Struggling with consistent progress?
I'm building a specialty job board in a niche that's a pain in the ass to aggregate. There's real money in it. The hard part isn't the build.
The hard part is the small, consistent stuff I don't want to do. Emailing HR at a big company. Practice managers. Hiring supervisors. Asking for money. When it gets hard I stall and name it "research" or whatever else sounds responsible. I'm a research hound (and a trained leadership coach), so I can lose a whole afternoon not sending the email and still feel like I worked.
I'm a dad of two with a full-time job. I've still gotten through half marathons, a marathon, a triathlon, and powerlifting meets. What made that possible wasn't motivation. It was writing down the thing for that day. Specific. Cross-offable. Did I do the thing I said I'd do? If yes, great. If no, I know the score. A feeling is not a score.
I'm trying to turn that into something I can hand to people who still have their January 1 list sitting there because it's too big to start.
I made a short workbook. Research-based, the same stuff I'd use in a coaching session, easy to get through. It will not clear your whole list. It will get you one thing done. Start embarrassingly small. Get consistent. Then add a slightly bigger chunk.
If you want to try it and tell me what sucked or what was helpful, say so and I'll send it. If you're really stuck on being consistent I'm happy to hop on a short call and give you a few ways to get moving.
The ‘research’ label is doing a lot of work here. I’d keep the workbook, but make the first page an action contract: name one person to contact, write the exact ask, and set a deadline before the next research session. Then track a smaller signal than ‘did the email work?’ — did you send it without reopening the task? That separates avoidance from a bad market response. The marathon comparison feels relevant too: the useful unit isn’t motivation, it’s the next repeatable step you can finish on a tired Tuesday.
Careful, the workbook might be the same avoidance wearing better clothes. What you are dodging is not consistency in general, it is asking strangers for money, and the only thing that ever fixed that for me was putting it first with a number attached: five emails before I open anything else, done is done whether anyone replies or not. The first nine months of building my company was almost entirely that one uncomfortable call, and the discomfort never went away, I just stopped letting anything else compete for the 7am slot.
Hi,
Judging from what you call 'research' in your post, this looks like something you need virtual help with while juggling your usual jobs and your presence as a full-time dad.
If you are open to a collaboration, I could actually take on all of those aspects you mentioned while you carry on with what is more important.
I look forward to hearing from you: juneometere@gmail.com.
Assalam U Alaikum!
I'm HM. Aakif and solo founder from Pakistan, and start My SAAS journey without coding knowldege. Continue man don't worry inshallah you will achieve your success. And I am premedical student and I also do a parttime job at a pharmacy. don't
don't feel demotivated.
This resonates with me. I work in clinical practice while learning SEO and building online tools, and “research” can easily become the comfortable part because it feels productive without requiring anything to be finished.
What has helped me is giving each session one visible finish line: correct one page, publish one useful section, or test one feature. If I define the task as “work on the website,” it can expand indefinitely. If I define it as “finish this one section tonight,” I am much more likely to complete it.
I am still learning consistency myself, but small completed tasks seem to create more momentum than a long list of partially researched ones.
Interesting that you’ve identified “research” as the place where progress can hide.
Curious whether the biggest friction is actually doing the work, or deciding which work is worth doing first.
Shows up differently for different people. I see this constantly: overwhelm arrives as tightness in the chest or a heaviness in the gut, and people attribute it to almost anything except the thing they're avoiding. Or it shows up as a sudden urge to clean, check Slack, book the trip, or read IH/HN/reddit/etc.
That's not laziness. Sirois and Pychyl's work frames procrastination as short-term mood repair. Avoidance is an effective anxiolytic that lasts about twenty minutes. And Steel's meta-analysis found task aversiveness to be one of the strongest predictors of delay, which fits: the running away tells you exactly where the aversion sits. Then you can name the pattern and cut the task down to something you'll actually start.
My own version was powerlifting. Putting heavy things on your back is unpleasant to contemplate, so you dilly-dally and do leg extensions and a light treadmill walk instead. What changed it was an accountability coach. Every day: did you do the workout you intended, what did each rep feel like, did you hit the numbers.
There's decent evidence behind it. Harkin et al. 2016 pooled 138 randomized studies, ~20,000 people, and found prompting progress monitoring improved goal attainment, with bigger effects when progress was recorded and made visible to someone else. Caveat: most of those studies were health behaviors, so I'd hold it loosely outside that domain.
That’s an interesting distinction. The idea that avoidance can reveal where the real aversion sits is particularly compelling.