Rainbows vs B*tch Days.

As the old saying goes — some days are sunshine and rainbows, others days are bitches and hoes.

Today, has been a bitch.

The Monday of Mondays. Feeling like I have a billion things I need to get done without the motivation to get started.

This happens to me every once in a while — I wake up and can immediately tell it’s going to be an off day.

And in hindsight it adds up. A classic Monday morning without meetings on the calendar to keep me honest, coming off a long first weekend in Chicago spent out on the town with friends.

The rest of my team was out last week so there’s a lot of catch-up staring me in the face, meanwhile we’re in the middle of pivoting our business from B2C to B2B and so everything feels like it’s in limbo. New city, new business, no income, woof.

TBH if I wanted to rationalize spending all day on the couch doing absolutely nothing I could. I can tell you I did NOT want to write this blog post, let alone do the more important things on my list today.

In the past I’ve let that laziness win.

But I am starting to know better. Because giving into laziness never actually makes you feel better. It almost ALWAYS leads to feeling much worse and then having to do twice the work to catch up later.

Laziness is a dish best earned. Like taking a vacation to celebrate a big sale. Or rewarding yourself with Netflix after a 60min workout.

Over the first few years of my young self-employed / work-from-home / knowledge-worker / startup adult life, I have learned some tricks to combat the laziness.

It’s all about three things: 1) Small wins, 2) Setting proper expectations, and 3) Accountability forcing functions

Here’s what I mean:

Small Wins: the easy mistake I have made in the past is feeling like I need to get up and do the hardest thing in the world on a Monday for the entire week to be a success. Like going for a run before the sun comes up then balancing my checkbook and cleaning the entire house by 10am.

That’s just setting myself up for failure. Biting off too much.

Setting Proper Expectations: this is where setting better goals comes into play. A better expectation to set on a morning like this would be to say “I am going to wake up at a cool 9am and spend 30min writing a blog post” — now that’s a small win that I can accomplish. And even though it’s not a reality-bending feat of human ingenuity and perseverance, getting to check *something* off the list in the morning is the most important thing.

That’s called momentum. Tbh it’s crazy how much momentum comes into play when it comes to productivity. And do you know an even easier way to build momentum? Its:

Accountability Forcing Functions: this is any sort of external system you can use to literally force yourself to be accountability. A simple example is scheduling meetings — if you want to force yourself to get up and going, an easy way is to put time on your calendar with someone else so you have no choice but to be there. Another simple example is writing a public blog like this… because once other people start reading then you have no choice but to keep writing it.

Peer pressure is an incredible thing. It can be leveraged as a powerful force to get shit done if used wisely.

The beauty is once you’ve forced yourself to set low expectations and succeed, the rest of the day gets easier and easier.

That’s life baby. Keep going!