Motivational Management

Managing mood for greatest productivity

Most of your emotions will not come as the result of your immediate choices, but on a much longer arc of your long term decisions, so what you can do about them in the moment will be limited to mitigation, not outright control.

Part of maximizing your output is changing your tack depending on your mood. Managing your moods is like shifting a vehicle with a manual transmission to maximize miles per gallon of fuel as you navigate hills in several ways. When your mood is good, you’ll want to increase your pace. When your mood is poor, downshift as necessary to grit through as much as you can.

The challenge of increasing your pace when your mood is good

Increasing your pace when your mood is good will run counter to your natural desire, which will be to try to persist in good feelings.

The best time to begin a very difficult task is as you complete or are making good progress on another task. Perhaps surprisingly, this is also the hardest time to begin a difficult task. Your positive momentum will be held back by the fact that you will subconsciously avoid tasks where you anticipate challenges, preferring to hold onto good feelings rather than risk them on something that might cause them to end. You will be surprised how inclined you are to slow down, suspend rational regulation of your behavior, or otherwise deviate from your intentional path when you feel good.¹

While it might seem that this approach robs you of the enjoyment of your accomplishments, the truth is quite different. By default, people try to maximize how they feel here and now. The problem is that focusing on how you feel right now is the worst way to feel best long term. Don’t succumb to the temptation to rest in the good feelings of getting something done. The emotional high you are on will not last forever. When it goes, you will feel much better if you spent the good times doing more good things. When you aren’t progressing, you will slip into mental states where focus, hard work, and progress are all significantly hampered.

Instead of focusing on what feels good right now, focus on doing what is best all the time. Long-term positive feelings always result in greater duration of positive feelings by definition. Sacrifice present good moods to present achievement in order to win future good moods that exist independent of future achievement. Act so as to maximize your future feelings by choosing to do the best you know right now rather than trying to feel as good as you can right now.

The more you achieve when you feel good, the less frequently and intensely you will feel bad. The average long term joy and meaning you feel will increase geometrically when you use achievements to impart momentum to subsequent tasks. Every step you take towards living productively will impart momentum to your process; every win will make you more capable of the next. The more you chain together, the much more intense and enduring the good feelings will be. Operating at a fast pace during a good mood builds your momentum, making it easier to continue to be productive as you hit obstructions. Like an object rolling down a hill, the larger it is and faster it’s rolling, the less the obstacle will matter. Overwhelm, hopelessness, anxiety, depression, and every other negative emotional state are easier to avoid when you have made or are making obvious progress in your purpose.

Use positive feelings from completing a task to impart momentum into the very next task. The best way to make the most progress on tasks is to leverage the momentum that comes from completing tasks to start, continue, and finish other tasks. If you need to take a break, wait until after you get the next task started, and try to go as long as you can before doing so.

The rest of this chapter will focus on techniques you can use to be as productive as possible in spite of a poor mood.

Tether feel-good activities to productive work

The problem with most things that make us feel good right now is that they tend to cause you to either do less or worse than you would without them. But there are many things you can do that will feel good right now, and some of them can be used to increase your productivity in achieving what provides enduring and residual good feelings by advancing your purpose.

Do not seek lasting meaning by pretending that something that feels good right now has enduring value if it doesn’t. Use things that feel good right now to supercharge the advancement of your purpose, not to detract from it.

For example, use something that feels good right now as short-term synthetic rewards for long-term efforts. Use assigned rewards to impart motivation to lackluster, long-term, or laborious tasks. Use the things you find enjoyable to motivate the things you do not. This will compound the positive reward with the satisfaction of doing what you need to do combined with the pleasure of doing what you want to do. It will also condition you to associate work with pleasure.

You are the master of your own life, and you have the power to arbitrarily link any reward to any task. For example, if you like snacks, have them right before a weight-lifting session. Doing so will not just help you gain motivation to work out; the easy-to-digest calories will increase your workout performance, and the exercise will metabolize it before it has a chance to turn into fat. If you like coffee, reserve it as a reward to co-occur with work, rather than something to precede it.

If you enjoy a leisure activity, tell yourself that you get to play for 15 minutes if you finish a key task. If you like scrolling the internet, do so as a reward you can look forward to after a stated increment of measured progress—more often than not, once you achieve the progress, you will feel better about that than the internet, and will just keep working.

