You can have a clear goal, a solid action plan and a working planning system… And struggling to make progress on your projects. All planning systems won’t help you if you lack the fuel to make steady progress towards your goals.
Whatever the “size”, the ambition of your goal or your project, you will go through many different emotional states during your goal journey:
- excited and enthusiastic about doing something new…
- overwhelmed by the number of things to do
- motivated to succeed anyway
- discouraged by (small or large) obstacles to overcome
- etc
Making progress on your projects achieving them is often like riding a roller coaster. And it’s not always easy to manage your emotions and keep your motivation, focus and organization at their peak all along the way.
Whether your goal is to start your business, create your blog, do sports regularly or simply repaint a wall or sew your first t-shirt, you will need to regularly “fuel up” to allow you to make progress on your projects.
What fuel are we talking about?
The “fuel” that allows you to move forward on a daily basis is made of 3 ingredients all essential to achieve your goals. To boost your projects, you will need :
- Motivation
- Organization
- Concentration
It is when you can bring these 3 elements together at the same time that you are able to make progress on your projects and towards your goals: you are focused on what really matters, and you have all the energy you need to take action and move your projects forward.
So here are some tips and suggested tools to boost your motivation, organization and focus on a daily basis. And FINALLY get to achieve of your projects!
How to make progress on projects:
Motivation
Motivation is the basic energy for everything we do. It is the momentum, the drive to get things done. It can be triggered by many different factors which vary according to people, the moment and the environment in which we find ourselves. But we can distinguish two main types of motivation:
- The internal motivation: it is the one that comes from you, it is your inner fire. It is linked to how what you’re doing resonate with your purpose: does it appeal to your desire to learn, to your wish to contribute to something greater than yourself, to your desire to deploy your creativity?
- The external motivation: this is the one that comes from the outside world. It can be linked to the way others look at you, to the perspective of getting a reward or a benefit from an action…
In order to make progress on your projects and achieve your goal, you need to fuel this motivation: you need to be able to renew it, to fuel your desire to achieve your goal. Because it is above all your motivation that will give you the energy to take action and make progress on your projects.
Therefore, the idea is to be able to use these 2 types of motivation (internal and external motivation) to recharge your motivation when you need it.
Fueling your motivation can be done through:
- regaining self-confidence
- celebrating your progress
- etc
The drivers of your motivation depends on your character, and your general mindset… It’s up to you to find what boosts your motivation and to activate these “boosters” when you start to lack energy to achieve your goal or when you feel discouraged.
Some examples of tools to boost your motivation:
The ‘’did’’ list, the supporters, the celebrations…
You can discover all these tools (and the matching worksheets so that you can easily use them) in the Daily Booster workbook, which will allow you (among other things) to boost your motivation.
The Daily Booster workbook is meant to give you tools to boost
your motivation, your organization and your focus on a daily basis.
How to make progress on projects:
Organization
There’s no point in having motivation to achieve your goal if your organization doesn’t follow through. Organization and planning covers a lot of things: your routines, habits, to-do list, or your organization system itself.
From my point of view, the most important thing in organization is not so much the organization system you use. Whether you use a planner, a digital calendar or a planner, that’s not what’s important.
The most important thing to make progress on your projects is to master the art of prioritizing.
Prioritizing is about making choices:
- What is the most important thing in everything I have to do?
- What actions will have the most important and immediate effect on my goal?
- If I had to do only one thing from my entire task list, what would it be?
The tool you use to organize yourself more or less pushes you to prioritize. It can guide you in making choices such as the PROJO planner for example.
But whatever your system of organization is, you will have to learn to give yourself priorities and revise them regularly to achieve your goals and make progress on the projects that are important to you.
There’s no point in spending hours on a multitude of different tasks if none of them are a priority: you’ll be wasting your time, your energy… Without priorities, there is no direction and no progress towards the realization of your projects.
Prioritizing your actions allows you to sort out what is important and urgent from what is not. It’s about sorting through your daily life to focus your time and energy on what will really get you closer to your goals.
Some examples of tools to help you set clear priorities:
Eisenhower’s Matrix, Pareto’s principle, Mental Inventory…
If you don’t know where to start to prioritize your actions, you can use the worksheets featured in The Daily Booster workbook to make decisions more easily and better manage your priorities.
How to make progress on projects:
Focus
I could have called it “productivity”, but the goal here is not to think ‘performance’. The third secret ingredient you need to achieve your goals is focus and good time management.
The two belong together:
- Focus means being able to cut out distractions and focus entirely on what you’re doing, without drifting: by focusing, you are 100% available for what you are doing. You become more efficient, and you move a little faster towards your goals.
- The purpose is also to spend your time in a more thoughtful way, with maximum intention. Managing your time better in general will allow you to reduce the time you spend on meaningless tasks, or distractions, and to make time for the things that bring you joy. And more time to make progress on the projects that are important to you.
Again, the goal is not to do “more”. Simply to reshuffle the cards of your time management and make intentional decisions (as opposed to default decisions) about how you want to spend the time you have available.
Because whatever the size and ambition of your goal or project, you will need a minimum amount of time to achieve it: a few hours, a few days, a few weeks… The time you need to achieve your goal is at hand: you just have to find ways to take it.
Some tools for focus and time management:
Carlson’s Law, time blocking, time budget, power hours…
Motivation, organization and focus…
Put together, they are “magic” fuel that will allow you to make progress on your projects and ultimately achieve your goals.
But there’s no secret: you need tools to boost your energy levels everyday and make sure you have all the motivation, organization and focus you need to make progress on your projects. I personally use tools like that every single day.
I put all the tools I use and everything I learned from 6 years of project management and entrepreneurship in a very concrete and actionable toolbox: The Daily Booster workbook.
The purpose of this workbook is to help you refuel when you feel discouraged, overwhelmed or distracted: the 70+ pages of the workbook give you actionable tools to boost your motivation, your priorities and your focus to make progress on the projects that are important to you, one day at a time.