A lot of you have asked me: “Omer, what is the most important skill to learn?”

After lots of deliberation, I think the #1 skill to learn would be the skill of Getting sh*t done even when we don’t feel like it.

You know you should exercise for at least 20-30 minutes daily and eat fruits and veggies to improve your health. You know you should spend a few hours after school or work to work on your personal projects such as Resume writing, or taking that course on coding. But instead, we end up binge-watching Squid Game on Netflix. Why? And more importantly, what can we do to stop procrastinating

Here are 10 strategies to counter this burning problem that young professionals are struggling with:

1. Intrinsic Vs Extrinsic motivation

Examples of extrinsic motivators are – “I am doing this because it will help me buy a house”, “I am doing this because it will help me buy that car”. These motivators are tied to an external tangible thing that you want to get. And that is often where motivation runs out, because we stop feeling like wanting to do something. We start thinking, “maybe I don’t want that”, “maybe I don’t need that”.

Studies show that intrinsic motivation leads to increased persistence. When intrinsic motivation is high, as a result prosocial motivation and persistence is also high. According to a study by Adam Grant, Prosocial motivation is essentially being motivated by a desire to promote and protect other people’s wellbeing without seeking to gain any personal benefit. In the same study by Adam Grant, he gives an example of how due to higher prosocial motivation firefighters were subsequently more persistent and went on to work significantly higher overtime hours per week. The desire to help others had resulted in an increased effort and increased level of persistence.

So here is a question for you, when you don’t do something, is it because the external reward not good enough? There are many people in the world who don’t want to be ambitious, they don’t want more money, they don’t want a bigger house, they are perfectly happy with what they have. Sure, but we still have to get joy from what we do, and how will they get things done when they don’t feel like it? That’s when we remind ourselves of that intrinsic motivator – why are you doing it? What is the reason you’re doing it? Why are you here? Hence, for the next task you have on your list that you are putting off, ask yourself: Why is this task important for me? Why am I doing this? What happens if I don’t do it? In other words, find the intrinsic motivators for the task.

2. Everything must be in your schedule.

I always say this to my clients: “If it is not in your calendar, it won’t happen”. Our calendars can be our #1 productivity tool if used correctly. If you don’t have a plan, and don’t have an approach and it’s easy to miss the stuff you don’t feel like doing. We avoid the stuff we don’t feel like doing. When it is in your calendar, when it is properly planned out you more likely to work on it.

Schedule. Put it in your calendar. Break it down. Stop putting this off because you don’t feel like doing them because when you don’t feel like doing something, it’s going to feel a lot harder, in the long run, to actually do it. Make a plan, put it in your schedule, commit to it and prepare everything the night before. That makes it more easy and simple for you.

3. Plan for the voice in your head.

We may decide that “okay I am going to start going to the gym tomorrow”, “okay I am going to work on my book for 4 hours”, “I decided I am going to start a podcast”, and we think when we make that decision, there’ going to be no opposition. We think that there will be no resistance to our decisions.

But every decision that you make, will have opposition in your head. You wake up early, the voice says: You can sleep in for a bit longer, it’s okay, you need rest.

You try to eat healthily, the voice says: it’s okay, a little bit won’t hurt. 

And when we hear that voice, we either follow it or we resent it. We either think “what is wrong with me, why can’t I do this” or “oh I should have never done this, I knew I shouldn’t have tried this”.

We know it’s important. We know it’s important to exercise, to eat healthily, to read more, BUT THEN WHY? Why does the voice in our head mislead us? Here’s why: we don’t create an alternative script to communicate and conversate with that voice. When that voice becomes strong, our voice becomes weak.

Solution: Create a self-talk script to counter the voice.

When the voice in your head says “I don’t feel like going to the gym today”, your script should say:

• “but it always feels so amazing when I leave”

• “I want to be fit and healthy to serve”

• “If I don’t work out today, I will regret it tomorrow”

• “I deeply enjoy being a healthy, focused individual”.

