How to charge your work like a bull

There is a type of work that accumulates and when we don’t deal with it, becomes stale. It’s hard to dive into because it’s been a long time since you last worked on it and you don’t feel that confident about it anymore. That’s when you need to summon your inner bull.

How to summon your bull

There are a few ways I’ve found to rouse my motivation to work on something stale or complex.

The first one is to remind myself in detail of the reason why I should do it at all. It works especially well if I remind myself of how my not doing is affecting others negatively. Didn’t fix that bug in a learning app? Well, it actually means I’m stopping a student from learning something that could help them.

The second way is immersing myself in the context necessary for the task. Which files do I need to see? Which programs to use? Which websites to visit? Let’s get them open. This makes it easier to find a loose end and start tying it up.

The third way is to reason out why what you’re about to do is the most important thing you can do at this very moment. Figure out how it will contribute to everything else you do. How it will lead to a crucial outcome.

These tactics will work to wake your inner bull from drowsing and use its energy to toss up the long-on-the-list work to make something awesome.

Charge

Once you’ve summoned your motivation, charge. Dive in, do your worst, start chipping away at the block of work. When you’ve overcome the initial fear of engaging, it becomes easier to keep going. Then, you don’t need your bull, but it’s useful to have it ready when you need to charge into something new and not overthink it.

Remind yourself of the reason why you do something and how it affects others. Immerse yourself in the context of the task. Figure out how the future stands on the outcome of your work.

And charge.