How I Make Myself Work When I’m Lazy (it’s not discipline)

I struggle with motivation a lot. Trust me, I've tried everything from time blocking to Pomodoro, GTD method to 2-minute roll, and none of them worked for me. There's always something I know I got to do, but I don't. I wait for the motivation to kick in, but it never comes. When I need it, suddenly around 2:00 a.m. in the middle of the night, I would get super hyped up about something and promise myself that I would change this time, only to find myself in the same position three days after. What's worse is that the more I repeat this cycle, the more I doubt myself and feel awful.

I used to say you don't need motivation; the only thing you need is discipline. But I disagree now because completely relying on discipline is not sustainable in the long run, and it causes burnouts. So how can we get things done without relying on motivation or discipline? I read dozens of books, watched hundreds of hours of content, and with trial and error, I found the solution. Today, I'm going to introduce you to the system I used to get things done and work without relying on motivation.

The major mistake we all do is not understanding the underlying reason why we struggle with motivation and procrastinate. Without understanding what is causing it, it's almost like going to a doctor, getting a medication without getting a diagnosis. Imagine you're actually like an Alzheimer’s patient but get a medication for diabetes; it doesn't make sense. Rather than trying every single productivity tip you see online, it's much better to first understand the reason and try to solve that issue so that you spend less time trying to figure out what works for you.

There are a bunch of reasons why you might be struggling with motivation, and even the same person can struggle with different reasons depending on the season of their life. So today I decided to talk about the most common ones: lack of clarity, feeling overwhelmed, feeling unfulfilled, burnout, and also lack of system. If you're interested in other reasons and how to solve them, I will have videos coming, so stay tuned.

Most of us, I think including myself, really struggle with clarity because we are taught—especially if you’re in productivity—that the more you get done, the better it is. But one thing I learned after talking with other entrepreneurs is that most successful people actually only focus on a handful of things, and they just eliminate everything. But to do so, we first need to be super clear on what to focus on and what to eliminate.

The first step we're going to do is actually dumping everything we have in our mind. I usually like to either use Notion or my iPad for doing a brain dump. By beginning our day doing a brain dump, we eliminate the feeling of overwhelm. Notifications popping in and so many things are distracting us. All these things are inputs in our brain, so subconsciously, actually, we're getting overwhelmed every single day, and that's completely normal. When you do this even for once, you're going to see the immediate results of like getting clarity and feeling at peace.

So whether you decide on 5, 10, or 15 minutes, the important thing is that you basically set yourself a deadline. The reason why we set a timer is because of Parkinson’s Law. Basically, if you give a task an hour, it's going to take an hour. If we're going to give it 5 minutes, it's going to take 5 minutes.

So step two is to filter. Go through your brain dump and write down 10 things you need to get done that day. Now, what we need to do is prioritize them. I'm actually terrible at prioritizing. When I have 10 tasks in front of me, I look at them and I'm like, "Okay, which one should I do first? Which one should I do next?" Then I get overwhelmed, and I do nothing.

So if you don't want to be like me, what I recommend is using the Eisenhower Matrix. It basically divides the tasks into four different categories based on their importance and also their urgency. Quadrant one is for the important and urgent tasks. These are the tasks that require your immediate attention. Let's say the kitchen's flooding or your toilet is broken, like happened to me two weeks ago. We want to ideally get these done first, so that we won't get stressed over them and we will also not face these consequences.

Next up, we have the Q2 tasks. These are the important but not urgent tasks. Oftentimes, because they don't have a deadline, we always say that we're going to start someday, and then that someday never comes. I always did that a couple of years ago. I would always tell myself that I'm going to start working out tomorrow, and that tomorrow never came. So one day, I said, "Okay, I should actually schedule a time in my calendar." If you don't make active time for your Q2 tasks, you will never have time for them.

Once I started to actually commit to working out, I got quite jacked in like two years. Not really sure whether you can see my muscles, but I'm pretty healthy and doing pretty well. Let's see whether you can see them—maybe not that much—but yeah, I'll include some pictures, don't worry about it. Okay, and then we also have the Q3 tasks. These are the urgent ones but not important ones—for example, like work emails that you don't care about.

So we're going to always do the Q1 first, schedule time for the Q2 batch, and try to eliminate Q4. Once you create this list of 10 different tasks, make sure that there's at least one task in Q2. If there’s nothing in Q2, that is a very big red flag. I would go through my list once again and find one in Q2.

Now step three is going to be picking your focus of the day. This is going to be something that is going to get closer to your long-term goals, whether that's working out, whether that's working on your business, maybe taking online courses, or maybe spending more time with your family, or let's say going to therapy—something like that. This focus of the day should be something that is going to make you more fulfilled and happy in the long term.

If you have an all-or-nothing attitude like me, starting from I think 20 minutes is a really good spot. Because if you do something for 20 minutes every single day, you actually see a significant amount of results. Also, if you have more time, you can spend more time on it. The important thing is that every single day you pick a focus of the day and do something for your future self.

Saying no to all the deadlines, all the distractions, all the obligations that you have and making time for yourself. Whenever I don't actively make time for the things that I care about and that give me fulfillment, I really start to question the meaning of life, and life starts to feel really pointless. Everything becomes boring, and that really demotivates me, and I start procrastinating.

