What It Take To Complete Your Projects and Accomplish Your Goals

Podcast 136

This week, it’s all about using daily routines to build a structure to your day so you remain focused on what is important and keep the momentum going with your goals

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Script

Episode 136

Hello and welcome to episode 136 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

So how do you make progress on your projects and goals consistently? It’s a question I get asked frequently and it is one of the secrets of the super successful. 

Now the truth is there is no real secret to this, all you need do is look at the way people like Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Warren Buffett and Charles Darwin (yes the Origin of Species author) managed their time and you will see a pattern because really it is a pattern. 

Oh, before we start, don't forget, if you have found that managing your tasks by project creates overwhelm and a lot of tasks slip through the cracks—never to be seen again—then it just might be time for you to try the Time Sector System. 

The Time Sector System is a time management system designed in the twenty-first century, for the way we work today. It takes the overwhelm out of your work and helps to get you realistic about what you can achieve each day. 

If you have tried other systems and not found anything to work, then take a look at the Time Sector System. This might just be the way for you to manage your work and your goals. 

Full details of the Time Sector System are in the show notes. 

Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question. 

This week’s question comes from Terri. Terri asks: hi Carl. I wonder if you have any tips on getting my projects finished. I seem to be very good at starting projects, but after a few weeks, I lose interest and then forget about them. 

Hi Terri, thank you for your question. 

This is something I used to really struggle with myself. I’ve always been very good at coming up with ideas and starting them—whether they are goals or projects— but terrible at finishing. I either got bored or just lost interest in doing them because something else, and seemingly more exciting came up. I felt I was an expert at accumulating projects and goals but terrible at following through. 

In the end, I realised every achievement, every success I had ever had was built on one simple factor. Consistency. 

You see things only move forward when you take action. But for you to get to the end of anything, whether that is a project or a goal you need to take that action consistently. There is no escaping that. There simply is no other way around it and there are no shortcuts.

This is how Dwayne Johnson built his successful acting career. He knows his success is built on three things. His personality, charisma and his physique. He’s not a classically trained actor, but he has natural charm and charisma, and that comes through, but to maintain his physique he has to work out every day and maintain a strict diet. 

Every day, Dwayne Johnson will wake up four hours before he is due on set. That means if he is due on set at 7:30 am, he will wake up at 3:30 am and begin his exercise with forty-five minutes to one hour of cardio. He then has breakfast (eggs and steak yummy!) and does an hour and fifteen-minute weights session. He repeats that six days a week, taking one rest day on a Saturday. 

Question: Would you be willing to do that every day for the rest of your life? 

If you want to be a successful action star, that is the kind of consistent commitment you are going to have to make. 

Now for you to build the momentum you first need to establish what are the tasks and activities you need to complete every day or week in order for you to move things forward? Without really understanding that you are just not going to make any progress.

Let’s say you want to create a number of income streams in preparation for your retirement. The first step is to identify what needs to be done to do that. What kind of income streams are you considering? Which ones are viable? Which ones are not? And what steps can you take each day that will develop and build those income streams? 

You see if you don’t make those decisions and establish what needs to be done every day or week, you will never begin taking action. This project will become a dormant project. It will be in your project list making you feel comfortable because seeing it there makes you feel something is happening but the reality is you are doing nothing to move it forward so it does not move forward. It is stuck, dead, dormant and until you start doing something, anything, it will remain dead. 

That reminds me of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch there. 

Imagine you want to start a podcast. You have the equipment—a laptop, a microphone and some audio editing software. Great. You have the equipment. So what next? How can you build your podcast? You need to begin recording your podcast. Now recording just one is not going to create a successful podcast, you need to be recording one every week. 

So, what do you have to do each week to be able to record a podcast every week? Write a script, record it, edit it and then publish. So, each week you need to set aside time for writing the script, editing and recording. 

I know how long it takes me to do this podcast every week, and that means I need to find around three hours each week. Two hours to prepare the script, thirty minutes to record it and thirty minutes for editing. So, on my calendar I prepare the script on a Tuesday morning, I record it Sunday morning and edit it Sunday afternoon and publish on a Monday morning. 

These tasks are part of my recurring areas of focus and get done consistently every week. If I don’t do all these tasks every week, no podcast will be published. Period. 

I’ve frequently spoken about Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, on this podcast and how he wrote a book every year. The routine was simple. Begin writing at 9:00 am and continue until 12 pm. Then return and do the editing of that day’s writing between 4 pm and 6 pm every day. After six weeks, a book was written. 

And that is the secret. Consistency and routines. Turn the action steps that will take you towards completion into your routines and do them consistently until your project is finished or your goal is accomplished. 

As Robin Sharma says: “all great things are difficult at the beginning, messy in the middle and beautiful at the end.” 

Getting started is hard, keeping going when you doubt yourself is very messy, but by making sure you do whatever needs doing consistently over a period of time you will eventually have a completed project. 

So how do you keep yourself motivated to keep going when things are hard. I remember when I began my YouTube channel, my videos were getting a few views, and I was picking up a few subscribers here and there. It was slow, it was hard and it was very difficult sometimes to give up five or six hours each week to make the videos. 

But I knew the only way to grow and develop the channel was to keep going no matter how hard it sometimes seemed. I can promise you is was very hard to start. It was incredibly messy in the middle because a lot of time I had no idea what I was doing. But with each video, I made I was learning. I was getting better and my confidence was growing. 

Today I have almost 50,000 subscribers—nowhere near the number the really successful YouTubers have, but to me, that is not important. For me, it’s about learning and helping. Each video I make I learn. And each video, I hope, helps at least a few people learn something that will help them to reduce their stress and become more productive. I am achieving my goal. 

So, you need to develop the routines and build the structures into your days and weeks that will sustain your momentum. That is the only way you will build anything. 

So once you have established the action steps you need to take consistently, get those action steps set up as recurring action steps in your to-do list manager or your calendar. Make them non-negotiable. Be determined to make them happen every day or week and understand that unless you are prepared to do that you will fail. 

Another important factor here is to not confuse thinking and planning with taking action. Of course, you do need to do some thinking and you will need to do some planning, but all your thinking and planning is not moving anything forward. The only way to start moving things forward is to actually start taking real action. 

Write that script, record that first episode and publish it. You will learn far more from doing that than you ever will researching and talking about it. 

I often read articles that tell you to develop your branding, to establish who your audience is and to research your area. All that is complete rubbish. You will never know who your real audience is until you begin publishing. You could spend weeks developing a brand image only to discover that the people attracted to your message are not the people you thought would be attracted to it and you then have to waste a lot of time re-branding and rethinking your strategy. Publishing and getting whatever you want to do out there will teach you far more and a lot faster than ‘strategising’. 

As Nike says: Just do it! 

So Terri, make a decision about what needs to happen consistently. Make sure you plan when you will do those action steps every week and get started. The sooner you start the sooner you will get the kind of feedback you need to adjust and improve and the sooner you will get to the end of the project or achieve your goal. It’s all about turning action steps into routines and habits and making sure those steps happen every week. 

I hope that helps. And thank you so much for your question. 

Thank you also to all of you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.