Ever feel overwhelmed by how large a task is? Did it seem like there was no way you were going to accomplish it? Did the enormity of the task make you want to just throw up your hands and say, “The heck with this”? If so, welcome to the world of demotivation due to lack of successability.
Successability refers to your confidence in your competence. The more confident you are in your ability to succeed at a particular goal or task, the more motivated you will be to do it. Unfortunately, the converse is also true, the less confident you are in your ability to do the task, the less motivated you will be to do it.
This is the problem with tasks or goals that are really big; they overwhelm you. You wonder if you will be able to do them; they create doubts and make you insecure. You lose your confidence and then lose your motivation.
There is a strategy you can use to overcome this problem. It’s really quite easy.
I call this strategy breaking it down. In this strategy we make what had been an overwhelming task into a series of less onerous tasks. We do this either by breaking the task into its component parts, or by setting a limit on the amount of time we will be engaged in the task at this particular time.
I faced this very problem over this past weekend. I’ve recently started tweeting, so I purchased a book on how to use Twitter in marketing. I believe Twitter is a powerful tool, but only if you know how to use it. So I wanted to learn how to use it properly. Saturday morning I took the book out of my brief case, and the first thing I notice is how long it is, 477 pages, so many pages. The very next thing I notice is that the lawn needs cutting. I was clearly looking for a distracter, some reason to not read the book. But I knew I wanted to become an expert in Twitter; I really wanted to study the book, but my motivation wasn’t strong enough to overcome my reluctance at such a major task as studying a 477 page book. So what I did was set a time limit for myself. I told myself I only needed to read for one hour. I even set the timer on the microwave for one hour so I would not be distracted by wondering when I had completed my hour.
I told myself that after that hour if I wanted to mow the lawn, I would allow myself to. This was a much more manageable task, so with such a manageable task at hand, one I was confident I could complete, I was once again motivated. As it worked out, I studied the book for an hour, and then just kept reading, for another hour.
What we are also doing when we break it down is matching the chore to our available motivation. I didn’t have enough motivation to read the whole darn book, but I did have enough to read for one hour, which turned into two hours.
I could just as easily have broken down the task of studying the book into its component parts. For a book it’s easy to do. Each chapter of the book is a component part. To apply the strategy in this way, I would have assigned myself a certain number of chapters.
Breaking tasks down, either by component part or by setting time limits, can work wonders when you are facing an overwhelmingly big task.
Why not try it out next time you are facing such a task?
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