Ride the Wave While Surf’s Up

Sep 14

4 min read

Set Up, Skill Up, Speak Up

By Andrea Spyros & Nancy DeFina | BD3 Solutions

"I just don't feel motivated." When it comes to procrastination, it's the excuse we hear more than almost any other.

If your treadmill has become an expensive clothes hanger, here's an insight for you: motivation is like a wave. Some days you can take on the world. Other days, getting out of bed on time feels like a win. We all tend to build plans based on a version of ourselves that only shows up sometimes.

Most of us plan our lives as if we'll always be riding the crest. We sign up for the course, buy the equipment, or commit to the ambitious version of a habit, all while motivation is running high. Then the wave naturally dissipates and rolls into the shore, the plan stalls, and we blame ourselves for not following through (even we fall into this trap, and we know better!).

Most productivity advice ignores the wave entirely. It assumes you'll feel the same tomorrow before lunch as you did this morning, riding whatever burst of energy inspired you to get started in the first place. Worse, it seems written for a person who doesn't actually exist: someone who never has a low moment at all, let alone a bad day. That person isn't real, and advice built around an ideal version of a human is advice built to fail. When it does, it rarely gets read as a flaw in the advice. It gets read as a flaw in you, more proof for the belief that you're just doomed to keep procrastinating, and the judgment piles on from there.

So instead of fighting the wave, the smarter move is to grab your surfboard and go with the flow. That gives you two different tools, one for the crest and one for the trough. We call them Harnessing High Motivation and Leveraging Low Motivation.

Harness High Motivation with One-Time Actions

Harnessing High Motivation is exactly what it sounds like: when a wave of motivation shows up, you use it, right then, before it passes. The tool for that moment is a One-Time Action, something you do once rather than a habit you maintain or a routine you repeat. It’s a single move that sets you up for success and keeps paying off long after you've made it.

We touched on One-Time Actions in our last article on environment design. Today we're going a layer deeper. The key is timing. One-Time Actions are the right tool specifically when your motivation is high. If you've just had a burst of energy, a moment of feeling capable and ready, that's fuel worth spending on something that only needs to happen once. Save your crests for the actions that need a push to get done at all.

There are three types of One-Time Actions you an use when you're riding a wave:

Set Up. Create an environment that sets you up for success; get your tools where you'll actually use them. One-Time Actions are often how environment design actually happens. You do it once, intentionally, harnessing a burst of high motivation, and then it just works for you every day after.

Skill Up. Learn how to do something new, or get better at something you already do. Watch a tutorial. Take a course. Read the one article that finally explains the thing you've been avoiding because you didn't know where to start.

Speak Up. Have the conversation you've been avoiding. Tell your partner, coworker, or roommate what you're trying to do and what would help. So much procrastination hides behind conversations we haven't had yet, the ask we haven't made, the boundary we haven't stated out loud. Speaking up is a One-Time Action too, and often one of the most powerful ones.

All three are easiest when you catch yourself with energy to spare. That surge after a good night's sleep, after a productive morning, even after one of those ever-elusive “aha-moment” epiphanies.

That's the time to Harness High, while the wave is still strong enough to carry you.

Like this? We'll send one of these to your inbox each week.

SEND IT TO ME!

Leverage Low Motivation with Tiny Behaviors

Motivation won't always be high, and building your entire plan around catching it at its peak is a flimsy plan. This is where Leveraging Low Motivation comes in, and the tool for it is a Tiny Behavior, the smallest possible version of an action, small enough that it barely requires motivation at all. That's exactly what we're covering in our next article.

For now, the useful shift is this: stop treating low motivation as a problem to push through. It's information telling you which tool to reach for. On a high-motivation day, Harness High and set up, skill up, or speak up. On a low-motivation day, Leverage Low and go Tiny. Both are legitimate moves, and neither one requires you to be someone you're not in any given moment or on any given day. The wave decides which tool you need.

You just have to know both options are available and match yourself in the moment.

Andrea Spyros and Nancy DeFina are the founders of BD3 Solutions and creators of Untangle Procrastination™, a behavior science-based program grounded in the models and methods from the Stanford Behavior Design Lab. Learn more at bd3solutions.com.