The problem

Even a pleasant work sometimes requires boring or painful tasks that can engender procrastination and failure.

Goal

Surrounding yourself with resilience enhancers and productivity guardians.

Potential

Necessary but uninteresting tasks can discourage you, giving rise to big loss of time. Sometimes, a simple boring task can delay or kill the full project.

4 powerful steps to be super resilient

Definitions

Resilience is the ability of something to return to its original shape after it has been pulled, stretched, pressed, bent, etc.

1.      Gamification

Gamification is game mechanisms and designs applied to business purpose and professional goals. To increase involvement and motivation with gamification:

– Use your daily goals as challenges and achievements
– Set rules (time pressure, scoreboards…)
– Clear progression (use %, scales, steps, points…)
– Create a competitive environment if you are a competitive person (challenge a coworker), or write your score and challenge yourself to do better the next day
– Add some randomness and craziness (ask to a friend to call you at random time and give you a random challenges)
– Reward yourself: Create status reward that you collect
– Share your achievement to get social admiration, collect
screenshots or picture of your results

2. Social Emulsion

Wherever you are introvert or extrovert, social pressure and social boosts can drastically enhance your energy levels. Here are a few strategies to take benefit of that power.

Work with a mate who has the same goal, so you feel guilty if he goes faster than you. He will keep you on track in the hardest moments. Also, a mentor or a master can direct and drive you. Set regular meetings or messages to share results and speak about problems you are facing; goals you are trying to reach. Where to meet a mate or mentor? You can find them on forums or groups and contact them directly, explaining your project and motivations. You can also find some mates or mentors in events relative to your subject. For example, if you are a software developer, you can try to participate in Hackathons.

3. Rewards & Punishments

In this approach, if you don’t reach your goal, you are punished, if you do, you are rewarded. Basically, you can choose any kind of punishment or reward you will present to yourself for you can solicit someone to… BeeMinder is a website where you can bet money that you will achieve your goal. You put money on it, and if you succeed the platform gives you back your money. However, if you don’t, the platform keeps the money. You can bet as much money as you can to accomplish your goals. The aim is to fight procrastination with the fear of losing, or to boost productivity with an external reward (money here).

4. Identity Pacts

This concept was popularized by Nir Eyal. Rather than doing only actions or habits, it will give you more long-term solid results if you associate those actions to an identity. For example, a Muslim that doesn’t eat pork doesn’t eat pork, even if it’s a birthday, or if he feels bad or if all his friends are. Because it’s part of his identity, there is no space for being trapped in “just one time” thinking.
What identity are you trying to achieve behind the habits you try to stick to? Who do you want to become? For example, if you are reading every day, you can identify yourself as a learning and growing person, and what this kind of person do is learning, no matters how chaotic their days are, because they unshakably rooted learning to their core identity.

5. Mental Hacks to kill procrastination

We all procrastinate times to times. Here are a few hacks you can use to get you started:

– If you are distracted by your enviromnent, check our digital cure course so you can live at your full potential
– The 2 minutes rule: If a task requires less than two minutes, there is no point of wasting 2 hours to think about it. If the task takes more than 2 minutes, how can you break it down, so you focus only on the start of it, and it feels less intimidating?
– Day of procrastination: Rather than procrastinate individually on each task, you can put them all in the same basket, a procrastination list. Once this list is big enough, taking half a day or a day to do all of them in once. That way you save a lot of energy and relieved the pressure.