Why We Don’t Do What We Know We Should Do.
One of the more powerful productivity quotes I’ve come across is “if it’s important enough, you’ll find a way. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse”. And I see this being played out every day through the questions I receive.
The questions usually follow the line: ‘I know I should be doing a weekly planning session, but I just don’t have time. Or ‘I want to exercise, but I’m just so exhausted when I get home after work’ or ‘I want to have a regular morning routine, but I have to get my kids ready for school’.
Everything after the word “but” in those sentences is valid. For example, you may not have time for a weekly planning session, you may be exhausted when you get home at the end of the day, and your kids may need to be readied for school. But is that it? Is that going to be the reason you don’t do what you know you want to do?
In those examples, I see a flaw. If you are not doing a weekly planning session, what are you doing instead? What is more important than doing a weekly planning session? When you get home after work, exhausted, what do you do instead of exercising? What is more important? And preparing the kids for school is externalising something you have decided is more important than your morning routines.
And let’s be honest here. None of these decisions are life or death decisions. They are simple choices.
The driving force behind our decisions in all these scenarios is motivation, and motivation is driven by pain and pleasure. We don’t exercise because we associate pain with exercise. We don’t do our morning routines because waking up thirty minutes before our kids is painful. We don’t do our weekly planning because watching another episode of our favourite drama on Netflix is more pleasurable than looking at all the tasks we have to complete next week.
As humans, we naturally gravitate towards pleasure and away from pain. It’s how we’ve survived for so long. We learn patterns, develop habits, and do things because we are motivated to follow a pleasurable life.
This is the motivation for switching apps to the latest, shiniest offerings. Something exciting and pleasurable about moving all our tasks or notes into a new app, convincing ourselves this time will change everything, and you will be miraculously more productive. But, of course, this is never true, and you’ll soon be looking for the next shiny new toy.
If you look at all the tasks that are overdue on your to-do list now, you’ll find that around 80% of them are tasks you associate with pain. You can do a simple experiment here. When you open your email in the morning, which emails do you reply to first? It’s always the easiest and shortest ones. Why? Because when you hit the send button, you get a dopamine hit, and that is your brain’s way of giving a pleasure shot. We crave the dopamine hit, so we clear out the easy emails first.
Unfortunately, that only leaves you with the emails you associate with pain. And now you’re going to say you don’t have time to reply to these because you wasted forty-five minutes sending out meaningless “thank you” emails to all those easy emails.
If you want a better balance in your emails, reverse the order of your actionable email list, so the oldest is at the top, and when you reply to your mails, start at the top. That email will be the oldest and, naturally, is your most important email. It may take you thirty minutes to reply to that one, and the five emails after it may take two minutes each. It doesn’t matter. Unless you have a set of rules to follow, your brain will always take the easy road, leaving you with the worst kind of list to deal with. A painful list.
For the tasks that you don’t ‘feel like’ doing because they are hard or will take a long time to do, you have got to learn how to turn the perceived pain of doing those tasks into something you associate with pleasure.
One way you can do this is to understand that instant gratification (completing quick, easy tasks) does not leave you feeling satisfied long-term. Putting off the more difficult tasks until later will result in greater pain eventually.
You will likely have to spend part of your weekend doing these tasks or find yourself having to explain to an upset client (or boss) that you are behind on a project. Or, you will have the embarrassment of having to explain why you have failed again at accomplishing a goal you told your friends and family that you would accomplish this time.
Another way to overcome this dilemma is to turn the unpleasant things you know you have to do into a habit. Habits take time to develop. You will not be able to do something one day and expect to do it the next automatically. Habit formation doesn’t work that way. Doing a weekly planning session, for instance, means for four to eight weeks, you will have to wake up every Saturday (or Sunday) morning and sit down and plan out your week.
You can trick your mind here. Every Saturday morning, I make myself a cup of coffee, turn on the BBC’s Sounds app and listen to Sounds of The 80s (and Sounds of the 90s). I set up a wonderfully relaxing environment in which to do my planning session.
I used to hate doing my weekly review, putting it off to the last moment on a Sunday evening. However, I felt that was the perfect time to do it because I could prepare myself the night before I went back to work. The reality was, I was doing late Sunday evening because I was looking for more exciting and pleasurable tasks to do each weekend, and I was putting off the planning session until the very last moment.
Once I switched to Saturday mornings, deliberately setting up a pleasant environment, and forced myself to do it week after week, I quickly found it was a task I looked forward to doing. I saw (and felt) the benefit of doing the planning early to switch off entirely and enjoy the weekend.
This also works with exercise. It is painful at first. You’ll be sore and slow-moving for a week or two when you start, but this short-term pain will bring enormous amounts of pleasure long-term when you have incredible energy, feel less tired, become healthier and have a better chance of living a healthy, long and adventurous life.
The key to anything you do in life is your motivation, and that is something you have control over. You can either continue to see those things you don’t enjoy doing as painful by focusing on the short term and lose all motivation. Or you can look beyond the short term and see the benefits (pleasure) of completing those tasks on time. Benefits such as moving projects forward each week. Of feeling energetic, looking fantastic and building long-term resilience against illness and ill health.
It’s always your choice.
Thank you for reading my stories! 😊
My purpose is to help as many people as I can live the lives they desire. To help people find happiness and become better organised and more productive so they can do more of the important things in life.
If you would like to learn more about the work I do, and how I can help you become better organised and more productive, you can visit my website or say hello on Twitter, YouTube or Facebook and subscribe to my weekly newsletter right here.