Motivating yourself is hard so here is what I do instead

I travel almost every week for work and as part of my traveling, I take a bus for about 3.5 hours each way every week to be able to work on site. Ahead of the 3.5 hours, I think “wow, I’ve got so much time to do the things I want to do — I can read, I can write, I can journal, I can even watch a few videos to learn something new”.

Then reality kicks in. I get on the bus and then I’m watching movies or TV shows for the few hours that I’m on. Or I end up passing out and taking a nap on the bus. Essentially, I get distracted from whatever I thought I was going to do and end up doing something else.

Has that ever happened to you? You plan on being productive and then end up wasting away hours watching Youtube or browsing through Instagram?

So how do you end up not relying on motivation to get you to do productive work? Here are a few ways that I’ve found that works for me:

From Ramit Sethi — schedule it in your calendar

Think about your work and if you have meetings. Do you ever miss meetings? Do you feel bad when you are even late to a meeting? It’s likely that you keep your meetings as much as possible, whether it’s a meeting with a client, meeting with a boss or a meeting with your team.