideas right now. So you come to the point to do the work and you either you find that you don't want to do it or else you're just not sure about how to get going on it. Here's some things. First of all, make it easy. You know, the more obstacles that are in the way, the the less likely you are to do it. You know, so if you are trying to, I don't know, work out in your house, but you have you know two kids asking you for help with something or demanding your attention, and you got you know people calling in the phone, you've got to take these calls, like this is a disaster, right? So you've got to make it easy of making the time available just for you, for you to do what you decided you have to do. You have to make it easy by making accessible to you whatever objects or items you need to do the job. You know, this task, whether it's cooking or whether it is uh exercising, you have your workout clothes, whatever it is, make things available to you. So make it as easy as possible. Next, though these are not in some particular order, you know, remind yourself why you want to do this. You know, think about your life goal or your five-year goal or the one-year goal that you're working towards, and think, I really do want that. I wrote it down for a reason. I've been thinking about that for years. This is the time for me to do it. I'm gonna work towards it now. Next, a very common piece of advice is to just do things in small pieces or only demand that you do a little bit towards it. So this works very well, especially if you have a large, complicated project. We talked about, you know, that some of these goals are, you know, finite tasks and often they don't bring a lot of motivation, and sometimes they're right, they're big and complex, they seem overwhelming. Do a little bit, just start. Say, all I've got to do is, I don't know, 10 minutes of starting to work on this project. Just I'm gonna make myself do 10 minutes of something towards the final goal. And first of all, even 10 minutes is a step forward. It's better than throwing your hands up and going to sit on the couch. But also, the truth is as we get going, we tend to do more than that minimum that we've demanded of ourselves. Now, just demand the minimum. Say, look, I'm gonna do 10 minutes of working at this, and then I get to go lie down if that's what I want to do. Okay, that's if that 10 minutes that's what you want to do, go do that. But most of the time, we will still feel good that we did that work. We said, Oh, that wasn't actually that bad. And also, 10 minutes later, you think I could do another five minutes of this, I could do another 20 minutes of this. It isn't that bad, and I do feel better, and you will feel better once you're in it. Things are almost always so much harder from the outside before you get going on them. I heard a story, I think it was in James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, where he talked about someone who wanted to start working out of the gym. And so the rule he gave himself is that he had to drive to the gym. He had to put on his clothes and drive to the gym. He didn't have to go inside and do the workout. That wasn't because if he told himself, you know, it's 5 p.m., it's time to go to the gym and work out, you know, it's just it's a big ask, you know, you're gonna get exhausted, it takes hours. So the only thing he asked of himself was, I put on my shoes and stuff, and I drive there. And I can immediately turn around and drive home. I can stop at McDonald's on the way home if that's what I want to do. But what usually happens, though, of course, is you drive to the gym and think, well, I'll go inside. And, you know, you make yourself just do these little steps, you will start to do more. So break things into pieces. Whether it's a big project, if it's a big project, you have to do that anyways, just to make any sense of it. Take it a little step at a time. But really, when it's, you know, you've got four to five minutes booked and you don't want to do a single minute of it, tell yourself I'm gonna do 10 minutes of whatever this task is. It can seem useless to spend that little amount of time. But even if that's all you get yourself to do, it's not useless. Okay, give yourself wins. Okay, this is a big topic in of itself, having to do with the psychology of you know, habit reinforcement. Charles Dohig in his book The Power of Habit, which a friend of mine gave me while I was getting ready for this uh uh this podcast episode, he talks a lot in the earlier part of the book about the habit cycle and about rewards, but also about the craving that sort of really makes us get into habits. He says you don't really have a habit until you have a craving for the reward that you think will come when you do this behavior. So, anyways, giving yourself little rewards when you do accomplish a behavior, accomplish a task that helps you towards your goals, that's a great idea. I strongly encourage it. Now, you gotta keep a couple things in mind. Number one, don't make some huge rewards. You know, you can't say to yourself, every day that I do whatever task I need to do, I'm gonna buy myself a new jacket. You know, that's gonna ruin you. Don't do rewards that are counter to what you're trying to work on. I'll say, well, if I go to the gym for an hour, and then on the way home, I'm gonna buy an ice cream. You know, that is not the working in the path that you want to work on. And realize that a sense of accomplishment, the realization that you are doing the right thing and working towards the goals that you have set is itself a reward. That feeling that you have done something well and the right thing. If you haven't done it, done it well, you didn't you can't admire your performance. The fact that you did it, that's good. And the praise you can honestly give yourself, that's a better reward than an ice cream and then a jacket you buy for yourself. And I'm not just being starry-eyed when I say that, that your sense of achievement is worth more than uh chocolate ice cream. That's just the truth. It's the truth neurologically. You will feel better, you'll be more likely to keep doing behaviors if whenever you do them, you make yourself feel good about doing them. If you can make yourself realize or feel whenever you do a behavior, wow, I am improving my abilities. I'm improving my life, I'm working towards my goals. Those thoughts and feelings will trigger a better rush, something you want to repeat in your brain more than eating an ice cream cone or buying yourself something online. A lot of people use a to-do