Heidi Grant: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To (Harvard Business Review)
This article offers three reasons and three solutions: “thinking about the consequences of failure, ignoring your feelings, and engaging in detailed planning.” Summarized in edited excerpts here:
1.
Reason: You are putting something off because you are afraid you will screw it up.
Solution: Adopt a “prevention focus.” Instead of thinking about how you can end up better off, you see the task as a way to hang on to what you’ve already got—to avoid loss.
2.
Reason: You are putting something off because you don’t “feel” like doing it.
Solution: Ignore your feelings. They’re getting in your way. If you are sitting there, putting something off because you don’t feel like it, remember that you don’t actually need to feel like it. There is nothing stopping you.
3.
Reason: You are putting something off because it’s hard, boring, or otherwise unpleasant.
Solution: Use if-then planning. Making an if-then plan is more than just deciding what specific steps you need to take to complete a project – it’s also deciding where and when you will take them. By deciding in advance exactly what you’re going to do, and when and where you’re going to do it, there’s no deliberating when the time comes. It’s when we deliberate that willpower becomes necessary to make the tough choice. But if-then plans dramatically reduce the demands placed on your willpower, by ensuring that you’ve made the right decision way ahead of the critical moment. In fact, if-then planning has been shown in over 200 studies to increase rates of goal attainment and productivity by 200%-300% on average.
