Today I’m publishing my latest podcast episode — one that is the first in a series of four. The series “Get Things Done The Easy Way” aims to help you embrace more ease, joy and freedom in life. I delve into a new approach to productivity, one that foregoes traditional notions of discipline and motivation, emphasizing instead the ease and joy of doing what we truly want.
I've noticed a common theme in both my personal projects and my coaching practice: people achieve more when they align their tasks with their desires. Throughout this series, I will guide you toward understanding how less resistance and minimal procrastination can occur when embracing tasks that excite and engage us.
(Keep reading for a written version of this podcast episode, and stay tuned for the next parts of this series where we delve deeper into making ease a permanent part of your productivity system!)
🗝 Key takeaways in today’s episode:
- Discover why you only need motivation for tasks you don’t actually want to do, and how focusing on what you genuinely like doing requires less effort.
- We'll explore how managing your workload with a focus on pleasurable tasks reduces stress and improves overall happiness.
- Find out how taking a break and allowing yourself some downtime can unexpectedly boost your creativity and productivity.
This episode is not just about doing less but about doing what feels meaningful. Tune in, simplify your approach, and let’s make productivity a joyful pursuit together. Check it out, and start integrating ease and fun into your tasks!
🙏 Your Participation Counts
Your thoughts and feedback are invaluable! Did the episode resonate with you? Maybe it sparked a new idea, or you have a story to share about how shifting your focus has transformed your productivity. I encourage you to hit reply and let me know your thoughts. Your input could shape our future episodes!
Get Things Done The Easy Way
In this article series I will outline the ideas that help you get things done the easy way – it’s a kind of productivity system that requires less discipline or willpower and puts motivation on speed dial.
This “system” addresses procrastination, lack of motivation, stress and goals. And I aim to help you develop a way to get things done with more ease, so that you can have more fun and freedom in more areas of your life, even if …
You see, what I’m claiming is that for things you WANT to do there’s less hesitation, delay or procrastination – there’s simply less motivation, willpower or discipline required, when compared to the things you DON’T want to do.
What you WANT to do gets done without the need for motivation – you only need motivation for the things you DON’T want to do.
Then perhaps the ultimate productivity hack is to focus on doing the things you WANT to do. Of course there’s the issue of all the things you HAVE to do or that you SHOULD do, and I will in this series of articles help see how to address these challenges as well.
You see, I happen to believe that doing more things that we enjoy, that feels good and that matters is important and a path to living a life of more meaning, freedom and fulfilment.
I encourage you to reach out to me to share your feedback, thoughts and concerns around this topic and my musings. That way I can improve my concepts and we get to have an interactive experience around this. This can be done with great ease here on the Substack platform: you can leave a comment, you can send me a direct message or simply send me an email.
What I will cover in this series, in order to help you get things done the easy way, are:
If we only did what we wanted, we wouldn’t get anything done.
How to handle the things you SHOULD or HAVE to do?
What if you STILL don’t feel like doing something?
What about goals, performance or productivity?
What If We Only Did What We Wanted To Do?
If we did only what we WANTED to do, we wouldn’t get anything done, right? That’s usually the first thought that comes into our minds. Or at least it’s one of the most common questions I hear whenever I have this conversation with people – and as a life coach, change and motivation expert I do have this conversation with a lot of people!
First of all, I think you’re not giving yourself enough credit. If you think you wouldn’t do anything unless you HAD to, that being because of some external pressure, consequence or reward, I don’t think you’re doing yourself justice. Unbeknownst to you, there’s an infinite creativity and endless possibility that resides within yourself. (And I will help you see this for yourself, read on.)
Secondly, this often comes down to a very common misunderstanding, one that is assuming that in contrast to your current busy, hectic, effortful and potentially uncomfortable situation and ways of doing things, what you most desire is to do NOTHING. This is the REACTIVE way of going about living life. And it’s very common. The object of our desire is often the opposite of what we’re loathing in our current reality.
For example: when we’re stuck working at a job we hate, we imagine finding a job that we’d love. Or when we’re feeling overworked after long and intense periods of work we often picture time off, laying on a beach somewhere doing absolutely nothing.
For that reason, it’s not surprising that what comes to mind whenever we entertain the idea of only doing the things we want to do, we picture doing NOTHING at all! Doing nothing at all seems like the most appropriate response to a lifestyle filled with too much to do. The misunderstanding lies in the fact that the best we can come up with is based on what’s the opposite of how things are currently, and then believing that THAT is what we REALLY want.
A Simple Misunderstanding
What makes the idea of only doing what we want so scary is because from where you are now, what seems to be the logical scenario is to simply do nothing at all. It might be true that in the short term that is exactly what you might want to do, and it might very well be exactly what you end up doing – nothing, that is.
