Why don’t I have enough willpower to get my work done?
If you , like me, often get annoyed with yourself for "not having enough willpower", then I think you will find this concept really interesting. I often think it along with “why can I never get to the bottom of my to do list”!
It’s from a book I read recently; "Deep Work" by Cal Newport. In it, the author says that human beings have a limited amount of willpower that diminishes as we use it throughout the day. He says that our willpower is like a muscle that can get tired and needs rest to restore its strength.
When we engage in activities that require self-control, concentration, and decision-making, such as resisting distractions or making important choices, we use our willpower. As we go through the day, our willpower reserves gradually deplete, leading to reduced self-control and diminished ability to focus on important tasks.
To counteract this, Newport suggests integrating effective habits into our lives. By establishing consistent routines and habits, we can reduce the number of decisions we need to make and automate certain actions. This is because habits require less conscious willpower to execute once they become ingrained. As a result, we can preserve our limited willpower for more critical tasks and minimise the strain on our mental energy.
By building habits, we create a structured framework that reduces the need for constant decision-making.
For example, if you have a habit of working on a specific task at a designated time every day, you eliminate the need to decide when and where to work. This allows you to conserve your willpower for the actual execution of the task, rather than wasting mental energy on planning and decision-making. So that could be working on a certain weekly report and sending it every Friday morning for example.
The other benefit of this is that habits create a sense of automaticity, making it easier to enter a state of deep work/ or flow. When we establish a routine, our minds become accustomed to the pattern, and it becomes easier to focus and engage in deep, concentrated work. By reducing the cognitive load associated with decision-making, habits enable us to enter a state of flow more effortlessly, leading to higher productivity and better results.
In summary, "Deep Work" suggests that our willpower is a finite resource that depletes as we use it throughout the day. To counteract this depletion, we can build habits into our lives. By establishing consistent routines, we reduce decision fatigue and preserve our willpower for more important tasks. Habits provide a structured framework, reduce cognitive load, and allow us to enter a state of deep work more easily, leading to increased productivity and focus.
Creating routines and habits to enable clients to build efficiencies into the "adminy" parts of their work so they can spend more time working on the parts of their business that generate money and that light them up is a huge part of the work I do with my clients.
To find out more about ways to work with me, you can take a look at my website here: https://www.unscrambleme.co.uk/
