Jeremiah Tolbert

I usu­ally have lit­tle trou­ble moti­vat­ing myself to get my free­lance work done.  My gen­eral anx­i­ety about mak­ing a liv­ing is usu­ally very good about keep­ing me mov­ing for­ward, fin­ish­ing things, build­ing stuff out.  However, some­times I take on a lot of work simul­ta­ne­ously, and quite sud­denly I real­ize that I have a lot more than I expected to.  And I get hit with a pecu­liar kind of paralysis.

Rather than this pile of work moti­vat­ing me fur­ther, to work harder, my nat­ural instinct appears to be to hide from it and hope that it will go away on its own.  Logically, I know that the only way to eat an ele­phant is one bite at a time.  But so biz­zarely, it becomes much harder to move for­ward when there’s so much to do.

The ele­phant apho­rism is apt here, because I find the best way to get over this is to tem­porar­ily pre­tend the work­load is smaller, and trick my brain into this by parcel­ing my work blocks smaller.  Typically, I will start a task in the morn­ing and work until lunch with­out inter­rup­tion.  When I’m hav­ing a hard time mov­ing for­ward, I break my time down into half-​​hour incre­ments.  Within a cou­ple of hours, I’m in the flow and the anx­i­ety lessens.

I don’t know if this prob­lem is unique to me or some­thing oth­ers expe­ri­ence, but I thought I would share my approach to it.  If you have the same issue, share your solu­tion in the comments.

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Tags: motivation, workload