If you are struggling to pay attention to something that bores you, like reading a required report, interleave the activity with reading something you find enjoyable using some ratio that favors the task you need to do. If you need to crunch through some intense calculations, and you love books, make a deal with yourself that you’ll read for 5 minutes out of every hour until the task is done, and you’ll be shocked at how much more enjoyable the task becomes. Use music when it makes your work more productive and enjoyable—such as blasting upbeat music during backbreaking work, but not when it makes it more enjoyable at the cost of slowed production—such as some music does when you really need to think deeply about complicated information.

For even greater benefits, use something less important from your to do list that is more enjoyable or less difficult than what you are doing as your short-term reward. For example, “reward” yourself for preparing for a tough presentation by answering an email from your spouse.

Create an alter ego

Those of us with stern parents, micromanaging supervisors, or military experience know what it is like to have a person who will instantly make you regret any attempt to cut corners or do anything but what we ought. That kind of motivation is powerful, but it requires the continued presence of the instigator.

We can replicate many of the benefits of such a person without any need for anyone else.² Each of us has the ability to engineer the most stringent supervisor in our own minds. Fans of David Goggins have heard him tell countless stories of how his alter ego “Goggins” prods him any time he does less than his best. It doesn’t matter that David Goggins’ best is considered superhuman to many others—David knows he can do it, and Goggins won’t let him stop until he fulfills his own potential.

You create your own alter ego as you write and revise the life plan described in this book. This person represents the ideal you, and because you’ve done the work to describe him or her, from their character qualities down to what they do, when, and why, you know this person better than you do anyone else. You know exactly what they would do at any time and in any place. You should consult your mental model of this person at all times and in all places. Your life plan gives you a map that you can consult at any time in place of doing, thinking, or feeling what the old you would. Defer to the map in all times of conflict between the two.

Hold yourself accountable to what you say is important, and take responsibility for aligning with what you say you will do. Your alter ego can assist to fight off the natural laziness that we all have. We will automatically start looking for the exit and making excuses when things get unpleasant, but we can be trained to be better.

Whenever you stray from your best capabilities, your alter ego should instantly get on your case and criticize you incessantly. After all, you are the one who made the plan, and that obligates you to live up to it more than anyone else’s expectations ever could.

Every athlete or warrior has faced countless situations where they must mentally and emotionally warm up for a task. There is a reason that motivational speeches are given by good leaders before difficult tasks. A minute of motivation prior to starting a task can yield massive increases in productivity. You don’t need to wait for someone else to pump you up. Use your alter ego!

Ask why you are doing it, and ask yourself whether you really care. Tell yourself things like: “If ____ really matters to me, then I need to _____ right now.”

If you are short on motivational material, use the modern tools at your disposal to gather the best from others. Keep a list of specific short talks, quotes, or videos that motivate you.

Don’t just accomplish your tasks—vanquish them

When you are completing a difficult task, one of the best things you can do for your long-term motivation and confidence is to voluntarily go beyond what is required. If you want to reverse your tendency to abandon what you said you would do when it gets harder than you expected, make it harder when you are tempted to quit.

As crazy as it sounds to suggest that difficult situations should be made harder, you will find that there is no greater payback than the little extra effort that can be imparted at the end of an already gargantuan task. There is great power in laughing in the face of exhaustion. Going beyond the previously establishing ending point by adding finishing touches, enduring the effort a little longer, or jumping right into the very next task instead of taking a break can do wonders for your confidence that you can do hard things well—and you can.

Train yourself by giving yourself evidence that you don’t take shortcuts. When you are tempted to quit early, work extra time. When you are tempted to violate your character qualities, double down in whatever the positive attribute is.

Character is contagious. As you stretch toward your best, you will catalyze improvement in others. Most of us have experienced how one person’s complaints among a group of people suffering the same affliction disproportionately brings everyone down. Fewer people have seen just what one person’s stretching towards excellence can do for the rest. Crack a joke amidst a particularly terrible trial, especially if it is abundantly obvious that you are carrying the heaviest load in your group. Suggest to your group that you make the task even harder, especially if no one else will see or care—make it a symbol of internal pride. See who wants to stay on a little longer, who wants to go on a little further, who wants to go a little faster. Watch what happens when you invert the situation from being the victim to making it yours.