list, and one of the fun things about a to-do list is you check off a task. And you know that that checkoff is not just, well, it's efficient. I'm trying to show what I saw to get done. It's a good feeling when you check things off. I recently started using something I call a wind jar. It's just a little glass jar that I had sitting around. I put it on my counter, and then every time I do something in a day that is in any way getting me towards my goals, I drop a little object in there. And for the object, it doesn't matter what it is. I had a box uh up on top of my bookshelf with uh like chess and checkers and Chinese checkers all in this one box set, and I never used it. I don't play those games with my kids. So I put a bunch of those pieces into another little container, and so every time I do it, I move one over to the glass jar. Just doing that makes me feel good, and just seeing the pile grow makes me feel good. I don't have some plan where when I get to the top of the jar, then I give myself some big reward. I could do that if I want to, or you could do that if you want to, but really just moving things over, just the visual of the jar getting more full makes me feel good because I know as I'm doing that, what I'm doing is getting towards the finish line of these goals that I have set for myself. One of the unfortunate things about consistent good behaviors is that they are the key to our success, but it's actually very hard while we're doing them to see how they're moving us forward. It's you know, we do we don't have a gas gauge in us to tell how much progress we've made in our piano or whatever else in our lives. So a visual, like filling up a jar, replaces what we can't see by something that we can see and encourages us to keep going. And again, do not underestimate the strength of that kind of reward for yourself. Use self-praise is too strong a word. Use the acknowledgement that you're doing the right thing to help you feel good about this task. So give yourself these wins and these rewards in whatever form that you do it in. To go back to James Clear, that writer of atomic habits, with goals, people probably talk about goals too much. And uh an achieved goal is uh like an output. It's a result you get from putting in good inputs. And people don't think enough about the inputs. But really, if you focus on the inputs, the outputs take care of themselves. A wings jar is one way to see that you're taking care of the inputs. Okay, moving forward, another piece of advice for getting you to actually do the work is to plan your behaviors for the same time each week. We're trying to create habits. It's much easier to create habits when they are routines that occur at the same time, every day or every week. It's not required if your schedule for some reason doesn't allow for that. But most of our schedules do have some regularity to it, and it will make it easier for you to create a habit, which you know, a habit is a behavior that you don't have to work against. That is a big deal here. We're not trying to do things and make ourselves constantly have to push ourselves to do them. We're trying to grease the wheels as much as possible. So when you are blocking out your weekly calendar, try to make it so it's the same time each day or the same time each week that you're doing the behaviors so much as you can. You know, I don't have fixed times when I get to record this podcast. It has to work around other things in my life. That's how it is. If we're motivated, we can still do it. But again, I'm trying to get advice on how to make things easier for you. Now, here's what not to do. Don't lie to yourself and say, well, yeah, I'm not in the mood now, but you know, I'm gonna be in the mood next time. I'm gonna do it later when I'm motivated. This is nonsense. If you wait for the times when you're motivated to do the work to get to your goals, then you're not going to get to your goals. There's a line by an artist named Chuck Close, and he says, Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. That's an idea really important for artists or writers or those kind of people to understand that they shouldn't wait for the muse to strike them. Well, we're trying to become professionals at getting ourselves to do tasks. We don't want to be amateurs at that, which means you can't wait for inspiration. That's not gonna be the solution to you changing your life. You have to say now. Now I don't feel motivated, I don't want to do it, but now I'm gonna use one of these techniques of reminding myself why I want to do it, of taking a little piece of it, of giving myself some kind of reward at the end of it. I'm gonna get myself to do something now. I'm not gonna say, well, you know, when I'm when I'm ready, that's when I'll do it. Forget that. So here's a bunch of ideas. And again, I'm gonna talk about them more in a couple of episodes when I do stick with things beyond enthusiasm. Do know whatever ideas you get from me or from motivational books or anywhere else, it is up to you. No one can make you do it. Even if I could make you do it, I wouldn't want to. I'm trying to be in control of you. You have to pull yourself together and do some of this work. If it feels overwhelming, guess what? That's how it is to just about all of us. Make yourself do a little bit and get after it. Okay, now, next thing. The review is very important. What I mean is reviewing how you're doing with your behaviors, are you doing them or not? This is an idea that Dave Allen from Getting Things Done really emphasizes. You've got to says you've got to write down everything that you need to get done in your life. But not only that, you have to review that list regularly or else it all falls apart. This is a little different, but this is the exact same idea that you need to be reviewing how you're doing. Are you getting yourself somewhere? So at the end of each day, it's good to think, well, did I did I do the behaviors that I wanted to do? Did I step towards my goals today or did I not? And certainly at the end of the week, remember, each week you can be looking at a calendar and blocking out time in your week to try to set up time for you to work towards your goals. So, sort of before you create next week's calendar, you can do the review of the previous week and think, well, how did that go? You can look at the calendar. Say, did I use that time for the goals or did I not use the time for those goals? And look, it is very easy for this to become a time of self-abuse. And that was the case for me for a long time. After I started this program