Sneak Up On Your Dreams

NaNoWriMo feels like it’s sucking all the words out of me. I sit and push myself to write a few more words then a few more then a few more every day. The ability to put down words even when I don’t feel like it or am even highly resistant is satisfying and feels right.

What makes this pushing through and writing thousands of words when I don’t want to possible, is that I outlined the novel in detail in October. This makes the actual writing so much easier since I always know what’s supposed to happen next. After I’m finished I’ll need to find a way to break down the editing in same way so that it doesn’t involve a large, open space of trying to figure out what to do. I’ll need a checklist to go through one time at a time.

We, as humans, need structures to follow to move us forward. I’m sure there are people who can move ahead without needing anything to fall back on, but I find that structures, even structures I create, give me something to rely on. They make me feel like I don’t have to invent anything new, that I can just go back and look at my structure to be able to move ahead.

In education, this is called “scaffolding.” If a child is trying to produce something a teacher will keep adding a little more help and information as the child seems to struggle. If the child can produce the work right away then nothing is needed, but if they need some help the teacher will provide a piece and then another and another as needed. As the child learns, less and less scaffolding is needed for that particular task.

The way I use this is to create as firm and complete a scaffold as possible for myself, for my writing and then I use or ignore it as I need. School and even jobs provide that type of structure or scaffolding. It’s easy to get comfortable and rely on the structure that someone else has set up. For achieving your own special goals, though, you need to build your own scaffold. Don’t think of it as extra work or wasted time, but as a foundation that you can fall back on when you’re feeling lost and unable to see your goal off in the distance.

To build your own scaffold,

1. think about your goal

2. Break it down into the different pieces that need to be done for you to achieve the goal

3. Work backwards putting the pieces, the tasks that need to be done in reverse order

4. Write these down in a line perhaps across the top of a spreadsheet or just a piece of paper, then underneath each piece, list the specific tasks that you need to do to accomplish each one. Put a little check box next to each doable task.

Now you have your own scaffold. You can start working on each item in order. When you’re feeling motivated and moving you can do what you feel like. When you start to feel like your ambition is flagging you can open up your scaffold and see what piece is next to do or if your goal doesn’t require that thing be done in order, look over your list of checkboxed tasks and decide on tone to do that would be least miserable and do it. Your goal is to cross them all off. You can feel accomplished and successful with more checkboxes and you won’t have to think up each task when you’re not feeling that motivated.

The trick to attaining any goal you set is to complete each task necessary to achieve the larger goal.  On paper it seems easy, but in practice getting things done is not so easy.  Many people find just attending to life’s daily activities such as getting to work dressed and cleaned appropriately, keeping the house clean and stocked with what it needs, and maintaining relationships difficult and time consuming. If you add children to the mix, many people find it hard to keep their heads above water at all.  Adding even small tasks in order to achieve a goal may seem impossible.

There are ways, though, to make many tasks more efficient and easier to complete.  I would like to collect here as many different ways that people have used to get more things done than they felt able to do.

One of the biggest contributors to feeling in control and completing the most things is to do things before they need to be done. I call this “pre-crastinating.”  Pre-crastinating gives you early deadlines with the promise of relief afterwards.  I have worked on my pre-crastinating skills for decades now. It involves deciding that I need to finish all odious, unpleasant, or undesirable tasks early, as soon as they can be done and before I do anything else that I might want to do more. I’ve sort of programmed myself to feel that all difficult tasks need to be done before enjoyable ones.  I see it as a game somewhat. I play that the sooner I can finish the unpleasant tasks, the sooner I can do whatever I want.  In the beginning it was just miserable.  I had to drag myself into doing things when I wanted to do other things. After a while I liked “winning” the game.  I would finish my work before it needed to be done and then when it needed to be done, I felt like it had been done for me. I had “won.”  After enough positive feedback, it’s become second nature.   Having required tasks done early, allowed me to do no- as-required tasks, that might be related to achieving goals, to be done when I should have been doing my required activities. Whether or not it’s reality, pre-crastinating makes me feel like I have created extra time for myself.

A second trick that I use is when I feel lousy I try to do an extra amount of unpleasant and particularly mindless activities at that time. For example, one thing I always hated was correcting my students’ work.  I had a box where they’d hand in their work and in the first year I just let it pile up until I felt I had the time or interest to correct the work.  I would then be facing huge piles and would just feel miserable.  As the years went by I put “correct work” on my schedule every day so I wasn’t faced with a mountain.  In addition, though, when I felt lousy I would do extra correcting.  I figured that since I already felt lousy and correcting made me feel lousy, it couldn’t make me feel worse.  Then when I felt better I’d feel even better than I would have because I had the miserable job done.  Whenever I feel down or off (which I often feel if I eat food that I’m sensitive to) I look for the most mindless and unenjoyable tasks that I know I would like accomplished.  I can muck around in my misery and wallow in even more misery by doing the boring activity.  In this way I can get closets organized and papers corrected and bills paid and so on and so forth.

A third trick I use is routines.  Setting up routines with just an extra little task can propel me to where I’m going just a bit.  I discussed routines in a previous post.  Adding just a 15 minute action to some routines can help you move ahead, whether it’s writing a hundred words a day or doing 5 push-ups or making one phone call or paying $5 extra on a debt.  Consider your larger goal and think of which task might be able to be broken down into much smaller pieces than you thought possible.  It may seem like it would take close to forever to pay off a car or a mortgage with just $5, but everything adds up over time and it’s not taking much away from your current life, so you might as well do it.

What tricks do you have that help you do things when you feel miserable and don’t want to do what you need to do?