Not only do your moments of exemplary performance help everyone who sees them, each will help you be better than you would otherwise be by providing evidence that you are better than you thought. Your own high water marks provide you with evidence of greater capability, and each one of them is like a deposit into an interest bearing account that can be drawn upon in your times of need.

Don’t just get tasks done; dominate them; vanquish them.

To kickstart actions you aren’t excited about, get your body into the action

Your mind can easily generate significant barriers to what your heart is not excited to do. You can effortlessly avoid nearly anything through the sophisticated power of your brain to justify after the fact what you decided from a purely emotional position.

You can reverse the polarity of your brainpower from procrastination to productivity by tricking your body to get moving into a task without initially inviting your brain. Though this technique sounds strange, it’s no different from how you get duped into many time-wasting or downright harmful things: you get your body physically involved in something before you give your mind the chance to consider it, preventing it from throwing up barriers until momentum makes it difficult to stop.

In order to get the greatest impact out of your limited time, you need to cultivate the ability to get started on demand. The best way to get into an important task is to turn off your brain and get your body as close as possible to the action.

For example, get your body into the room you need to be in to do the appointed task. Trick yourself by only agreeing to go into the room. Once you are there, it will be an order of magnitude easier to do whatever comes next. If you need to do something on the computer, simply turning it on and opening the relevant program will take you most of the way.

In a similar vein, you can use physical context switches such as locations, movements, or even clothing to subconsciously enter into the mental state you need to be in to accomplish a task at hand. These physical routines help make the tasks associated with them more automatic. For example, maybe you do all your writing at one particular desk, you only answer emails from your phone, and you always have meetings in a conference room. Abstaining from work while in your bed at home will help you get more sleep, having a particular place where you watch TV will make it less likely that you watch when you have better things to do, and so on.

Your physical disposition has a significant impact on your productivity. Research shows that the slight boost of positive brain chemicals from a short round of physical movement significantly increases cognitive performance. Try it next time you have an important meeting, a test, or you are simply feeling tired.

Variations on this technique abound. Use it generously.

Transfer all negative emotion into traction in the task at hand

A significant slice of the negative emotion experienced by a typical person pertains to situations that have nothing to do with what lies at hand. Typically, stress and anxiety exert drag on your productivity like a parachute on a runner. But stress and anxiety can be beneficial at certain times and in limited quantities. One benefit is that it can help you achieve laser-like focus and promote your task to the existential level. A surprising number of people have never experienced this kind of focus, and are unaware of the kind of productivity it enables.

Another potentially helpful but potentially negative emotion is urgency. Urgency is never created—only recognized. Our time is always limited, and whether we realize it or not, there are tremendous outcomes hanging on how effectively we use it.

The ideal place to position your perspective is on the knife edge between the belief that you have enough time to do everything that matters, and that every second you waste significantly reduces what you care about most. You have enough time to do everything that matters, but not one moment extra.

Deadlines are priorities expressed on a calendar. They help generate urgency. By setting them, you recognize the urgency of getting your tasks completed, and you will activate certain mental mechanisms that help you get started faster, work harder, and finish earlier. Deadlines become particularly powerful tools when combined with backwards planning to break the deadline of a large task into earlier deadlines for its prerequisite components. Breaking up a task over time with deadlines at each step propagates the urgency of the task into each day in place of the complacency and procrastination that generally occurs when you perceive that you have plenty of time remaining to complete a task.

Procrastination from poor alignment with purpose

Normal people procrastinate far more than they realize, wasting amazing amounts of time that could be spent working towards what they believe is more important. They avoid decisions as much as they can, delay decisions as long as they can, and put off actions as long as they can.

If you want to test how much time you waste, get a stopwatch and compare the time you claim you are working on something to your actual time on task. It can easily be a 10:1 ratio! Imagine how much more you would accomplish if you had ten times as much time. This is exactly what you stand to gain if you stop procrastinating.

Why do most people find it so difficult to immediately undertake the tasks that they truly believe are most important? It isn’t as if they are being forced by someone else to do what they are delaying. It is their own choice.

