These types of software tools range from mild to very aggressive, and by testing different tools you may find one that helps you maintain your focus. I don’t use one, but they are out there.
Rather than using tools, I prefer to tackle my distractions one by one. The problem with these tools is that they don’t remove the desire. The reason I quit smoking so effectively was not because I removed access to cigarettes. People who try that always fail. Instead, I removed the desire. I focused on the root desire and replaced the feeling of pleasure from smoking to one of disgust and fear. Now instead of dreaming about a smoke, I have the occasional nightmare. It’s been years since I’ve had a cigarette, and even writing this section is making me feel a little gross.
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Unconscious Habits
Let’s begin by removing and replacing our distractions one at a time. One of my biggest distractions for a very long time was email, and it destroyed my productivity. I felt it was crucial to be super reachable. I had half a dozen phone numbers and more than twenty different email addresses already routing to my iPhone.
I felt like I was living in the future. I was so cutting edge; I was able to answer every email no matter where it came from in a matter of minutes. But in reality, I was wasting huge amounts of time, responding instantly to unimportant emails and checking my phone when there were no new messages.
Many of us have an unconscious habit with our cell phones. We check them all the time throughout the day. If I told you to turn off your cell phone for the next twenty-four hours, most likely you would still have imaginary moments where you need to check it. You would still have phantom rings just like everyone else.
How many times have you seen people in business meetings checking their phones? They can't control themselves. Every single student in high school and college does it now. It's become this uncontrollable habit.
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The Power of Motivation
Motivation requires three elements: energy, strategy, and a clearly defined goal.
How badly do you want to make this change? How much energy and excitement do you feel about changing your bad habits for good? The more energy you start with, the easier it is to stay the course. But energy alone isn’t enough. Plenty of people start diets, desperate to change their lives, but they fall short.
This is where strategy comes in. We need to develop and implement an effective strategy if we want to achieve success. Quitting habits is a bad strategy, but replacing them is a good strategy. You have now mastered this component.
The final problem comes from how we set goals. Most people have an ill-defined desired result. There is a big difference between “I want to write faster” and “I want to write twenty thousand words a day.” Most of us set vague goals that merely point in a direction, with no way to measure success. The second problem with most goal-setting is that we set goals that are too far into the future.
“I want to lose a bunch of weight.”
That’s an excellent and admirable goal, but we need more clarity. We can build and improve this goal into something that works because right now it’s worthless. It’s barely more than an emotion.
I’m a heavy guy. A year ago I had a revelation that if I don’t take control of my weight, I will die early. I was about to get onto an airplane when they weighed me, and I saw that I was two hundred and seventy-two pounds. I nearly had a heart attack. I had gained more than seventy pounds without paying attention.
In the past year, I’ve lost a lot of that weight. I haven’t hit my goal yet, but I am on the path to success. I have to maintain my healthy habits, or the bad ones will take control.
Achieving success with a single big goal is impossible. It’s not achievable. Instead, I break down each day into a series of small goals. I have a goal each day to drink only water. I have a goal to work out each morning when I wake up. I have a goal to work out on the ocean each afternoon after I finish writing. My stretch goal is to exercise twice a day, but that doesn’t happen very often.
Instead of thinking about how much weight I need to lose or feeling depressed when I get off track, I just focus on hitting my goal for that day. Those small goals are all achievable. They can be measured all within the span of a single day.
Small goals can be targeted with your “go” system. You can form habits by targeting small goals. You can turn your habit machine into your ally instead of your adversary.
We activate habits through repetition. When you do the same thing over and over, your brain stores that behavior as a macro and it becomes automatic. You wake up in the morning, and you have your running shoes on before you even realize what’s happening.
Our lives are filled with little habits that we never think about. Nearly everyone on earth sleeps with their feet toward the door. Have you ever thought about why you do this? In college, my first roommate and I became fascinated with this phenomenon, and we started sleeping with our heads toward the door. People would come in all the time to talk to us and suddenly realize they were whispering to our feet. After a few weeks, sleeping this way became a habit and switching back was just as hard.
There are things in our lives we don't think about that we could change if we put our minds to it. The only way to achieve your goals is to break them down into smaller, achievable goals. Our brains are far better at focusing on short-term goals than long-term. Short-term desire overwhelms long-term need. This is why we smoke even though we know it will kill us. This is why we party hard in our twenties even though we know it will make it harder for us later in life when we have to pay off all those credit cards.
We eat things that are bad for us, simply because they taste good. Eating horribly and being overweight can cut your lifespan by about forty percent. Instead of living to be one hundred, you may only live to be forty, fifty, or sixty. Even knowing that, the majority of people in our culture, including me, are overweight.
