How I Stopped Snoozing and Got Motivated to Start the Day

Some mornings I would snooze for 30 minutes before getting out of bed.

I needed a passive activity to slowly wake up. Often I would lie in bed and flip through Instagram for half hour till I felt awake enough to move. Sometimes when I got up right away, first thing I would do was use the toilet. I would fall asleep on the toilet for 5 minutes before realizing.

I don’t know what’s up with me but I need some time for my brain to calibrate before I can start moving on the day.

I don’t know how I came up with this technique. I just know that I had a hard time getting up to get on with my morning routine. I was losing precious time in my morning that could be used productively.

Getting Shit Done in the Morning

I had to get up to start my morning routine. I had to get up to read and write. I had to get up to organize my day. I had to get up journal. I had to get up to meditate. I needed to have a nutritious breakfast. I had to spend some time with the dog before leaving the house.

The morning is the best time to get work done. There are less distractions. People aren’t working or emailing or texting you in the morning. Your brain is at it’s freshest. Your mind can perform optimally in the morning. Decision fatigue has not set in.

I spend the morning writing. Writing is exhausting. It requires me to search deep within myself for material. It’s scary. It exposes me to myself. I get to know what I really have inside. Do I have what it takes to affect the change I seek to make?

It’s not an activity I can save for the evening. In the evening I’m tired. I want to unwind. I had a tough day at work. I’ve used my mind’s juices already. I am out of self discipline power to sit down and get my words on the screen.

The (Silly) Tactic

Now I wake up, and the first thing I do is open the YouTube app. I used my weakness and found something productive to wake myself up. I found a way to get my ass out of bed quickly.

I started watching motivational videos on YouTube as soon as I woke up. I have my headphones plugged in (cause I don’t want to wake up my wife), and I have a playlist cued up. It makes me accountable to the speaker screaming at me to hustle harder, that I need to sacrifice sleep, that I need to work hard to get what I want.

I made the playlist here. Feel free to use it. Or come up with your own playlist. If you don’t know where to start, just type in “motivation” into the search box and start there.

Not only does it help me get out of bed, but I wake up ready to tackle the day. The synapses in my brain start firing. I can’t wait to get to hustling. I have the urge to skip breakfast so that I can start my writing. It increases my productivity by a factor of two to three.

Would love to know how you start your day. Do you struggle as much as I do? Any tips?

Getting My Ass Moving


Each action removes the barrier to entry. Each action removes one more excuse off the list.

I’ve wanted to write about personal development for atleast 5 years. The biggest barrier though was not knowing where to start. So I had to take action. I set up a website. I chose the easiest one to set up, Squarespace. Now that I had a platform and a place to write, I had one less excuse to prevent me from writing.

Massive actions build momentum.

Take the big steps needed to start doing what it is that you want. I went through the pain of setting up a blog. It was one less excuse to start writing. I had to go through the pain of publishing my first post. Then I had to publish again. I had to learn the art of shipping your work.

I started off writing long, 10+ minute posts. Now my average post is about a 2 minute read. I needed to learn to ship more often. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Perfection is the enemy of results. The post is never up to my expectations or my standard. But I have the habit of writing daily. I learn to ship many times a week no matter what. I will have written thousands of more words, 5–10x more posts as I did before. I built momentum and learnt to ship the work.

Actions lead to lessons.

I hate everything I’ve written above this. It’s not meeting the vision that I had for this post. The ideas aren’t connecting. The words aren’t flowing.

But the post is going up. It doesn’t matter that I’m not very happy with it. I have a deadline and it needs to ship. Too bad for me. That’s what I deserve for not planning out my week. That’s what I deserve for not taking more time this week to write it. I shouldn’t have slept in 3 days in a row.

Each week I post new posts. Every time I learn something new. If I want to produce the quality of work I expect from myself, I need more time. I can’t rush the process. 3 days of sleeping in is half the week of writing. Losing momentum makes my brain rusty. Not posting is a missed opportunity to help someone. Not posting is a missed opportunity for me to learn about writing. Not posting is a missed opportunity for me to plan my thoughts.

Actions keep your head in the game.

Life is busy. It’s easy to do nothing. Doing nothing and no work towards our goals is a habit. We become numb to the desires of our hearts. We start to accept the daily grind. The status quo seems good enough. The lizard brain is comfortable cause we’re safe.

The daily actions though always keeps us moving. It’s not just the hour or two of writing that I get accomplished daily. It’s knowing that I need to wake up tomorrow and say something different. It’s knowing that I am running out of blog ideas and need new ones. It’s knowing that I have no stories to share and need a fresh one to share. The daily writing habit I have is not contained between 7–8am daily. It’s become 24/7. Inspiration suddenly pops up everywhere.


My daily writing habit is my daily action. It’s the daily habit. It’s becoming my new status quo. It’s becoming my new daily grind. The lizard brain still doesn’t like it. It still tries to scare the shit out of me. But I’m moving forward. This post may have zero impact publicly. But I’m learning. Gaining momentum. Learning to ship. Getting better at doing the work.

Summary:

Do.

The Free Rider Problem You Have

A free rider is someone who enjoys a service without giving anything in return.

This makes sense, ‘why spend energy when I can take the rewards?’

A pay rider is someone who gives of themselves generously.

This makes less sense, ‘why spend energy so that others can take the rewards?’

The pay riders are exhausted. They have to make difficult decisions. They have responsibility. People rely on them to get work done. Expectations are put on them.

But the problem with being a free rider is that they aren’t useful to anyone. They are easily replaceable. They don’t have trust from their comrades. They rely on the employer to hand them their pay cheque. Free riders are happiest on tuesdays at their bowling league.

