Project beginnings have wonderful energy. You’re ready! You’re stoked! It’s the first day! You’ve begun! Your Limitlessness Project is very cool! Your first efforts feel so rewarding! Life feels like it has a lot of great exclamation points to it!!!
Your second day is fairly OK. You’ve done yet another action toward your task. You successfully fit it into your day. You made the necessary accommodations to all the stuff you usually do so that you could get it done. It feels good. Not exclamation-point good, but good nonetheless. You’re on your way.
Your third day is where the REAL project begins. Because your third day is where life starts wanting to reassert itself. You know, the river of everyday life and responsibilities, well-carved, deep-channeled, already full of actions and tasks and things that are waiting to get done. Also known as “the status quo” or “what’s going to take over and keep you where you are now, unless you swim against it.”
This third day is where the excitement of starting has faded, and you realize this new bit of project is now going to become part of your everyday. Even if the endpoint is something you really want, this is still the point at which your project is likely to be derailed. So it’s the point at which you need to shift gears for a while to ensure you stick with it. If you can get past this point, your new task will become part of your daily habits - a new channel added to the river that will take you to where you want to go. The trick is getting there.
Day 3 is the day you’re most likely to begin putting off your project for all the other things that are familiar, or just pop up as needing to be done instead. Excitement had you making the time those first days, but now, you need to use dedication to keep it going.
Use any or all of these practices to make sure you stay on track:
Prioritize your project over everything else. Make it this a boss-level priority - that you spend xyz number of minutes on your project today and every day (you pick how many minutes).
Realize you have the time. Realize that you can probably just as easily fritter that time away watching cat videos on the internet even with “all the urgent things that need to be done”. So don’t let the urgent things fool you - you can make the time.
Use the Pomodoro Method. Set a timer, and determine that you’ll work on it for that amount of time. First, this helps you fit it into your time-day and energy-day. Second, you’ll find that any initial reluctance to dial in to it quickly vanishes as you get warmed up to your topic.
Dial in anyway. If you ended up at the very end of the day and even if you’re tired, dial in to your project anyway. You’d be amazed at how your energy lifts once you’ve worked on it for a few minutes, and how good you feel knowing you met your commitment rather than avoided it. But also, plan to tend your project earlier in your day when you’re less tired.
Do it first thing in the day, if that is your best energy time and/or to make sure it gets done over all other items. Or, last thing in the day if that is your consistent time for sitting down and focusing on this kind of task.
Span the gap. Realize that you’re going to be in a “gap period” for a while as the fun of beginning is transforming into the pleasurable rewards of habit - a period during which YOU deliberately have to manage your commitment to it until it does become a habit.
Keep track. Maintain a calendar, checklist, or other written or online tracking method to show clearly when you did it, and when you didn’t. In itself, this creates a reward mechanism as you get to check off the item when you DO complete it.
Understand your engagement cycles. Don't expect to bring the same enthusiasm to your project every day, as if you were a machine mindlessly stamping out identical widgets. Realize that some days you'll be enthused, and others you might be disengaged. If that happens, work on variations of your project that interest you. If you're repeatedly bored, re-examine your goal, tweak it, or even pick a new one (it's always OK to explore - finding out you don't really like something is valid data too).
Find the flow and find the fun in it. If you feel disconnected from your project by the third day thanks to life’s pressures, that’s normal, even with something you want. Just set up your timer and do some work, any work, on your project. LET GO and LET FLOW. Doing this will reconnect you with the vision of your goal that keeps you engaged. The more you work on it, the more connected, engaged, and fulfilling it will remain for you.
Keep deliberately pouring energy into doing your project over days 3 through 7-10 as you begin to make it a habitual part of your day. This also helps you figure out how to fit what you’re doing into your energy day, so that you can come to it with enough mental resources and focus to dial in and do good learning or good work. Be experimental - what really keeps you going on it? What’s the best time of day? How long is an ideal timer period? Should Sunday be a project day too, or a freedom and rest day so you can come back to it fresh on Monday?
Literature says that it takes 21 days to make a habit, but I’ve found that it can take as little as a week if you set up a strictly followed reward checklist and reaffirm your commitment to prioritizing this each day.
Your Limitlessness Project is in itself a growth of your ability to cultivate success practices. Play and explore to find the most powerful combinations for you. Once you embed it as a habit, you’ll find you come to it automatically, and with joy and pleasurable expectation of what you’ll be working on in your session - you’ll find that you can’t wait to work on it!
How many things have you started in the past that have sputtered due to not transitioning the 48-hour slump? How can you re-engage with the ones you still want to do, or with your current Limitlessness Project as you attain a new level of achievement?
Keep Growing,
Katherine Lieber coaches and trains on self-leadership, limitlessness, energy health, inner power, and healing the wounded professional to recover joy, vision, and high performance in the workplace. She is the founder of TitaniumBlue Leadership. Be limitless - be the hero in a world that needs you.
© 2019 Katherine R. Lieber & TitaniumBlue Leadership
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