I struggle with motivation a lot.
Trust me, I've tried everything from time blocking to Pomodoro GTD method to 2 minute rule.
And none of them worked for me.
There is always something I know I got to do it, but I don't.
I wait for the motivation to kick in, but it never comes when I need it.
And suddenly around 2am, in the middle of night, I would get super hyped up about something and promise myself that I would change this time, only to find myself in the same position three days after.
What's worse is that the more I repeat this cycle, the more I doubt myself and feel awful.
I used to say you don't need motivation, only thing you need is discipline.
But I disagree now, because completely relying on discipline is not sustainable in the long run and it causes burnout.
So how can we get things done without relying on motivation, neither on discipline?
I read dozens of books, watched hundreds hours of content and, with trial and error, I found the solution.
Today I'm going to introduce you the system I use to get things done and work without relying on motivation.
So the major mistake we all do is not understanding the underlying reason why we struggle with motivation and procrastinate.
Without understanding what is causing it.
It's almost like going to a doctor getting a medication without getting a diagnosis.
Imagine you're actually like an Alzheimer, but get a medication for like diabetes.
It doesn't make sense.
Rather than like trying every single productivity tip you see online, it's much better to first understand the reason and try to solve that issue, so that you spend less time trying to figure out what works for you.
So there are a bunch of reasons why you might be struggling with motivation, and even the same person can struggle with different reasons depending on the season of their life.
So today i decided to talk about the most common ones, which are lack of clarity, feeling overwhelmed, feeling unfulfilled, burnout and also lack of system.
If you're interested in other reasons and how to solve them, I will have videos coming.
So stay tuned.
So most of us, I think including myself, really struggle with clarity because we are taught especially for interproductivity.
We are taught that the more you get done, the better it is.
But one thing I learned after talking with other entrepreneurs is that most successful people actually only focus on handful of things and they just eliminate everything.
But to do so, we first need to be super clear on what to focus and what to eliminate.
The first step we're going to do is actually dumping everything we have in our mind.
I usually like to either use Notion or use my iPad for doing a brain dump.
By beginning our day doing a brain dump, they eliminate the feeling of overwhelm.
Notifications popping in and so many things that are distracting us.
And all these things are inputs in our brain.
So subconsciously, actually, we're getting like overwhelmed every single day.
And that's completely normal.
When you do this, even for once, you're going to see the immediate results of like getting clarity and feeling in peace.
So whether you decided 5, 10 or 15 minutes, the important thing is that you basically set yourself a deadline.
The reason why we set a timer is because of the Parkinson's law.
Basically, if you would give a task an hour, it's going to take an hour.
So if we're going to give a five minutes, it's going to take five minutes.
So step two is filter.
Go through your brain dump and write down 10 things you need to get done that day.
Now what we need to do is prioritizing them.
So I'm actually terrible at prioritizing.
When I have 10 tasks in front of me, I look at them and I'm like, okay, which one should I do first?
Which one should I do next?
And then I get overwhelmed and I do nothing.
So if you don't want to be like me, what I recommend is using the Eisenhower matrix.
It basically divides the tasks into four different categories based on their importance and also their urgency.
So the quadrant one is the important and urgent tasks.
These are the tasks that requires your immediate attention.
Let's say the kitchen is floating or your toilet is broken like happened to me two weeks ago.
We want to ideally get these done first, so that we won't get stressed over them and we will also not face these consequences.
Next up, we have the Q2 tasks.
These are the important but not urgent tasks.
Oftentimes because they don't have a deadline.
We always say that we're going to start someday and then that someday never comes.
I always did that.
A couple of years ago, I would always tell myself that I'm going to start working out tomorrow.
And that tomorrow never came.
So one day I said, okay, I should actually schedule a time in my calendar.
If you don't make actively time for your Q2 tasks, you will never have time for them.
Once I started to actually commit to working out, I got actually quite jacked in like two years.
Not really sure whether you can see my muscles, but I'm like pretty healthy and doing pretty well.
Let's see whether you can see them.
Maybe not that much.
But yeah, I will include some pictures.
Don't worry about it.
Okay, and then we also have the Q3 tasks.
These are the urgent ones, but not important.
For example, like work emails that you don't care about.
So we're going to always do the Q1 first schedule time for the Q2 batch Q3, and try to eliminate Q4.
Once you create this list of 10 different tasks, make sure that there's at least one task in Q2.
If they're nothing in Q2, that is a very big red flag.
I would go through my list once again and find one in Q2.
Now, step three is going to be picking your focus of the day.
This is going to be something that is going to get closer to your long-term goals.
Whether that's working out, whether that's working on your business, maybe taking online courses, maybe spending more time with your family or, let's say, going to a therapy, something like that.
This focus of the day should be something that is going to make you more fulfilled and happy in the long term.
All or nothing attitude.
Like me, starting from, i think, 20 minutes is a really good spot, because if you do something 20 minutes every single day, you actually see significant amount of results, and also, if you have more time, you can spend more time on it.
The important thing is that every single day, you pick a focus of the day and do something for your future self, and saying no to all the deadlines, all the distractions, all the obligations that you have, and making time for yourself.
Whenever I don't make actively time for the things that I care and gives me fulfillment, I really start to question the meaning of life and life starts to feel really pointless and everything becomes boring and that really demotivates me and I start to procrastinate.