But the pay riders don’t work for their employer, they work for the customers, the clients, the comrades. They are useful, make big contributions, exercise creativity. Pay riders are leaders, they have gained the trust of others. Pay riders have rock solid confidence in themselves, that they don’t need to free ride off others. Pay riders provide for themselves abundantly and are happiest sharing the spoils with others.

A pay rider learns the values of hard work
, patience
, creativity
, grit
, problem solving
, providing value
, hard skills.

Pay riders stand out and get paid.

Free riders blend in, and fade.

 

4 Intangible Skills I Learned From Reading More

What I gained from reading has spilled over to many areas of my life.  It wasn’t just the amazing stories, the knowledge, strategies and tactics, or motivation.  What has had far more spill over effect have been the intangibles.

1. Focus

Sitting down and reading everyday required focus. I had to learn to put on mental blinders and focus on the book.  Plug in headphones if my wife was watching TV, and focus on what I was reading.   Not check Instagram.  Not check Facebook.  Not check Snapchat.  Learning to focus the mind on one task. Reading, learning, not thinking about other things at the same time.  Sitting down for 2 hours without checking the phone.  Not checking e-mails.  No social media.  Not googling random thoughts or doing small errands between tasks.  Not turning on Netflix.

2. Discipline

It required discipline to read everyday.  Every time I had extra time at home, it wasn’t about finding something to do.  It was about sitting down and getting shit done.  Read.  When I started, I created a rule.  No TV between Mondays and Thursdays.   So what do you do when you’re home and you can’t watch TV, and you told yourself you would read more?  It didn’t matter if I was tired, I forced myself to open the book and read.  When I couldn’t focus my mind on a specific book, I would switch to something lighter that my brain could digest.

3. I’ve always got an hour

With the rare exceptions, I always had time to read.  Even if it was right before bed and super exhausted.  I could pick up a fiction book and get engrossed in the story.  Reading fiction before bed would help turn off the “doing” part of my brain.  Rather than winding down by watching TV and letting the glare of the screen kill my bio rhythms, reading a book would help put me to bed.  The rest of my time will be more productive if you give me my workout time,’ — Barack Obama

4. Achievement

At the beginning of the year, I set out to read 8 books during the year.   I set a low goal by pushing a little bit past my then-speed of reading.  So I started with a high pace in January with a goal of reading more in 2016 than I did in 2015.

[A] man’s most specific gift: his ability to put all his resources behind one activity, one field of endeavour, one area of accomplishment… Human excellence can only be achieved in one area, or at the most in very few. — Peter Drucker

The one achievement that I wanted to do everyday was to read more.  It wasn’t about reading a certain number of books or pages.  It was, squeeze as much reading as I can in a day.  Before work.  After work.  After dinner.  Before bed. On the bus.  Waiting for the car to get maintenanced.  Anywhere and everywhere.

I learned that if I set my mind to accomplish something, reading more, I could achieve it.  It wasn’t about reading more, and also eating really healthy, working out everyday, spending more time with my wife, more more more.  It was one thing, setting my mind to that one thing.

It’s surprising how simple, not easy, but simple, it is to do achieve just one thing.

How to Spend More Time Working on Things That Matter

It gets so frustrating when my day ends up getting clogged with meetings, emails, and instant messages.  A few days in a row of this and at the end of the week, I have no real work to show.  I haven’t contributed anything to the organization, learned anything new, or made progress on the projects that I’m excited about.

A few months of this, and it starts to feel like I’m never going to get any work done.  Not only that, someone’s gotta eventually notice that I’m not doing any actual work right?  If only I didn’t have to answer all these e-mails and attend all these meetings.

Thankfully for us, distractions have always been an issue for knowledge workers.  Many wonderful people have tried various productivity systems, here are a few that I find useful.

Eisenhower Method

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important. — Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States

Consider the urgent and important tasks, the ones where if you decide you’re going to put off for another 24 hours, you’re going to get fired, or your customer is leaving you.  In a fairly strong organization, this should happen infrequently, less than once a week or month.  These are your first tasks.

Outside of that, work on the important and not urgent.  Work on the things that will push you forward in your growth and development and the project that gives you the best opportunities.  In Eisenhower’s words, these are the ones that are seldom urgent.

Where this matrix falls though, are the things that are not very important, but are things that just needs to get done. What happens when those things get pushed down the priority list, is that work that needs to get done slips through the cracks, gets delayed, and people are waiting for it.  This isn’t good for the organization, and therefore, not good for you me either.

So while it’s important to focus on the growth and development opportunities, tempering it with tasks that need to get done using the next method works well.

Eat the Frog

“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day” — Mark Twain

I’ve found this method to be quite helpful.  The full method is fairly self explanatory through this beautiful matrix I drew in my free Paint app.

Where this method differs, is that stuff that are not important, but have to get done, are the things that go first.  Rip the bandaid, get it over with.  It’s kind of like, do your homework right when you get home, and you can play and do whatever you want afterwards.

Where this matrix falls through, is that your time can end up getting entirely consumed by tasks that you don’t want to do, or the ones that don’t provide the growth opportunity for you.  This isn’t good for your own fulfillment, effectiveness, or your career.

Where does this leave us?

Energy Based Prioritization

There are some days where you have more energy than others.

Your best days, where you got a great sleep, you are focused, you woke up knowing your why and your purpose, these are the inspiring days that don’t come often enough.  These days, choose the Eisenhower Method.  Asides from the emergencies, work on the things you want to do!  It creates the synergy of knowing what you want to do, why you want to do it, and having the mental resources to work on it.

On the other days, when you have a backlog of things that have to be done that you don’t want to do (and there is always a backlog), work on those things.  Get through it as much as you can, get through the day, and just eat the live frogs so you can get to work on the things you want to do.