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.