Do you have a project or idea on the horizon but are waiting for that spark of motivation to ignite?

Maybe you have a goal sitting in the pipeline and it seems monstrous, overwhelming or quite complex and from the outset, you fidget, delay or ignore it…

Procrastination in the pursuit of motivation towards our goals, ideas and ambitions is what costs us many waking hours, keeps us burning the midnight candle and staying busy with perhaps the not so important!

The revolutionary idea of conquering procrastination and avoiding the motivation trap is simply this:

​Action proceeds motivation

The secret to executing and not procrastinating is to take your gigantic vision or project and turn it into bite size tasks.

The Power of Chunking

Let’s begin with a thought on ‘chunking’. We need to make our projects manageable by cutting them into bite size pieces. More importantly, we need to chunk them in terms of their perceived difficulty. Our minds work most effectively when we chunk and turn complexity into simplicity. Whenever our brains have too much information it becomes overloaded, it’s kind of like having too much data with not enough ram or memory on your computer - it freezes.

Adopt the Disney approach

Walt Disney is famous for bringing animation to life. He was successful with this difficult task because he understood this concept. Each film was created by chunking his ideas down into storyboards and tackling each specific aspect of the film by mapping out what, how and when it would be done with a systematic approach.

Build your confidence-competence loop

As we begin to write down simple, small and manageable tasks toward our bigger goals, we kick start the wheel of motivation. As each small step is actioned and we begin to progress, we start feeling more confident and motivated toward each coming task. This idea is likened to that of the ‘confidence-competence loop’; as we progress with each manageable chunk our confidence and motivation to take on the next chunk increases.

Take action

Maybe you have a report you have been putting off. Whatever it is, we need to chunk it down and list, from 1-10, each manageable task that needs to be done in order of difficulty - easiest to hardest, until goal is completed.

0- This could be thinking about how we need to write the report
1- This could be beginning to map out the key points
2- And so on…
3- 
4- 
5- 
6- 

Once you have 10 bite size ideas, begin taking action at zero and keep building on your progress with each step. You will quickly begin to see the power of actioning small steps to stay motivated toward completing the bigger goal.

I would love to hear your thoughts on shifting from chaotic complexity and moving to elegant simplicity…