of writing out my goals regularly and trying to set my time so I can work towards those goals. My review times, whether they would be sort of a sit-down time or just in my head, I'd do it, it'd be purely opportunities to tell myself how little I was doing, how I was not doing enough. And it was so easy to do that because I was setting up way too much for myself. You know, I was trying, I was setting up 27 hours of work to do every day. And so guess what? I wouldn't get it all done. And here's a chance to criticize myself. As I'll talk more about and blame the process, we don't want to do that. It makes us unhappy and it does not make us more successful. So do the review process, but make it much more an opportunity to give yourself wins. You know, if you wanted to do 10 things today, or you wanted to do 15 things this week, and you only did four things, gave yourself some wins, some rewards for those four things, or tell yourself, good, it's four steps towards my goals that I wouldn't have done if I hadn't planned it at all. And can you do more than four? Yes, probably you can. But you are more likely to get yourself next week to do five or six things if you say, good job on the four, let's do more this coming week. And this idea of giving yourself encouragement to improve behaviors is probably most important for those behaviors that we have stopped altogether. And you already have those in your life and you're gonna have them again. Well, we get going on something, and maybe we stop after a week, or maybe you do for like a year or two, and then for some reason we stop doing it and we look back with regret. Well, start again. I know you want to make it more complicated than that, and you certainly want to punish yourself more than just saying, well, I guess I'll get going again. You know, you really, I know, you want to dig into yourself for being a quitter, and you could think, well, where would I be right now? If I hadn't quit, then I'd be at this point with that ability, or I'd, you know, I'd make this kind of an income. Why did I do it? Whatever. Don't go on like that. Restart the behavior. Restart and make yourself do it consistently. That's the best solution there. You know, once I asked a surgeon I worked with at the hospital, asking about surgery complications, why sometimes it seems we see so many. And he said, you know, we're not working on perfect machines, which could seem a little self-serving, but it's true, you know, the human body, especially from people who are quite sick and people who've been around for decades, it's not a perfect machine. And the same goes for you and for me. We're not perfect machines when it comes to always doing the right behavior at the right time. And I know that I'm repeating myself here, and it's already a long episode. But I really want you to get it out of your head that it's your job to now expect perfection of yourself because you've heard this podcast or because you have read books about organization. You're not a perfect machine, you're never going to be a perfect machine. Release yourself. From that pressure, do the best you can, review how you've done so that you can make improvements. As always, I'm not trying to get you to always speak to yourself in glowing terms. I just want you to be fair to yourself. And it's just so easy for us, it's natural almost to be unfair to ourselves. But really, the review is important and it's not there so you could just yell at yourself or tell yourself how much you suck. It's there to say, How am I doing? Do I need to adjust how much I'm able to do this work? Am I am I dropping the ball? Are there certain behaviors in particular I'm not trying to do? And it's a chance to praise yourself for the efforts you have made. Okay, let's see if we can wrap up this never-ending episode. Is it possible? Is there a finish line? In a way, it'd be nice if these were just ten minutes long. Just uh quick piece of advice, you know? You know, and I I think when I was getting into this podcast and just starting to like approach actually recording the episodes, I thought it it may be that very few people ever listen to it. And that's okay. And it also may be that people might come along and listen to exactly one episode and then move on and never come back. And that's okay too. But if that is the case, I would like it to be that something I say actually helps them. That I I try to give as much as I can in that episode to positively affect their life. And maybe that motivation makes me go on too long, but that's how it is. Alright, as always, let's wrap up with the mantra that I introduced in the very first episode. Mantra goes. You matter, this work matters, you can do this work. You do matter even if you feel like you have failed so many times in setting goals or in achieving the goals you set for yourself. Believe me, you matter. You have value right now. The work matters. You getting to your goals, you doing the things that'll make you happier and achieve your potential, that matters. And so working your behaviors to get to those goals and finding the time to do that, that matters, and you can do it. You know, however frustrating it feels, however many times you have not succeeded in the past, however busy you are, you can find ways, you can find time, you can put in the effort to get yourself to your goals. You can do that. Okay, that's it. Thanks for sticking with it so long. See you next time. All right, this has been the How to Be Happy and Successful Podcast. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. So if you're interested in reading an article that goes with this uh podcast episode, you can go to the website. Website is www.happy-and-successful.com. So it's happyandsuccessful.com. There's types in between the words. You can read articles there. You can also sign up for the mailing list there. So when I put out new content, you will get an email saying, hey, there's new content. Go listen or go read. I also offered coaching. So if you'd like some help being happy or being successful, or both, you think my ideas are good, reach out to me to the website. If you like the episode, please go write a nice review about it wherever you listen to it. And if you didn't like it, or you just keep that to yourself. And if you really like the episode and the podcast in general, feel free to go to the Patreon page and become a supporter. That'd be awesome. If you have any questions or comments or complaints, go to the website and uh send me an email. I will do my best to respond, though. Okay, I think that's it. Until next time.