Most of us have a lot going on in life in general. In the past 50 or so years we’ve been adopting all kinds of ways to become more productive and to save more time for other things. The problem is that we’ve never actually ended up reinvesting that time into anything else but MORE work – MORE busyness. And here we are, overcommitted, overworked, overstressed and on the brink of burnout. Reading books on personal and professional productivity trying to learn some better ways to cope with all the demands (I see you ❤️).
It’s a funny thing that we’ve taken on the responsibility to become more productive so that we can get it all done. For who? For what reason? Just like most industries somehow managed to convince consumers of their products that THEY are the ones responsible for the proper disposal of their products no matter the risks associated with them, somehow productivity has managed to be outsourced and placed on the individual to become better at handling more, faster and often. At no time do we stop and question this delegation, this sidestepping of responsibility. Who's benefiting from this? You? Me?
This is not an article (book) about broken and late-stage capitalism, so I won’t dive into this. However, I will point the finger at any corporation or organisation that is extracting value by trading in people’s time. When your time is being traded away for something else in return, then when you become better at doing more things at the same time or faster then the return of their investment is going up.
So here we find ourselves doing more all the time. Most of the things we do aren’t even the things we’d like to do. The things we’d like to do get put off and end up last on the to-do lists and are things that hopefully we can circle back to once we retire(?).
So when someone proposes that you only do what you want to do, of course your mind jumps to the thought of doing nothing for a long while. It’s a natural response to all the over-doing that’s been happening over the past years or decades. However, doing nothing isn’t likely to be how you spend your time doing what you want to do. The fear is unfounded and based on the simple misunderstanding that being allowed to do anything you wanted would mean that you wouldn’t do anything at all. It is perhaps true, that for a little while, for a short period of time you would indeed slow everything down and simply BE in order to recover and recharge – this is a perfectly natural and healthy reaction to the typical hectic and stressful lives we lead. It doesn’t mean that it would remain the way you spent the rest of your life. But thinking that it would be is often the thought or fear that gives rise to the rejection of the whole idea of doing only what you want to do.
You staying passive and inactive is very unlikely once your reserves are restocked and your batteries are recharged. Instead, what is more likely to happen is that there’ll be a surge of inspiration, motivation and curiosity. What I’m inviting you to keep in mind here is that the fear of ending up doing nothing forever is most often simply a reaction to how life seems at this moment. It’s an opposite reaction to your current situation. Seeing this typical misconception will help you see through the initial fear and can help you stay open to what comes next.
Infinite Creativity And Endless Possibilities
Due to the ways that we’ve been raised, taught and managed, by mostly well meaning authorities, influencers and rolemodels, we’ve come to think that unless there’s a stick or a carrot we couldn't possibly get anything done. We need the looming fear of negative consequences or the promise of future rewards in order to move ourselves into action. Left to our own devices, we’d simply do nothing.
This idea is founded in a very big misunderstanding in my opinion. The misunderstanding is making the assumption that nothing of value would be done if you simply got to do what you wanted, and the idea is failing to acknowledge human potential with its infinite creativity and endless possibilities. When we don’t think higher of ourselves and the general human potential then it becomes easy to believe that people are lazy and what’s needed for significant things to happen is a stick or a carrot.
Decades ago, it was a known fact to NASA (the U.S Federal government agency responsible for the civil space program) that some very critical and even life-saving problem solving, ideas and creativity was being discovered outside and away from the high-stakes and demanding performance-driven work environment. It was an observation that made a surprising discovery which was referred to as the “3B’s”. It’s a phenomenon that is said to have played a crucial part in saving the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970.
The 3B’s were locations where employees seemed to often come up with ideas or solutions to complex problems while being far removed from their work desks. It was observed that typically while taking a bathroom break or taking a shower (which supposedly was the case with saving the Apollo 13 space mission), or while going to bed or waking up or while riding the bus to or from work (or in any vehicle really) were all very potent locations for creative ideas to come to mind. This is what became referred to as the “3B’s”: Bathrooms, Bedrooms, Buses.
What they all have in common is that these are places or situations where you’re often doing something completely different than working hard on something. It’s a place or situation void of the proverbial stick or carrot. And this condition seems to allow creativity to flow more freely and make otherwise hard-to-make connections.
Even Einstein is said to have had some of his best ideas in the bathroom, in the bathtub to be more specific. Einstein used to sit in his bathtub for hours playing with soap bubbles. Embarrassed, his wife had to tell waiting guests that he can never be disturbed in the bathroom. In the lab he can be disturbed, but never in his bathroom – because it’s the place where he gets so utterly relaxed that all the great insights happen to him in there.