When picking your focus of the day, you can use a Notion template like mine or you can use this app, Widget, where you can type a note and put it on the screen of your phone, so that whenever you unlock your phone, you see it. Whatever it is, it’s important that you write this somewhere else that you can easily see it.

Speaking of Notion, they've recently launched an amazing feature called Q&A. This feature provides instant answers to your questions using information from across your workspace. It's like having your own executive assistant that you can bug 24/7 with questions. Let's say you had a meeting with your team but can't remember the task you need to handle. No worries; you can ask the Q&A. Or let's say you're using Notion for school and you want to find a specific class note. You can ask Q&A.

The difference between Q&A and traditional AI chat bots is that Q&A understands your business, previous decisions, and meeting notes to provide accurate and relevant answers. It only uses the internal knowledge within your Notion workspace, making it far more personalized than other AI models trained on publicly available information. It saves so much time and reduces repetitive questions.

Whether you're trying to find company policies or trying to check a project status, instead of messaging your coworker or your friend to find the answer you need, you can simply ask Q&A. It will also give you the link to the relevant Notion page so that you can dive deeper if you need to. If you're already a Notion AI user, you can get started today with Q&A already in your Notion workspace. You can get started with Notion AI for only $10 a month. If you're interested in trying it out, join the waitlist to get early access. I have my link in the description below.

At this point, we should have 10 tasks on our list and one focus of the day. Now, out of these 10 tasks, we're going to eliminate five of them. Yes, you heard it right—we're going to eliminate five of them. One thing that I learned over time is that even though sometimes I think I have to get this done today or I'm going to die, I do it the next day or maybe the day after, and it's actually not the end of the world.

In the beginning, you might not be able to eliminate if you have been procrastinating for a while and things piled up, but make sure that it's absolutely a must. If you can't eliminate, one thing that you can do is to only get them done. Once you accomplish your top five and also your daily highlight, once you have finished these, then you can work on the remaining tasks. If you skip your daily highlight and keep focusing on urgent tasks, you will get burned out, and you will find yourself in the same position. So it's actually a non-negotiable for this method to work.

I think most of the productivity methods just don't have this step, and this is the most important step, in my opinion—at least for me. At the end of each day, I sometimes forget it, I'm not going to lie. But at the end of each day, ideally, I'm supposed to do it, and you're supposed to do it—go through your task list and look at how many of them you got done.

The top three and the daily focus is a non-negotiable. If you get done your top three tasks and your daily focus, you're going to give yourself a tick. If you couldn't get done your top three tasks and your daily focus, these are just like a set, then you give yourself a one cross. The important thing is tracking this in a visible position—whether that's a Notion template that you have and where you track it, or whether it's a whiteboard, or whether it's the sticky widget or what is your like Apple notes.

It doesn't matter; it should be in a place where you see it all the time so that your subconscious makes sure and makes it important that this actually matters for you. Because one really important thing I learned is that "out of sight, out of mind" is so true. If I'm not seeing it visually, you know, on a whiteboard, then I find I forget about it and I never do it. So make sure that every single day you track it.

I think actually doing this on a whiteboard kind of becomes a game, and being able to see that first thing in the morning really motivates me. Actually, sometimes things don't go well. I mean, 90% of the time things will go well, to be honest. But one important thing is that we never skip two days in a row. I mean, if something extreme happens, obviously you have all the rights to rest, but I'm not talking about that.

And you know that once we have marked our day, the last important step is writing down in one sentence what went well and what could have been better. This is going to be the action point for tomorrow, and by looking at this, we're going to try to prevent the same mistake happening. Maybe that day you forgot to turn off your notifications, and you got a call from your friend, and you ended up chatting for three hours, which I did last week. So it was actually my feedback for a couple of days ago.

The next day, you know just put your phone in do-not-disturb mode. Depending on your life, the reason why you're struggling is going to be different. So we can't act like there is going to be one magical method that is going to, like, cure it. Like the GTD method can't cure everything and all the problems you have in your life. It doesn't work like that. I don't know; at least it doesn’t work like that for me.

By reflecting every single day on what went well, maybe you went to a café, and you were really able to focus, so do that next day again—the same thing. By repeating the things that went well and by eliminating the things that maybe didn't go that well, we give ourselves every single day a chance to improve.

So by doing this, you start to rely on motivation and discipline less and less, and because we gamify this, and we also try to understand our emotions and behaviors, it gives a very high awareness of your actions. It actually made me realize that I'm a human and I'm not a robot.

Depending on the things that are happening around me, sometimes my motivation and my drive fluctuate. I learn that, and the important thing is rather than pushing yourself all the time and telling yourself, "Oh, you're a loser," rather than doing that, understand your situation, adapt to it, and knowing what to do in those scenarios is going to help you more in the long run.

If you like this video and found it helpful, I'm currently working on creating a free community where I can connect like-minded people and also add a master guide, maybe a mini course, maybe a PDF—who knows—about time management for different reasons. Today we mainly covered overwhelm, burnout, lack of clarity, and lack of fulfillment. In upcoming videos, I'm thinking about covering other areas, so if you're interested, let me know in the comments, and see you soon!