TJL #37: Imagine the work, not the reward (Daily productivity #12)

Simple tips & tricks to be more productive

Dec 31, 2020

Welcome back to Today Jan Learned (TJL) #37. In this newsletter I share the best of what others have figured out already. I take the best self-help advice and repackage it into actionable chunks for you to apply to your own life.

Read today’s tip down below! 👇

Daily Productivity Tip #12

Imagine the work, not the reward.

Studies have shown that it doesn’t help athletes to imagine themselves winning. What does help them is to imagine all the training they need to do.

By visualising the work that needs to be done, your perspective becomes grounded in reality. It’s this tangibleness and realness that boosts our motivation, helping us tackle our goals.

In other words, imagine the work, not the reward. Instead of dreaming about that promotion or launching your app, visualise yourself working on it and putting in the hours. Use this strange motivation trick to your advantage.

For more details, keep reading down below! 👇

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Imagine the work, not the reward

Today’s lesson is from an interesting book called How To Take Smart Notes.

It’s a great book if you take a lot of notes and want to totally geek out on optimising your notetaking process.

The chapter this quote comes from talks about planning. More specifically, they talk about how humans suck at planning.

The lesson to draw is to be generally sceptical about planning, especially if it is merely focused on the outcome, not on the actual work and the steps required to achieve a goal.
While it doesn’t help to imagine oneself the great author of a successful and timely finished paper, it does make a difference if we have a realistic idea about what needs to be done to get there in our minds.

Planning is important because it helps us get a realistic idea of what needs to be done, but we must remain sceptical of the actual numbers.

We know from sports that it doesn’t help when athletes imagine themselves as winners of a race, but it makes a big difference if they imagine all the training that is necessary to be able to win. Having a more realistic idea in mind not only helps them to perform better, it also boosts their motivation (Singer et al. 2001).
We know today that this is not only true for athletes, but for any work that needs effort and endurance (Pham and Taylor 1999). Writing definitely belongs in this category.

It turns out that it is not imagining the victory that motivates us, but imagining the work! Strange, huh?

I found this insight quite interesting and have applied it many times now. Instead of imagining finishing today’s issue I just think of all the work that needs to be done, grounding me in reality, boosting my motivation.

Thank you for reading!

That was today’s issue of the Daily productivity Newsletter 🚀

Daily Productivity is a newsletter in which I share practical and effective tips on how to become more productive.

I collect these tips from the best self-help books, podcasts, videos, and turn them into immediately actionable tips for you to apply to your own life!

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As always, you can find me on my website janmeppe.com or on Twitter at @janmeppe.

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