Procrastination is not the problem, but just a symptom of the actual issue. What is the problem? A person who procrastinates prioritizes the emotions of the moment in themselves or others over what they rationally believe is more valuable. A rational person will immediately begin what is most valuable and will diligently continue in the same while it remains the highest priority, even if it doesn’t immediately make them feel better than any option. Your life plan will help you be more rational through helping you determine the value of each task you need to accomplish.

Procrastination can stem from misalignment between action and purpose. Too often, we attempt to remedy procrastination through action, but only end up wasting time because the action we choose has no connection to our purpose. This kind of procrastination can’t be cured through action, but through thinking. If you feel like you do not want to do the task you know you need to, ask yourself why you need to do it. Your life plan provides an explicit connection between the tasks you execute, the goals they support, and the purpose they feed.

Efficient people aren’t motivated by what they have to do, but seek what they get to do. They actively look for beneficial changes they can make and immediately jump into what they need to do to make them. They seek to maximize the value of the time they spend, because they understand that will maximize how they feel long-term, and they are willing to sacrifice how they feel in the moment to that end.

At any time, you should be able to provide an exact answer to why you are doing what you are doing, and a defense for why what you’re doing is the best way to do it. Any time you are dragging in your task at hand, ask yourself why you are doing it, and remind yourself of the purpose.

Visualize micro-goals for each task you undertake, explicitly partitioning off the task and the reward mentally before beginning it. Think in terms of the expected reward, not the action.

Asking why has important effects even outside the context of a life plan. Consistent, intentional, sensible actions will yield surprisingly positive results, both in terms of what you accomplish and in terms of how you do it.

Procrastination from a lack of planning

The more clear and detailed your plan, the more likely you will do it. The easiest way to fight procrastination is to respond to it by initiating planning. If something seems too big to plausibly see from start to finish, you have not planned through it enough. When you have effectively created a plan, the barrier of entry into the first task drops down to next to nothing.

The more detailed the task, the more psychological leverage you will have in completing it. Every degree of uncertainty or lack of detail in a task will increase the emotional energy required to start and continue the task. The more details you have fleshed out, the easier it will be to feel as if progress is being made as you work.

So much procrastination and failure comes from people making the decision in the moment of action. There is no reason to wait until the moment of action to make the decision of how you will act. The act of planning is pre-executing the decision. All that remains is the action.

A specific list of explicit tasks will make it very clear what remains to be done. If you can’t say what the next few steps are in high detail, you haven’t thought about it enough.

Procrastination from lack of decomposition

No obstacle is insurmountable if it can be decomposed into small enough pieces. If you want to instantly be capable of moving any task forward, no matter how difficult it may be or how long it may take, all you need to do is figure out how to chop it down into bite-sized parts.

If you are struggling to get started, take the smallest possible action. It’s very hard to get up and run a marathon, but it is easy to get up and tie your shoes. By making the first step as small as it needs to be in order to be easy, you will remove all anxiety to attack it.

By discretizing the rest of the task, you will find all the motivation you need to do the work—the plausibility of the portions will be the evidence you need to believe the expected reward is both possible and worthwhile.

Procrastinate productively

Even if you are stuck in procrastination, you can trick yourself into making progress through leaning on your to-do list. Instead of burning time on something other than what matters to you, procrastinate by working on something else from your to do list. If you procrastinate by starting other projects you really aren’t looking forward to, you can sneakily impart momentum to them so that they are even easier to continue once you get to them.

You can use this same trick to make your breaks much more effective. Use break times to forward other goals. Take a break from one task by doing something further down your priority list. For example, read a book from a prioritized list of books you want to read. To be prepared to best use these times, keep a list of things you would like to do or learn about.

Use time blocks

Uncertainty is a prime driver for procrastination. If you aren’t sure how to further decompose the task at hand, you can create a surrogate by using time blocks. Commit that you will work for some prespecified time without taking a break

By choosing a time limit for how long you will work on the task in the present sitting, you will bring the task into finite bounds and reduce the psychological blocks associated with interminable activities.

By sticking to the task for the chosen time, you will generate many of the same positive feelings and momentum that you would find in actually completing the task, which will further assist you in doing that later.

