What You Don’t Want To Do

It’s easy to get motivated to want to do something. It’s tougher to get motivated to want to do something enough that you actually do it. And it’s not necessarily that you don’t want to do it, it’s just that there’s something else you’d rather do more. Or, in many cases, the parts of you that don’t want to perform this action outnumber the parts of you that do. Sometimes it’s just plain inertia. You’re already doing nothing productive and would prefer to stay that way for right now. But you can get yourself out of it.

One method is compromise. Promise yourself that you get to go back to the nothing productive as soon as you do this little, itty bit of the thing you want to do. You’ll have to make it small enough to convince your grumpy/unmotivated/scared parts. If you still don’t want to do it, make it smaller. Don’t suggest that you write a page of your novel. Write a sentence. Don’t call your mother. Write her a note. Or a postcard. Don’t phone for a job interview. Revamp your resume for 5 minutes. Or, if you’ve done that already, print out ten copies. Don’t paint one picture. Hold a paintbrush in your hand. All of these are small things, pieces of a bigger dream (getting on the best seller’s list, improving your relationship with your mother, getting a new job, having a gallery showing). But with big dreams (and you deserve big dreams), there can be big worries and fears. So, you sidestep these worries and fears (when you can’t plow right through them) by going small. Smaller than your worries and fears, which can seem huge, but which burn out when you don’t feed them big bits of dream.

Even if what isn’t getting done isn’t a part of a dream, you can still do these little bits to “trick” your grumpiness, fear, worry, sloth. Need to clean the house top to bottom? That’s a heck of a thing. Can you load the dishwasher instead? Even at a little bit, your kitchen will look and smell cleaner than it had before you did it. And perhaps those grumpy, etc., bits will be a little quieter as you look for something else small to do.

Another method is plowing right through your grumpy bits. Feel them, but do it any way by brute force. I will spend six hours at the computer writing this novel if it kills me! It works, sometimes, depending on your mood, your health, your willpower, and your grumpiness. Sometimes your grumpiness is more powerful than your willpower. This does not mean you’re weak! This means that you need to cut down the grumpy bits to a more manageable size. This method works very rarely for me. I use compromise a whole lot more often.

A third method is reward, another method I use more often than brute force. If I do three things on my to do list, I get a reward. If I exercise, I get a reward (not food). If I do X, then I get to play for 15 minutes or read a book I picked up from the library or whatever else I’m in the mood for. Pick something that does not sabotage you as a reward, and then “bribe” yourself into doing what needs to be done. If you have issues with weight or sugar, do not use food as a reward. If you do not have the money to spend, do not use a shopping spree as a reward. If you know that you always spend at least an hour on that website and you don’t have an hour right now, do not use that as a reward. Pick something that is healthy for you that you want – time reading or biking, a new hat (from the thrift store, if your wallet isn’t fat), a ripe plum, or the night off from worrying and berating yourself about this thing. Or whatever works for you. Figure out something that feels good and isn’t bad for you and wham! You have a reward.

One last method is more drastic than the others. Not much more drastic than sheer brute force, but close. You take away all of your distractions, until there is nothing left but the thing you’re avoiding but want to do and other things you’ve been avoiding. I have deleted a game from my computer because I played it too much. It freed up a good bit of time. I now play other computer games rather than do my work sometimes, but not as much as that game drew me in. I have also gotten my bathrooms cleaned and the floors swept on more than one occasion just because I wouldn’t allow myself to do anything fun and yet my grumpy bits still didn’t do that other thing, whatever it happened to be. I have been very amused at myself and the lengths I will go to in order to avoid the thing I’ve been avoiding. Typically it’s writing, but not always.

So how do you do this anti-distraction thing? This could be tough. First, what qualifies as a distraction for you? Do you talk a lot on the phone? Do you garden to the exclusion of everything else? Do you, too, play computer games? Or perhaps you, too, read a book until it’s finished no matter how long it takes? Is there a TV show that you just can’t miss? Are you a web surfer extraordinaire? Figure out what you do when you aren’t doing what you don’t want to do (or, rather, what you want to do, but your grumpy bits don’t). Then eliminate it, at least temporarily. Unplug your phone and turn on the answering machine. Check it once an hour in case of emergency. Lock your gardening gloves and other things into the shed or garage or trunk and give someone else the key. Turn off your computer and don’t turn it back on. Or take off the plugs so that it’s that much harder to get power back to it and gives you a little bit more time to think “Do I really want to spend the next part of my life on the computer rather than live my dream?” Quite frankly, sometimes the answer is yes, and that’s okay. It’s when the answer is always yes that you’ve got a problem. That’s a topic for another time.

Don’t get the book or loan it to a friend. Set up your VCR and put a giant piece of paper over your TV screen. And when all that doesn’t work, when you simply have to have a treat or have to clean the bathroom rather than look at your scrapbooking materials one more time, then do it. For the next fifteen minutes, do something else. Then try again. Are your grumpy bits more willing to do 5 minutes of dream now? Or 1 minute? If not, another 15 minutes somewhere else, something else, and try again. And you keep trying. If you use this as a good excuse to get other undesirable chores done, that’s wonderful. At least the cat box is clean and your lawn is mowed and the car is washed. And you’ve been thinking about your dream, because it’s the reason you’re cleaning the cat box, mowing the lawn, or washing the car. It’s tough to keep every bit of your mind off the thing you’re avoiding.

I can hear some of you yelling (mentally) at your computer screen and throwing popcorn at it or other such things. “One minute won’t make a bit of difference!” Wrong. One minute can make a huge difference, when there’s enough of them. One sit up does not a washboard stomach make, but one sit up done numerous times does. All your bits of dreams and dream-doing will add up into something amazing, something wonderful. A novel is written one sentence at a time, and if those five sentences in that paragraph were written in a flurry of motion one day or over five different weeks, they won’t know it when they read it. Did you exercise ten minutes today or twenty? Or three? Will it matter to anyone but you when you finish your marathon? If it takes you ten years to find a new job instead of ten months, does that mean you don’t get your dream job at all? Nope, it just means that you have that much more life experience to bring to your dream job. The important part is for you to do something that brings you closer to the accomplishment of your dream, to the birth of The Future that you want. Do one little bit. Large enough that you actually do something, small enough to bypass your grumpy bits.

Your dreams are amazing, and so are you. Live them, and create the Life you want.