How I Make Myself Work When I’m Lazy (it’s not discipline)

I struggle with motivation a lot trust me I've tried everything from time blocking to Pomodoro GTD method to 2-minute roll and none of them worked for me there's always something I know I got to do it but I don't I wait for the motivation to kick in but it never comes when I need it and suddenly around 2:00 a.m. in the middle of night I would get super hyped up about something and promise myself that I would change this time only to find myself in the same position 3 days after what's worse is that the

more I repeat this cycle the more I doubt myself and feel awful I used to say you don't need motivation only thing you need is discipline but I disagree now because completely relying on discipline is not sustainable in the long run and it causes burnouts so how can we get things done without relying on motivation neither on discipline I read dozens of books watch hundreds hours of content and with trial and error I found the solution today I'm going to introduce you the system I used to get things done and work without relying on motivation

so the major mistake we all do is not understanding the underlying reason why we struggle with motivation and procrastinate without understanding what is causing it it's almost like going to a doctor getting a medication without getting a diagnosis imagine you're actually like an Alzheimer but get a medication for like diabetes it doesn't make sense rather than like trying every sing single productivity tip you see online it's much better to First understand the reason and try to solve that issue so that you spend less time trying to figure out what works for you so there are

a bunch of reasons why you might be struggling with motivation and even the same person can struggle with different reasons depending on the season of their life so today I decided to talk about the most common ones which are lack of clarity feeling overwhelmed feeling unfulfilled burnout and also lack of system if you're interested in other reasons and how to solve them I will have videos coming so stay tuned so most of us I think including myself really struggle with Clarity because we are taught especially if you're in productivity we are taught that the more

you get done the better it is but one thing I learned after talking with other entrepreneurs is that most successful people actually only focus on handful of things and they just eliminate everything but to do so we first need to be super clear on what to focus and what to eliminate the first step we're going to do is actually dumping everything we have in our mind I usually like to either use notion or use my iPad for doing a brain dump by beginning our day doing a brain dump they eliminate the feeling of overwhelm notifications

popping in and so many things that are distracting else and all these things are inputs in our brain so subconsciously actually we're getting like overwhelmed every single day and that's completely normal when you do this even for once you're going to see the immediate results of like getting Clarity and feeling in peace so so whether you decide at 5 10 or 15 minutes the important thing is that you basically set yourself a deadline the reason why we set a timer is because of the Parkinson's love basically if you would give a task an hour it's

going to take an hour so if we're going to give a 5 minutes it's going to take 5 minutes so step two is filter go through your brain dump and write down 10 things you need to get done that day now what we need to do is prioritizing them so I'm actually terrible at prioritizing when I have 10 tasks in in front of me I look at them and I'm like okay which one should I do first which one should I do next and then I get overwhelmed and I do nothing so if you don't

want to be like me what I recommend is using the eisenh how Matrix it basically divides the tasks into four different categories based on their importance and also their urgency so the quadrant one is the important and Urgent tasks these are the tasks that requires your immediate attention let's say the kitchen's floating or your toilet is broken like happened to me two weeks ago we want to ideally get these done first so that we won't get stressed over them and we will also not face these consequences next up we have the Q2 tasks these are

the important but not urgent tasks often times because they don't have a deadline we always say that we're going to start someday and then that someday never comes I always did that a couple of years ago I would always tell myself that I'm going to start working out tomorrow and that tomorrow never came so one day I said okay I should actually schedule a time in my calendar if you don't make actively time for your Q2 tasks you will never have time for them once I started to actually commit to working out I got actually

quite jacked in like two years not really sure whether you can see my muscles but I'm like pretty healthy and doing pretty well let's see whether you can see them maybe not that much but yeah I'll include some pictures don't worry about it okay and then we also have the Q3 tasks these are the Urgent ones but not not important one for example like work emails that you don't care about so we're going to always do the q1 first schedule time for the Q2 batch Q3 and try to eliminate Q4 once you create this list

of 10 different tasks make sure that there's at least one Tusk in Q2 if there nothing in Q2 that is a very big red flag I would go through my list once again and find one in Q now step three is going to be picking your focus of the day this is going to be something that is going to get closer to your long-term goals whether that's working out whether that's working on your business maybe taking online courses maybe spending more time with your family or let's say going to a therapy something like that this

focus of the day should be something that is going to make you more fulfilled and happy in the long term if you have All or Nothing attitude like me starting from I think 20 minutes is a really good spot because if you do something 20 minutes every single day you you actually see significant amount of results and also if you have more time you can spend more time on it the important thing is that every single day you pick a focus of the day and do something for your future self and saying no to all

the deadlines all the distractions all the obligations that you have and making time for yourself whenever I don't make actively time for the things that I care and gives me fulfillment I really start to question the meaning of life and Life starts to feel really pointless and everything becomes boring and that really demotivates me and I start to procrastinating when picking your focus of the day you can use a notion template like mine or you can use this app vidget where you can type a note and put it on the screen of your phone so

