Continuing to progress in spite of unproductive feelings

Any system that requires perfect motivation is going to fail. The fact is that everyone has to deal with energy and mood variations, and while there are many tricks to reduce their frequency and occurrence, they will persist.

What you get done is going to depend to a large degree on what you do when you don’t feel optimal. What we do when we feel the worst tends to matter the most.

The best time to set goals, make plans, and execute tasks is when you feel good. But you won’t always feel good. Most people will feel at their best only a small fraction of the time. One of the benefits of planning is what it enables you to do, even when you feel bad.

The worse you feel, the more intentionally you will have to be to impart forward motion to your goals. Many would call this willpower, but doing so diminishes the clarity of what is happening, ascribing too much of it to some magical inherent force rather than empowering you with an actionable mechanism to do more and better than you otherwise would.

When you feel unmotivated, switch over your fuel from short-term pleasure to long-term purpose. This is akin to your body switching from aerobic to anaerobic respiration: it’s much less easy, but it can keep you going for a lot longer. It takes a different approach, but that approach works, and it is fully within your control.

The beauty of the life plan system is that it gives you everything you need to make the most of the times when you aren’t at your best. Continuously focus on the highest priority item you have the resources to handle, and you will keep moving forward. This is much more than a mere matter of productivity—the more you continue to work through bad moods, the faster you will get over them!

When your mood is low, the secret is to just keep moving forward, no matter how slow your crawl becomes. Don’t act based on how you feel right now. Instead, become robotic in rational consideration of what you are doing. When you aren’t feeling great, you need to apply laser-like and even robotic focus on execution. Just stick to your to do list, and keep going. Turn off your senses. Ignore them.

Most accomplishments are the culmination of many small actions, not the result of one sudden act.¹ You will be amazed at how much your willingness to plod forward in suboptimal situations will culminate in exceptional productivity in the long-term. You will be amazed at what you can achieve even under the greatest opposition by simply focusing on and accomplishing the tiniest next step.

The life plan provides you the option to remain in the highest possible productivity even when conditions require flexibility. No matter your internal or external conditions, you can scroll down your priority list and find the highest impact item that you can handle at present. And you will keep moving forward.

In times of less than perfect mood, you are going to have to shift your priorities, and that’s ok. If your highest priority task requires hitting a boulder with a heavy hammer as hard as you can until it is broken into small pieces, you will not be able to uniquely work on that task while it remains incomplete. You will have to repeatedly whack it when you have strength and the skin on your hands remains intact, go do something else when that is not true, and come back after you recover. The boulder might remain the highest priority, but while you lack the resources to address it and are doing what can be done to get them, you will need to shift to the next highest priority.

Every gloomy moment is a gift to increase your near-term and long-term joy through exercising the faith to mentally recognize that your present feelings do not define inescapable reality, and that better feelings are most likely to come after better works.