How to Make Traction with your Goals

What do you do when you feel stuck in a rut? When you can’t seem to make any traction with your goals?   You know what areas of life you want to improve.  You even know what steps you need to take to get there, but you can’t seem to start.  There are all these goals to achieve and habits that you want to develop. Yet you can’t even manage one perfect day to get a streak going.  There must be a way to get past the inertia and move forward.  It can feel overwhelming so we just do none of it.  I have found myself in these ruts more than I care to admit.  I have developed some action steps that help me to get going again, especially when I don’t want to.

Just Start

It sounds cliche to “just do it,” but starting is the only way to break out of the rut.   You have a huge list of goals you want to tackle on a free weekend day. You also have your regular daily activities. Often, it is easier to procrastinate when there is nothing else on the agenda.  Nowhere to go, and no obligations to tend to.   During these times, all you want to do is scroll through videos. Yet you will be mad at yourself for wasting a day.  So you need to start with something, to make traction with your goals.  Once that task is complete, you move on to the next.  It sounds too simple to be true. However, it does work, and this is the exact situation I am facing today.

Make Traction with your Goals:  One Task at a Time

My day started unproductively, by watching videos and reading social media articles and posts on my phone.  The impetus to get going was as simple as getting up and having a shower, then making my bed.  Next, I folded a load of clothes and prepared some food for myself.  Then I turned on my computer and accomplished a goal of writing a blog post, and updating my finances.  Once I accomplished these goals, I built momentum. 

Next, I went down to my office to tackle some purging tasks that I had been putting off. Then I spent a little time on an activity that brings me joy.  Once I accomplished these tasks, I went for a walk with my favorite music and podcast.  Then I enjoyed a little relaxing time in the evening, watching a TV show, and reading a book.

Why do we Procrastinate?

In my example day above, I was looking forward to achieving all of these goals.  However, the pull of distractions is too strong.  The goals do take effort and the easier thing to do is to waste time on my phone.  I think this is a generational problem. Most people are addicted to their phones, and they waste far too much time on them.  It’s not even that the content we are consuming is that enjoyable. It has become an addictive habit and a pattern that we just turn to it when we “need a break.” Or, perhaps when we have a goal to work on that we are discouraged by. 

We feel like it will be too hard, or require too much energy. It will take too long, or we deserve time to just chill out and do what we want. We need to break ourselves from this addiction.  It’s not only our children’s generation who are addicted, we just show it in different ways.  For us adults, it becomes more about wanting downtime in our overscheduled lives. We are avoiding things that would move us forward with our goals.

Make Traction with your Goals by Ditching your Phone

I spoke to someone who had stopped bringing their phone everywhere with them. They now only used it as a true source of communication, and they expressed an immense feeling of freedom.  They no longer felt like a slave to this device. Nor did they need to know what was going on in people’s lives every moment of their day.  They would check it at the end of the day, or if they were expecting a message from someone.  According to Doctor Timothy Legg, “Your brain contains several pathways that transmit a feel-good chemical called dopamine when you’re in rewarding situations. For many people, social interaction stimulates the release of dopamine” (https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/cell-phone-addiction#other-risk-factors). Because so many people use their phones as tools of social interaction, they become accustomed to constantly checking them for that hit of dopamine that’s released when they connect with others on social media or some other app.

Symptoms of Cell Phone Addiction

• You reach for your phone the moment you’re alone or bored.
• You wake up multiple times at night to check your phone.
• You feel anxious, upset, or short-tempered when you can’t get to your phone.
• Your phone use has caused you to have an accident or injury.
• You’re spending more and more time using your phone.
• Phone use interferes with your job performance, schoolwork, or relationships.
• People in your life are concerned about your phone use patterns.
• When you try to limit your use, you relapse quickly (https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/cell-phone-addiction).

How Cell Phones Impact the Ability to Make Traction with your Goals

Duke and Montag (2017) at ScienceDirect state that “smartphones can distract us to a point where we are unable to achieve a state of flow at work.  Flow describes a state in which we are fully absorbed by an activity, forgetting about space and time, whilst being very productive. To remain in this state, one must maintain this concentration of focused attention on the task at hand. Even brief interruptions may undermine an individual’s achievement of the flow state” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii).

Furthermore, the intermittent reinforcement received from smartphones may facilitate the development of a “checking habit.” These are brief repeated inspections of the phone to scan for new content. The degree to which this checking habit could undermine the achievement of flow has been highlighted by Markowetz’s (2015) recent observation that participants check their smartphone every 18 minutes” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/).

Check out the post Cell Phones: The Parenting Battle for more details about the danger of this addiction.

Breaking the Habit to Achieve our Goals

I have experienced both of these aspects of cell phone distraction. When I am interrupted in my chain of thoughts so often, I sometimes just abandon what I am working on.  The checking habit is disturbing to me when there is truly often nothing of any importance to be checking for.  So why do we do it?   The need to break our cell phone habits would go a long way to achieving our goals and dreams. 

The first step to making traction with your goals is to leave the phone in a different room. I turn up the ringer in case my kids are out and need to text me. I can be in communication with them.   Yet I don’t need to have the ringer turned on for social media notifications. This would be far too distracting.  

Make Traction with your Goals to Create Motivation

It can be annoying to hear successful people say that they don’t have motivation either.  That they just do the thing they don’t feel like doing.  They must be lying if they appear to be so disciplined and happy in the pursuit of their goals.  Yet what they say is true, in that they didn’t feel motivated when they started the task.  At that moment, they did need to draw on discipline through the habits they created to get started.  Once they are in the middle of the task they have now built motivation through the simple act of starting.   The momentum of completing the goal produces the positive feelings needed to keep going.

At the end of the day, it comes down to just doing it.  Once you start doing one thing, the motivation you build will lead to the next thing.  But in my experience, this momentum only lasts as long as your cell phone is out of reach.  Far too many people underestimate the extent to which they are addicted.  It is time to break this habit that app developers specifically play into. It is time to get our lives back in the process.  We will regain our sense of purpose, accomplishment, and happiness. We will not have to end each day regretting the time that we wasted.  

You may also enjoy reading the related post, The Motivation Myth.