Now you are ready, now you have a script to talk to that voice in your head when you don’t feel like doing things.

4. Push through and measure how you feel After and not Before.

The mind holds on to negative memories rather than positive ones. This is why it is important to take a Mental Picture, a Physical Picture and Journal about positive experiences. For example, when you come back from the gym, you can write about how amazing it felt, you can tell your friends that you went etc. Always Journal. When you journal your positive and negative experiences, I promise that your negative experience entries will be longer. That is why I encourage you to Journal about positive experiences. Take pictures, share them, honor them, talk about them!

Imagine if you missed your flight, you would tell everyone about it. But if you catch your flight, you wouldn’t tell many people about it. Why is it that we tell people about things when they go wrong Vs. when they go right? Studies show that as humans we tend to remember traumatic experiences more than positive experiences. Research states that negativity bias starts to emerge in infancy. At one year of age, babies develop greater brain responses to negative stimuli. This suggests that the brain’s negative bias emerges during the latter half of a child’s first year of life. So, what we have to do is, we have to make our positive experiences more powerfully memorable, or we have to create stories through the challenging experiences, of what we learned from that scenario or at least learn to laugh at. So how do you get things done when you don’t feel like it, you push through and focus on the positive feeling you get after it is done.

5. See how it fits into the bigger picture.

Constantly zoom out. When you look at the thing for what it is, when you zoom in, you may not feel like it, but when you zoom out you realize – “Oh I totally get it!” When you zoom out, you get to check it with perspective. Sometimes your feelings mislead you, sometimes your feelings distract you. From what you really want and who you really want to be. Because if you only follow your feelings, you may never learn any of the lessons that are useful.

6. Create Accountability

Do it with someone like a peer or colleague. Accountability partners are everything. Finding someone to do something with, finding a mentor or a coach, someone slightly ahead on the journey, having a commitment to show up, it all helps. You wouldn’t feel like going to the gym every day, but because you are doing it with a trainer, you have to show up. This is the simplest fix. If you don’t want to do something, find someone to do it with.

7. Give yourself a reward.

My favorite reward is a non-digital break. A break for me could mean going to a spa, going on a walk, going outdoors in nature, it could be doing nothing, it could be taking myself out for brunch, it could be anything. If you have a whole week of doing things you don’t feel like, then you can reward yourself with a break for that whole weekend. This can be so motivating that by the coming Monday you would be ready to go at it again. You won’t be able to control how you feel every day, but you can control what you focus on so that you feel better at the end of every day. If you follow your feelings at the beginning of every day, you might not feel better, you’ll probably feel worse. But if you ignore your feelings at the beginning of the day, you might end up doing things that bring you great joy.

8. Outsource it.

What happens in our life is, that sometimes we feel like doing it, sometimes we don’t. But if you don’t feel like doing something ever, yes you can go ahead and outsource it, or get rid of it. If we never ever feel like doing something, we should remove it from our lives if we can.

9. Have Gratitude.

Remember the time when you didn’t have the opportunity to do some things which you now can? Remember that time and be grateful for it now. It’s so easy to get complacent, it is so easy to think that I don’t want to do this anymore, but Gratitude is the key. If we can’t be grateful for a dream we had, we won’t be grateful when we reach the next dream. And that is something we don’t realize. How do you get things done even when you don’t feel like it? You feel grateful for the opportunity, you feel grateful that you even get to do that, and you feel grateful that it has even come across your way. Gratitude is important!

10. Create an external announcement.

Announce it on social media, tell people. I am going to launch a book by this date. I am going to post an episode on my podcast every week. Making a moment out of an announcement creates a commitment, and that commitment drives you because you have promised people something. Create a promise to your community, your audience, and your friends, and show up for them.

These are all the way you can implement various techniques of How to get things done even when you don’t feel like it and to stop procrastinating. Because when you get things done you feel better!