We make poor decisions because when thinking about dying in twenty years or having a delicious meal today, we always choose the short-term pleasure. We are controlled by short-term desires. It's more visible. It's more visceral. It's more real. Trying to focus on a long-term far-away goal is too hard for us.
Let’s circle back to the core reason you are reading this book. You want to be able to write quickly. When you can write fast, you shorten the distance between setting the goal of writing a book and hitting it. The shorter that cycle, the more powerful your ability to focus on that goal.
When it takes six months or more to write a book, each goal is very far away. It’s hard to divide up the time between now and that far-away goal effectively. But when writing a book only takes two weeks, you can organize your time very efficiently. The closeness of the goal feels much more real. This is why many people brag about their ability to operate under pressure and study the night before a test. They are only able to focus on short-term goals.
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Life Gets in the Way
To be completely honest with you, a part of me earlier today didn't feel like working on this book. After a rough morning, I thought about taking the whole day off.
The day just started on the wrong foot. I got an email and discovered that I had a day of the week wrong. I thought today was Monday, but I then found out that it was Tuesday. I missed two important meetings, and I didn't release a podcast episode yesterday, which for me is very embarrassing.
And what a silly reason. Because I live in paradise, weekdays and weekends have no meaning. I somehow lost track of the day of the week to such an extent that I had no idea until a day later that I'd missed a day. So part of me spent this morning a little distracted, trying to recover from my mistake.
On Tuesday mornings, I have my group coaching call. So Tuesday mornings are the most stressful day of any week. It is the only time I have an appointment on most weeks. I have this call on my Tuesday morning, but it’s Monday night for the rest of you.
I spent the rest of the morning working on some website cha
nges and some new infrastructure. There are some big changes I want to make to my website, and I’m hitting walls figuring out the best way to do them. Some changes should be very simple to implement. But I'm getting a little bit overwhelmed by the technology right now.
I know that I'll have a solution by the end of the week. I just have to find the right person. But right now, I don't know if I need to buy a small piece of software or hire someone to create a custom solution for me. I’m in the phase before I can take action to fix my little problem.
All this garbage started hitting me at once, and I had a stressful morning. I was distracted and then tried to finish off some other projects, and then I put off this book to work on the site. All of that long preamble leads up to me revealing that my first recording session today is an evening session.
Sometimes life will get in the way, and if your goal for writing is far away, that can be devastating.
Fortunately, this book is mostly finished. I'm already way past the halfway point of this dictation. I’m at a place where I could take an entire day off and know that I would still finish the book this week. Because the goal is close, I can keep my eyes on it. Whether I finish the book on Wednesday or Friday isn’t a very big deal.
When you have complete control over how fast you write, you can begin to manage your days in the same way. When you know how many words you can write in a day, controlling the output becomes very manageable. You can see exactly how far away the goal is every day.
But if that goal is far off, it’s hard to be precise. If this book were six months from completion, then I would lose focus all the time. I would take days off and think that they don’t matter, but then the book would end up taking nine months. If we are too far away from our goals, it becomes very easy to lose the course.
When we lose the gym habit, it starts with missing just one workout. It doesn’t feel like a big deal. Then we miss another one, and suddenly it’s been months since the last time you broke a sweat. With a far-away goal, missing a few sessions doesn’t feel like a big deal.
This is why everyone joins a gym in January and stops going by March.
This happens for many of our habits. We must create clearly defined and measurable short-term goals. Each of these smaller goals is a component of that larger long-term goal of writing twenty thousand words a day. Now, do you understand why I taught you to write in short sprints multiple times per day? I’m breaking up each day into smaller, manageable goals for you.
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Action Steps
Concentrate on forming new habits rather than quitting bad ones.
Isolate the habits that are impeding your progress and replace them.
Start with small steps and don’t try to make massive change in a single day.
Experiment with focus software to see if that helps you.
Focus on replacing the desire for bad habits rather than the access.
Divide big goals into small, daily tasks. The more small tasks, the better.
Be prepared for some slip-ups along the way, but don’t use that as an excuse to quit.
Part XVIII
Setting Goals
If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success.
- James Cameron
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The Right Way
Most of our failures can be traced back to how we set goals. When we fail to set goals correctly, failure becomes inevitable. We tend to set huge, vague, far-away goals and then we’re shocked when we fail. The problem is that these goals are just too vague. They don’t feel very real.
Your goal right now might be to write a book. That’s an admirable goal, and it feels solid because the result is clear. Either you write the book, or you don’t. You can clearly measure if you have succeeded. The problem is that goal is too broad. How many pages will the book be? How many chapters? When do you want the book finished?