A funny (and helpful) sidenote, years ago, as I was supporting a former client in trying to develop a high-performance strategy to help grow his business and team, I shared the concept of the 3B’s to point out that good ideas are found in the places of the 3B’s while not over-working or over-performing. It didn’t take long for him to adopt the concept and he quickly made his own discovery; a fourth location; a forth “B” where creativity seems to be born: the beach. It became one of his go-to places whenever he sought to solve a problem or to find a reason to act. Bathrooms, Bedrooms, Busses and Beaches are places with little association to hard work or performance.
And speaking of beaches… When we daydream and imagine a radically different reality to what we currently have, feeling stuck at a job we don’t like, 1 out of 2 (based on my own personal case study) dream about being financially independent so that we never have to work another day in our life and can instead spend all days laying on the beach or by the pool catching some sun sipping on our favourite drink.
However, lying on the beach drinking mai tais all day long, every day of the week for weeks and weeks can get pretty old after some time … And you might start feeling bored.
To me, feeling bored is not a bad thing though. As I mentioned before, when your mind gets to wander, which typically happens when you’re feeling bored, your mind begins to form new ideas. Your mind is making connections you’d otherwise never make had you been occupied with busy work or distractions or escapism.
When you’re bored you create the space to tap into what you’d LIKE to do … instead of being busy doing what you HAVE to do.
For example, if you’d get to eat your favourite meal every day for every meal, it might become a bit repetitive and possibly a bit lacking after a while. The same could be true for listening to your favourite song, after a while you’d get tired of it, and you’d start to wonder: what else is out there? What other foods might you like? What other songs might be good?
I’m sure you recognise what I’m pointing out here: that after a while something that started out as a nice or even a desirable experience can lose its attractiveness, this is part of what psychologist call hedonic adaptation, meaning that what’s NEW NOW eventually becomes the new norm, leading to the excitement to wear off and for boredom to creep in.
AND, boredom isn’t your enemy! It’s your gateway. It’s a gateway for us to access what it is that we WANT to do, rather than always trying to catch up with life’s all demands or commitments never having time to do more of the things that makes us happy. If what’s stopping you from doing more of what you want to do is your fear that you would end up doing NOTHING, I hope that you now see that that it’s not likely to be the case.
A lot of innovation and improvements have seen the light of day, not from a place of necessity or survival, but from a place of playful dreaming and ideation. I’ve come to see how even if there’s a need to first relax and do nothing, once the scales have balanced themselves again, our minds start to open up, becoming curious, and start looking around with wonder: what else is there? What can I do with my time? What would I love to do?
In moments like these there’s so much bandwidth and energy being freed up and coming through you. By freed up I mean that this is bandwidth and energy which was always there, but simply didn’t flow freely. It was disrupted. Disrupted by all the “musts” and “shoulds”, by all the obligations, duties and expectations, self-imposed or otherwise.
Riding this surge of energy and asking yourself what it is that you’d like to do with your time and attention is a great way to get things done. Engaging in an activity from this place will often lead to what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “a state of flow”, a state where things feel exciting – with just the right amount of tension and relaxation.
Innate to us all is a drive to make a difference. An intrinsically rewarding feeling of being productive and producing something of value, to contribute. This drive might feel foreign to you right now, because you’re so used to having to force, convince and will yourself into action. Coming from a state of survival, overwhelm and stress, “doing nothing” will seem as the most desirable option right now. That’s fine. Rest there for a while. And soon you’ll awaken to an innate drive to make or do something of meaning, something that matters. And you’ll find yourself doing things that might look like work, performance or even the pursuit of goals, AND they are likely things that you WANT to do.
In Conclusion
We can INDEED do things AND get things DONE without a stick or a carrot – without a threat or a treat.
The fear that you’d end up doing nothing if given the chance to do whatever you wanted to do, I hope you now see is unfounded. The fear comes from your current state of being, a state of being overwhelmed and over-committed, and from there what seems most desirable is to do nothing. We typically desire the opposite of an undesirable situation as a REACTION to current circumstances.
And within you, within all of us, there’s an innate drive and curiosity, an infinite creativity with endless possibilities, and a desire to be of value, to make a difference and to contribute, which is longing to be released and expressed. The idea that you’d do nothing if you could do whatever you wanted just isn’t true. You have no reason to hold yourself back from doing more of what you want to do.
Instead, ask yourself: What would be possible if I DID do more of the things I WANTED to do? What would I do? How would things change? How would the people around me benefit?
Please send me a DM sharing your insights or leave a comment helping others discover their own “permission slip” to do more of what they want.
Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/prigida/thermal
https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/artificial-intelligence
https://uppbeat.io/t/brock-hewitt-stories-in-sound/rule-of-life
https://uppbeat.io/t/braden-deal/straight-chillin
https://uppbeat.io/t/sonda/united
https://uppbeat.io/t/prigida/burble
Get Things Done The Easy Way - Part One