Use context switches to your advantage

Every change you make to what you are focused on costs mental energy. A day spent switching back and forth from one context to another will absolutely drain your productivity compared to what you can achieve when focused deeply on just one thing at a time. Every time you switch tasks, you bring along a residual drain from everything you’ve focused on before, which will continue to reduce your available output for subsequent tasks. The only way to thoroughly purge these attention residues seems to be through a good night’s sleep. The overhead from prior tasks that increases throughout the day is yet another reason to prioritize each day’s tasks by highest priority.

Context switches can also assist you. When your momentum is dipping below threshold, you can leverage an intentional context switch to make faster progress on another task. Though switching to another task obviously stalls your progress on the first, wise use of intentional context switching will yield much higher productivity than dogmatically insisting on executing only one task until it is complete.

As your resources dwindle each day, backfill all remaining energy with the highest impact tasks for which you have sufficient resources

Picture the resources you have in a given day as being reset each morning. Every single thing you do, no matter how big or small, will reduce the day’s remaining resources.

Learn to queue up low-priority tasks that you can save for situations where you are short on time, energy, or other resources. In such states, it is very difficult to think clearly enough to enumerate such items on the spot. Potential entries can include errand calls where you know you will be placed on hold, catching up with old friends or slightly distant family members, performing outside chores, or catching up on the news. If you have more time but just as little energy, reading a book might be better use of your time.

Choose and arrange your space

Your environment matters. While most people understand that their environment has an effect on their output and will notice certain overtly distracting sights, sounds, or smells, they do not realize the import of things they may not even explicitly notice.

For instance, research has shown significant output increases in rooms with a temperature of about 70 degrees compared to rooms that are hotter or cooler, and the differences seem to increase with how much creative problem-solving the task requires.

Designers will tell you that the colors in your environment matter; natural tones boost focus and efficiency, and warm colors boost creativity. Order in your environment reduces emotional friction and distraction from the task at hand. Measured beauty in a space increases courage by boosting the emotional reserves to tackle the task at hand.

Pay attention to your environment. Spend time researching what changes you can make so that your environment boosts rather than detracts from your productivity.

Prepare your tools

Achieving peak performance requires preparing the necessary tools. The right environment will enable you to achieve better things in less time than otherwise. Abraham Lincoln is credited as having said: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Correctly attributed or not, the wisdom of this quote has endured longer than the familiarity with the subject matter. You may never cut down a tree with an axe, but if you did, you would readily recognize that attempting to do so with a blunt axe will not just take you many times longer than it would to first sharpen the axe, but will also be even more brutally unforgiving to your body than the already arduous task.

Our modern tools tend to be more technical than an axe—but not always. Whatever the tools of your trade may be, pay attention to what changes you might make so that they can help you be more effective. For example, if you use a computer for work, how often does it crash, slowly respond, or automatically update? Perhaps a better operating system or newer machine is in order. If you drive rideshare for work, how many miles per gallon does your car get? How much would you save if you traded your car for a more efficient model? If you homeschool, are there ready-made curricula that would do at least as good a job as what you spend your time creating from scratch?

Beast mode: Developing the ability to continue in a task forever, if that’s what it takes

Some tasks resist any further decomposition while still seeming insurmountable. Sometimes, you just need to stare into the abyss until you see the light. These tasks are like sledgehammering a granite boulder: try as you might, each attempt yields no sign of progress.

These tasks require existential promotion. You have to make them life or death; you have to leverage everything you’ve got. You whale on them until you collapse from exhaustion, then you immediately do it again, and you keep doing it until it yields.

Is there any task that could overwhelm you? You may be surprised to find how often you feel like you are completely lacking in what it takes to achieve what you have set out to do. You may be surprised at how many of these tasks lie along the path of an exceptional life. In these moments, let the strength of your purpose carry you.

How do you reach the point where the limits of time are your only limits? If you have a strong enough purpose and convincing reasons that a certain task is absolutely required to move forward in it, there is no limit to how long and how hard you will work to complete it.

A willingness to impart an unbounded effort will overcome any other limit. If you are willing to work two, ten, or a hundred times longer, harder, and smarter than anyone else, you will absolutely obtain what no one else can.