When picking your focus of the day.
You can use a notion template like mine, or you can use this app widget where you can type a note and put it on the screen of your phone so that whenever you unlock your phone, you see it.
It's important that you write this in somewhere else that you can easily see it.
Speaking of Notion, they've recently launched an amazing feature called Q&A.
This feature provides instant answers to your questions using information from across your workspace.
It's like having your own executive assistant that you can bug 24-7 with questions.
Let's say you had a meeting with your team, but can't remember the task you need to handle.
No worries.
You can ask the Q&A.
Or let's say you're using Notion for school and you want to find a specific class note.
You can ask Q&A.
The difference between QA and traditional AI chatbots is QA understands your business, previous decisions and meeting notes to provide accurate and relevant answers.
It only uses the internal knowledge within your Notion workspace, making it far more personalized than other AI models trained on publicly available information.
It saves so much time and reduces repetitive questions.
Whether you're trying to find company policies or trying to check a project status.
Instead of messaging your coworker or your friend to find the answer you need, you can simply ask QA.
It will also give you the link to the relevant Notion page so that you can dive deeper if you need it to.
If you're already a Notion AI user, you can get started today with QA already in your Notion workspace.
You can get started with Notion AI for only $10 a month.
If you're interested trying out, join the waitlist to get early access.
I have my link in the description below.
At this point, we should have 10 tasks in our list and one focus of the day.
So now, out of these 10 tasks, we're going to eliminate five of them.
Yes, you heard it right we're going to eliminate five of them.
One thing that i learned over time is that, even though sometimes i think i have to get this done today or i'm going to die, i do it the next day or maybe the day after, and it's actually not end of the world.
In the beginning, you might not be able to eliminate if you have been procrastinating for a while and things piled up, but make sure that it's absolutely must.
If you can't eliminate, One thing that you can do is that only to get them done once you accomplish your top five and also your daily highlight.
Once you have finished these, then you can work on the remaining tasks.
If you skip your daily highlight and keep focusing on urgent tasks, you will get burned out and you will find yourself in the same position.
So it's actually a non-negotiable for this method to work.
I think most of the productivity methods just doesn't have the step and this is the most important step, in my opinion at least, like for me at the end of the each day.
I sometimes forget it, I'm not gonna lie, but at the end of each day, ideally I'm supposed to do it and you're supposed to do it is go through your task list and look at how many of them you got done.
So the top three and daily focus is a non-negotiable.
If you get done your top three tasks and your daily focus, you're going to give yourself a tick.
And if you couldn't get done your top three tasks?
You know your daily focus.
These are just like a set.
Then you give yourself a one cross.
And the important thing is tracking this in a visible position.
Whether that's a Notion template that you have and where you track it, or whether it's a whiteboard, or whether it's a sticky widget or whether it's your like Apple Notes, doesn't matter.
It should be in a place where you see it all the time, so that you subconsciously make it sure and make it important that this actually matters for you, because one actually really important thing i learned is that out of sight, out of mind, is so true.
If i'm not seeing it visually, you know on a whiteboard, then i forget about it.
I never do it.
So make sure that every single day you track it, and i think actually doing this on a whiteboard kind of like becomes a game, and being able to see that first thing in the morning really motivates me actually.
Sometimes things don't go well.
I mean, 90% of the time things don't go well, to be honest.
But one important thing is that we never skip two days in a row.
I mean, if something extreme happens, obviously you have all the rights to rest.
But I'm not talking about that, and you know that.
Once we have marked our day, the last important step is writing down in one sentence what went well and what could have been better.
This is going to be the action point for tomorrow.
And by looking at this, we're going to try to prevent the same mistake happening.
Maybe that day you forgot to turn off your notifications and you got a call from your friend and you ended up chatting for three hours, which I did last week.
So it was actually my feedback for a couple of days ago to the next day.
You know, just put your phone and do not disturb mode.
Depending on your life, the reason why you're struggling is going to be different.
So we can't act like there's going to be a one magical method that is going to like cure it.
Like, oh, GTD method, cure everything that all the problems you have in your life.
Like it doesn't work like that.
I don't know.
At least it doesn't work like that for me.
So by reflecting every single day of like, what went well maybe you went to a cafe and you were like, really able to focus, so do that next day again the same thing, by repeating the things that went well and by eliminating the things that maybe didn't go that well, We give ourselves every single day a chance to improve.
So kaizen, kaizen suru.
By doing this, you start to rely on motivation and discipline less and less and less.
And because we gamify this and we also try to understand our emotions and behaviors, it gives a very high awareness of your actions.
It actually made me realize that I'm a human and I'm not a robot.
Depending on you, know the things that is happening around me, sometimes my motivation and my drive like flows.
I learned that and the important thing is, rather than pushing yourself all the time and telling yourself like oh, you're a loser, rather than doing that, understand your situation, adapting to it and knowing what to do in those scenarios is going to help you more in the long run.
If you like this video and found it helpful, I'm currently working on creating a free community where I can connect to like-minded people and also add a master guide, maybe a mini course, maybe a PDF.
Who knows about time management?
For different reasons?
Today, we mainly covered overwhelm, burnout, lack of clarity, and lack of fulfillment.
In upcoming videos, I'm thinking about covering other areas.
So if you're interested, let me know in the comments and see you