that whenever you unlock your phone you see it whatever it is it's important that you write this in somewhere else that you can easily see it speaking of notion they've recently launched an amazing feature called Q&A this this feature provides instant answers to your questions using information from across your workspace it's like having your own executive assistant that you can bug 24/7 with questions let's say you had a meeting with your team but can't remember the task you need to handle no worries you can ask the Q&A or let's say you're using notion for school

and you want to find a specific class note you can ask Q&A the difference between Q&A and traditional AI chat Bots is Q&A on understands your business previous decisions and meeting notes to provide accurate and relevant answers it only uses the internal knowledge within your notion workspace making it far more personalized than other AI models trained on publicly available information it saves so much time and reduces repetitive questions whether you're trying to find company policies or trying to check a project status instead of messaging your coworker or your friend to find the answer you need

you can simply ask q and day it will also give you the link to the relevant notion page so that you can dive deeper if you need it to if you're already a notion AI user you can get started today with Q&A already in your notion workspace you can get started with notion AI for only $10 a month if you're interested trying out join the weight list to get Early Access I have my link in the description below at this point we should have 10 tasks in our list and one focus of the day so

now out of these 10 tasks we're going to eliminate five of them yes you heard it right we're going to eliminate five of them one thing that I learned over time is that even though sometimes I think I have to get this done today or I'm going to die I do it the next day or maybe the day after and it's actually not end of the world in the beginning you might not be able to eliminate if you have been procrastinating for a while and things piled up but make sure that it's absolutely must if

you can't eliminate one thing that you can do is that only to get them done once you accomplish your top five and also your daily highlight once you have finished these then you can work on the remaining tasks if you skip your daily highlight and keep focusing on urgent tasks you will get burned out and you will find yourself in the same position so it's actually a non-negotiable for this method to work I think most of the productivity methods just doesn't have the step and this is the most important step in my opinion at least

like for me at the end of the each day I sometimes forget it I'm not going to lie but at the end of each day ideally I'm supposed to do it and you're supposed to do it is go through your task list and look at how many of them you got done so the top three and the daily focus is a non-negotiable if you get done your top three tasks and your daily Focus you're going to give yourself a tick and if you couldn't get done your top three tasks you know your daily Focus these

are just like a set then you give yourself a one cross and the important thing is tracking this in a visible position whether that's a notion template that you have and where you track it or whether it's a whiteboard or whether it's the sticky vidget or what is your like Apple notes doesn't matter it should be in a place where you see it all the time so that your subconsciously make it sure and make it important that this actually matters for you because one actually really important thing I learned is that out of side out

of mind is so true if I'm not seeing it visually you know on a whiteboard then I find forget about it and I never do it so make sure that every single day you track it and I think actually doing this on a whiteboard kind of like becomes a game and being able to see that first thing in the morning really motivates me actually sometimes things don't go well I mean 90% of the time things will go well to be honest but one important thing is that we never skip 2 days in a row I

mean if something extreme happens obviously you have all the rights to rest but I'm not talking about that and you know that once we have marked our day the last important step is writing down in one sentence what went well and what could have been better this is going to be the action point for tomorrow and by looking at this we're going to try to prevent the same mistake happening maybe that day you forgot to turn off your notifications and you got a call from your friend and you ended up chatting for 3 hours which

I did last week so it was actually my feedback for a couple of days ago to the next day you know just put your phone and do not disturb mod depending on your life the reason why you're struggling is going to be different so we can't act like there is going to be a one magical method that is going to like cure it like ha GTD method cure everything that all the problems you have in your life like it doesn't work like that I don't know at least it does it works like that for me

so by reflecting every single day of like what went well maybe you went to a cafe and you were like really able to focus so do that next day again the same thing by repeating the things that went well and by eliminating the things that maybe didn't go that well we give ourselves every single day a chance to improve so Ka by doing this you start to rely on motivation and discipline less and less and less and because we gamify this and we also try to understand our emotions and behaviors it gives a very high

awareness of your actions it actually made me realize that I'm a human and I'm not a robot and and depending on you know the things that is happening around me sometimes my motivation and my dry life flows I learn that and the important thing is rather than pushing yourself all the time and telling yourself like oh you're a loser rather than doing that understand your situation adapting to it and knowing what to do in those scenarios is going to help you more in the long run if you like this video and found it helpful I'm

currently working on creating a free community where I can connect like-minded people and also add a master guide maybe a mini course maybe a PDF who knows about time management for different reasons today we mainly covered overwhelm burnout lack of clarity and luck of fulfillment in upcoming videos I'm thinking about covering other areas so if you're interested let me know in the comments and see you soon