Name: How I Make Myself Work When I’m Lazy (it’s not discipline)
Uploaded: 2024-07-21T02:43:30.000Z
Duration: 13 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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 3 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 think you need it's discipline.

But I disagree now, because completely relying on discipline is not sustainable in the long run and it causes burnouts.

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.

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 a 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 decide at 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.

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?

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's 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.

These are 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.

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.

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 there are 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.

This focus of the day should be something that is going to make you more fulfilled and happy in the long term.

If you have an 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 a 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.

Whatever it is, 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 24x7 with questions.

Let's say you had a meeting with your team, but can't remember the task you need to handle.

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 Q&A and traditional AI chatbots is, Q&A 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 Q&A.

It will also give you the link to the relevant Notion page so that you can dive deeper if you need to.

If you're already a Notion AI user, you can get started today with Q&A 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.

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 5 of them.

Yes, you heard it right, we're going to eliminate 5 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.

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 a must if you can't eliminate.

One thing that you can do is that, only to get them done, once you've accomplished your top 5 and also your daily highlight.

Once you've 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 burnout 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 this step, and this is the most important step in my opinion, at least for me.