Today marks the start of the second half of 2013. The last 6 months went by in a flash and this is my report card. I made the public announcement in a March blog post that I was going to publish a blog post every Monday from April 1st. I published 7 blog posts between September 2012 – March 2013 (7 month period) which I considered unacceptable, but since my announcement I have published 13 blog posts between April – June 2013 (3 month period). I have almost doubled 7 previous months output in 3 months. What is responsible for this?
I tried different tactics in the past to blog consistently but nothing seemed to work until I made my blogging goal public. I also invited my blog readers to chase me up if I failed to publish a blog post at the end of every Monday. The act of setting myself a public challenge has motivated me to write and publish because I am determined not to fail in public. I realised that I needed external pressure to discipline me. The psychology of putting this external pressure on myself has motivated me to produce consistently which is my primary blogging goal. My aim is that this will eventually become an automatic habit that the external pressure will be unnecessary.
The fact that I know that I have a weekly deadline helps focus my mind because I know that I need to publish a blog post by 11.59pm every Monday. There is certainly a psychological power in declaring some of your goals publicly as the desire to avoid failing before the world can be the right motivation which you need to achieve that goal.
What goal(s) do you need to declare publicly in order to get motivated to start and complete it?
One reply on “Report Card”
Hey Prof, I gotta say I admire your courage to be open about this matter. You’re right though, sometimes it takes sharing goals to fuel the motivation needed for output. By the way, well done for following through on your blogging goal.
I tend to tell a select few about my plans…and in their own ways, they remind me of what I said I would do, and it reminds me that I need to get cracking on my goals because I don’t want to have to come up with excuses, and nobody likes to fail.
I’m working on being even more productive in this second half of the year. I’m determined to first of all not disappoint myself when I look back 6 months from now. Incidentally, I am my harshest critic, so I expect improvement if only to avoid ‘beating up myself’.