What is something you dream about accomplishing? What is something, that if it’s the only thing you accomplish in the next year, it will blow your mind!?
What is keeping you from achieving these long-term goals?
According to Charles Duhigg’s book Smarter Faster Better, our preoccupation with completing short-term objectives stifles our aspirations.
Put another way; we are not doing the one to two things we need to be doing every day to make headway.
It is not that we are lazy. Our days seemingly fill themselves up with busy work.
My coach helped me distinguish between two types of activities: Maintenance and Growth.
Maintenance activities are the ones that maintain the status quo. These are the day-to-day activities, the daily grind, that make up our to-do list. These are the things that we are on the hook to get done, and you have the internal character to get them done.
Growth activities are the things that move you beyond the status quo and towards reaching your long-term goals. These activities are the phone calls or outreach or creative work that isn’t urgent but still needs to be done to build what you want to build. These activities, no one would ever know if you didn’t do them.
Why don’t we do our growth activities?
Why don’t we do the extra activities we know we need to do to build our business or complete a dream project?
It may be that we don’t feel like doing it, or we tell ourselves that it’s not that important or we get distracted by something that grabs our attention. Nevertheless, what it comes down to comes down is the well-established physiological concept of Delayed Gratification.
By definition, long-term goals have their reward sometime in the future. Our brains are wired for instant gratification, and when we do short-term activities, we get an instant reward internally.
What can we do about it?
Are you are ready to bring out the big guns and once and for all destroy procrastination? The best way is to start doing Implementation Intentions. Do put trying these off!
Simply put, an implementation intention is not just what you are going to do (the activity) but also where (the location) and when (the time) you are going to do the growth activity.
An example for me over the last couple of weeks is 30 minutes of blog writing the first thing when I get into the home office. I was able to go from writing sporadically to putting a 38-day streak together without missing a day. I was shocked!
I have worked with clients to help them craft their implementation intentions, and it has been cool to see their early success. Get in touch if you would like to work together.
The important part is to not procrastinate on doing the implementation intentions!
You may want to take this one step further, tell someone, your manager, your coach, your productivity buddy, what, when and where you intend to do.
If you are building your productivity system, find a way to build gratification into doing you long-term growth activities.
If you would like to see how this fits into my overall production system, see my post on achieving what matters to you.