You may not want to get up and get moving, but I’m about to show you how to succeed when you want to stay in bed.
My Lead Shoes
It’s not uncommon for me to hear the alarm go off and not want to get up. When the music starts playing at 4:15, getting out of bed often feels like I’m wearing lead shoes. The call of the bed is so strong, and I find it challenging to fling off the covers, throw my feet on the floor and spring out of bed.
But not only do I do it, I raise my hands in the air in triumph and celebrate the day. It’s not easy, and the celebration sometimes seems a little underwhelming, but I do it anyway.
I used to be a slacker. A video-game junkie. A guy who sat on the couch playing games for hours on end.
Then I found some secrets that turned all that around for me. It started slowly and with small changes. After all, slow is better than undone. It made it easy to improve. Eventually it moved me to the point I discovered a key for how to succeed when you want to stay in bed all day.
The Power of Streaks
Over time as I kept adding more and more good habits, the bad habits decreased. I started getting streaks of success. I had these long daisy chain of days where I went weeks and even months without missing a single day. I was so focused on keeping the streaks alive, getting out of bed became easier.
It’s one thing to get out of bed when you’ve hit the snooze 20 times and you know you won’t make it in to work on time if you don’t get up. It’s another thing to know that when you hear that alarm, if you don’t get up, you might miss a streak you’ve spent months or even years keeping strong. It’s quite the motivator.
There are days where things just didn’t go well and I wanted to quit, but quitting would mean killing a streak. The saying goes that “success is the ability to move from one failure to another without loss of enthusiasm”. That motivation helped me even when I didn’t want to face the day. I found how to succeed when you want to stay in bed.
Simple Steps
If you struggle to get motivated in the morning, let me share with you three simple steps on how to succeed when you want to stay in bed:
- Make Work Fun: You’re going to have to do the work anyway, so have fun. Play some music. If I’m doing mindless work like looking for stock video or images, I might have a video playing in the background. You can make up little games to earn a reward, even if the reward is just the opportunity to get up and walk around.
- Make It Manageable: There will be work you don’t want to do. It can be a real drag. One of the best ways I’ve found to deal with it is to make it manageable. For instance, I need to do a lot of marketing work. At first, it was just a little. Instead of doing half an hour a week, I would do 5 minutes a day. It made it very manageable. After this had become a habit, I needed to put more time into it, so I bumped it up to 10 minutes a day which was easy since I was already doing five. Today I average around 30 minutes or more a day. It’s a positive part of my day because I made it manageable.
- Make Time for Play: You have to put play in the schedule. You may be able to do nothing but work work work for a few days, but over time it isn’t sustainable. That’s what burnout is. If you want staying power, you need to include time for enjoyment, relationships, health, etc. every day. Find ways to plan your time so that you work well, and play well too.
If you want to know how to succeed when you want to stay in bed, simply focus on making the work fun, manageable, and limited so that you have time for other things. Slowly build up over time. Enjoy the process. Enjoy the work.
Rest can be great, but being energized about making something amazing is orders of magnitude better.
