How To Hustle When You Don’t Feel Like It
Simple strategies to change how you view your work.
It can be easy to slip into a lull state when you are working from home. There are distractions everywhere. You’ve got chores around the house to do. Or maybe you’re mindlessly scrolling through social media.
Either way, you are doing a lot of things to avoid the thing that you really need to do. That you know you need to do.
You need to work on your business.
I know the feeling all too well. I work every day not just because I love my work, but I know that I have to and need to. For my own peace of mind.
So when I’ve gotten into those slumps, or I don’t feel like being all that productive, it’s around these times where I come up with strategies.
It’s these core strategies that have helped me to not only hustle when I don’t feel like it but to identify what disrupts my workflow and how I can get back into it.
It’s these strategies that push me to at least finish a task or two on my three sometimes four daily tasks I want to perform over the day. So it still needs tweaking, but it’s still pretty solid.
Find A Shortcut To Your Workflow
It goes without saying that when you aren’t working or hustling you’re not in a workflow state. The only way you can get back to it is to find a way to get back into your workflow state.
But to enter into a workflow isn’t a matter of just brute forcing the work.
For sure it can work in the beginning. To incentivize working out, you can start to convince yourself on a mental level to do 10 push-ups first thing in the morning. That can soon develop into you doing a 15-minute workout.
But I’m not someone who likes to do things directly. Instead, I like to create shortcuts. These are things that don’t necessarily get you to do what you want to do but they certainly help you in getting into the mood for it.
For example, I like to listen to music when I work. I discovered this a few months ago and while listening to music (with or without lyrics) I found my focus and my desire to do work increased.
This I consider a shortcut to get into a workflow state where I can write several articles if need be.
Either way, this shortcut is probably the most direct way of solving your issue. But how you got into the mood to not work in the first place can stem from something deeper. And it may even require you to view your work in a different way.
Reprioritize Your Work
The short answer for this is to focus on the work that is going to move the needle for you.
Perhaps you’ve stopped working or entered into a slump because you lost some momentum. From losing a client or not getting that deal you were hoping, this can dampen your mood and make you feel your work was for naught.
But that’s not true.
You’ve worked hard on building it up to something where someone else clearly saw some value in it.
But now you need to be reprioritizing your work.
It may feel like an event feels like you haven’t moved the needle of progress at all, but you have. It’s now a matter of getting back to moving that needle once more or finding some way to get back to moving it again.
When I first started my business I never took my writing seriously. I kept doing my thing of juggling a blog as a hobby and running a Youtube channel. I wasn’t making any momentum at all, but whenever something kind of bad happened, it taught me more and more how I should be progressing.
It taught me what would be the best way for me to proceed and grow forward. It’s led me down this path to where I’m making an effort in growing myself and to take my work more seriously.
It’s why it’s key to see events as an opportunity to reprioritize your work. It’s similar to what Winston Churchill said about success:
“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
We need to go from each roadblock without losing our momentum. To do that is to shift around some of the work that we’re doing.
Learn To Accept More
The final strategy I want to offer is to learn to be more accepting. This is a huge thing because when people first get into business they feel like they’re going to succeed immediately.
But time and again expectations don’t always meet reality immediately.
For sure, I believe that we will all succeed but it’s going to take time.
And that opinion I have is key because it’s one of the many reasons that I’m still pushing to make this into something.
With each passing failure or bad event, we get the decision to let it get to our head or to learn to accept it. When we accept it we begin to shape our new reality and with that comes new approaches to our work.
When we’re in a state where we don’t feel like working, we’re in a reality that may be caused by us not accepting something about us or our situation. This can cause a lot of stress and of course distorted thinking.
There isn’t a right or wrong answer in those situations, but clearly, if something is bothering you it means you haven’t spent enough time dwelling on it. When we accept a new reality, we tend to move past it and not let it bother us so much. We still talk about it, but it doesn’t cause a strain on us as much. We’re not letting it control our emotions or views.
And that makes a difference.
The difference between progressing and stalling depends on how you view your situations. One powerful quote that Dale Carnegie wrote in his book How To Stop Worrying and Start Living that summarizes this is this:
“Two men looked out from prison bars,
One saw the mud, the other saw stars.”
How you view your work and your business is much the same. The difference between people pushing forward or stopping depends on how they’re viewing each difficult situation.
So which is it?
Do you still see every roadblock or obstacle as a hindrance that impacts your work?
Or do you see these as opportunities to grow in more profound ways and push through regardless of how you are feeling?
You decide.