Let’s go back to our weight loss example again. Many people say, “I’m on a diet,” or, “My goal is to lose weight,” when in reality they want to lose twenty pounds. But they don't write it down, or they don't say it explicitly. We don't set a specific goal because if we do, we might fail. Removing the specificity minimizes the damage when you don’t hit your goal, but it also demonstrates a lack of faith in yourself. You are hedging your bets.
We set a goal without a specific number in mind, and when we have lost 5-10 pounds, we can decide that we hit our goal and deserve a reward. Of course, that reward tends to reverse all that initial hard work. This is why so many diets turn into yo-yos. Initially, we wanted to lose twenty pounds, but because we didn’t write it down, we have forgotten that goal and accepted something less.
When we don’t set concrete goals, they change over time. Your memory is unreliable. Your desire to make yourself feel good will prevent you from achieving what you want and deserve.
It’s time to start creating achievable goals.
If you say to yourself, “I want to write a book,” that's not enough. Instead, say, “I want to write a book that's ninety thousand words long, and I want to finish it in the next thirty days.” What you've created is a very, very effective goal. We want a goal that includes real numbers because then we can divide it into pieces. When you say you want to have a book that's ninety thousand words done in thirty days, you know you need to write three thousand words a day to hit your goal.
You have a concrete and measurable goal, and that’s the first step to achieving it.
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Break Goals into Days
Be very specific when setting your goals. This allows you to take each target and slice it into daily tasks. Writing ninety thousand words in a month sounds very daunting, but writing three thousand tomorrow isn’t nearly as intimidating. We can take a goal that seems impossible and make it manageable just by breaking it down into daily tasks.
Use a calculator to set your word goals for every project. When you have a goal and a number, we have something to work with. If you want to lose twenty pounds in twenty days, you know that you need to lose a pound a day. If you want to lose twenty pounds, but you don’t set a target date, the goal becomes foggy. You can’t break an abstract goal into smaller daily goals. It turns from losing a pound a day, to losing weight every day. Eventually, that will morph into getting on the scale and counting it as a win when you don’t gain any weight. Your goal becomes not getting worse. (This happens to me all the time when I stop being strict with my exercise.)
Now is a magnificent time to set your next writing goal in stone. How many words is your next project? How fast do you want to complete it?
The smaller our goals are, the more frequently you will get the positive reinforcement of having achieved a goal. Now that we have a daily goal, we want to go even smaller.
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Tiny Goals and Multiple Projects
The secret to my success as a writer is my ability to make tiny goals. Getting down to daily goals is really good, and most people only go that far, but I need more. I want to break my goal down into dozens of goals I can accomplish every day. My favorite way to do this is with Scrivener. Switching from Word to Scrivener tripled my writing speed and job satisfaction.
I love writing with Scrivener because it allows me to create hundreds of miniature goals within each project. I can hit dozens of writing goals every day. When I'm writing, I don't just hit one goal at the end of the day. Yes, I start with a daily word count goal. Usually, my daily goal is five thousand words, and my stretch goal is ten thousand. It helps to have multiple goals in front of you because some days you’re just on fire.
These are my goals when I am working on a casual project, but if I have a priority project, I adjust my goals accordingly. My base goal becomes ten thousand words a day, and I often push myself to hit twenty-five thousand on those days. For me to hit a number like this, I can’t be working on anything else.
I’m very fortunate that my success allows me to work on m
ultiple projects at once. I'm always working on four or five different things. I can focus on one project for two hours and then move on to something else. This alleviates that boredom that can set in at the end of a sprint. When I feel my speed starting to wane or my interest fading, I know it’s time to hop to a new project. Just changing to a new topic speeds up my writing again.
I normally have a nice array of projects to keep my mind satisfied, but when a big emergency contract floats across my desk, I can create a successful book in under five days. Breaking your goals into pieces will allow you to do the same thing.
It's very possible to achieve your goals when you structure them properly. Take your daily goal and break it down into smaller pieces. Set a goal for each writing sprint. If you need to write three thousand words today, break that into three sprints of one thousand words each. If that’s too much, break it down into four sprints. As long as you sit down at the computer with a target in front of you, it’s achievable. It is far better to finish five out of your six sprints and end the day with 2,500 words than to try a massive single sprint that wears you out. It is critical that you avoid burnout.
Once you have broken your day down into smaller pieces, go one step further. Break your project into as many pieces as possible. Before it was a bestseller on Amazon, Serve No Master was a Scrivener file with over one hundred and ninety sections. My average section is five hundred words. Each time I write five hundred words I click on an icon to move to the next section.
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 20