How do you stay focused/accountable?
This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently (staying focused/accountable). I've been losing focus very easily, doing tasks that aren't a priority and not thinking twice about it bink and the week has gone.
I know I could be achieving loads more if I just focused and was accountable.
Does anyone else struggle this is as well? Also does anyone got any suggestions to help me combat this issue?
Things that help me a lot:
Excellent points, fully agree.
I also think there is a lot of sled discipline involved, and the ability to plan far ahead but work for short-term improvements also help. I think it's rather easy to forget just how far a tiny amount of work, aggregated, will take you.
Thanks, Courland as always a great reply appreciate the response. It's amazing to see how many of the ways most people feel accountable is by feeling like your letting others down (again illustrated by several of your points). It's a shame as I feel its such a negative standpoint plus its reactive.
Avoiding that feeling is a big motivator for me. As is doing a great job, and trying to impress people and myself, which is the other side of the same coin, and is a bit more positive.
But other people have different motivators. For example, when I talked to Tobias van Schneider he was really into proving people wrong. He does better when people are saying he can't do something, to the point that he sometimes pretends people are saying that just to motivate himself.
In your shoes, I might look back to previous points in my life where I was excited about something and got a lot done, and ask myself what was driving me and keeping me focused back then.
Yer I think it does depend on you personally and your perspective, thanks.
In response to @csallen's comment I'm going to try matching people together in accountability pairs/groups.
If you'd like to be matched sign up here! https://goo.gl/forms/CdG2CUhY39W0WTF42
Definitely struggled a lot with this. One really simple thing I found was that opening a new tab in my browser, even with the intent of doing work, could instead lead to hours of distraction. I had some sort of reflexive reaction to opening a new tab (ctrl+t) which followed that keypress up with (ny+enter). Chrome would auto-fill "nyt.com" and I would end up sucked-into reading the news for hours.
In the end I built a really simple chrome extension to solve the problem of reflexively going to distracting sites that I didn't necessarily want to block forever - if you want to visit the site it just forces you to wait 15 seconds :P
I wouldn't say it totally solved my procrastination problem, but I definitely noticed that my news and facebook consumption dropped a lot after building the extension - it just forced time spent there to be intentional.
If you're interested, it's called Blacklist: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blacklist/jbpccandodannohfaoncogijbkfcmpgo/.
A few things that help me:
I find that social accountability is the most effective in keeping me motivated about tasks and habits. To this end, I am actually in the process of building a platform to 'formalize' this process by allowing groups of people to be collectively held accountable for certain habits or tasks. Would you be interested in having a look when I launch?
Defiitly!
Things that work for me
A few suggestions (from personal experience/struggle with the same thing) -
Committing a block of time everyday for the project, no matter what, can help.
The 1 piece of advice that I've learned from experience is:
When you're the least motivated/inspired to work on your project, work on your project.
In the span of little as 1 hour you'll be surprised with the results you output towards your product, it actually motivates you to keep going and further improving (otherwise you may be putting off that 1 hour task for a week and get nothing done and feel disinterested).
i'm thinking of building an app that tackcles this and would love your feedback https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/get-shit-done-by-being-accountable-8e3aff40f4
Focus comes from motivation. Motivation comes from discipline.
Accountabiltiy comes from having a co-founder and not letting him or myself down.
If you want to make progress on something important like strategy, life goals, etc. make sure "it has legs"
Meaning make sure somebody else is checking in on your progress regularily. Have scheduled meetings and report milestones - to a mentor or paid accountability partner If necessary.
The basic idea is anything which has legs = a person waiting for it will get done because its urgent and important. Trick yourself.
If you have customers, promise that feature x and y will be done before date z.
It's amazingly effective.
I am terrible at this. I'm highly accountable to my consulting clients, but very lacking in accountability to myself. I think this is a combination of burnout (consulting eats 50+ hours per week), and pursuing side projects which have economic potential but spark very little interest in my mind.
I've been trying to identify projects that get me fired up, but it's difficult to do when overworked.
It also doesn't help that after 20 years of writing software I find it intensely boring and unrewarding, as I find myself spending more time working around the limitations of web technologies than I do solving interesting problems. We've basically built entire industries on top of a document delivery engine; a rant for another time I suppose.
I have a group - a few coworkers, others in the extended network, and we have a Slack group together to hold each other accountable - we share what we're doing, ask for advice, and post victories as we build, retweet/amplify each others projects.
I'm trying to make an in-person meetup group - meet up at a coffee shop for a few hours on Saturday and work together. Did it a few times when I lived in another location and loved it, but don't want to waste time trekking to the other location.
Do something you enjoy (at least in general) and something you really care about.
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