Good post. I'd add another hack: While maintaining drive toward a big success, establish and reach small goals along the way. This keeps one from being held back by fears that can crop up around success; it safeguards against using unattainable goals as a type of irrational defense mechanism.
Strings of small successes also provide fertile, solid ground for successful pivots as more is learned. An endless set of reworked plans toward overly grandiose goals can be a barren pivot quagmire.
Agree. And even smaller. Reaching small goals give you a positive rush that allows you to take on a bigger challenge and not get depressed attempting it while sitting idly by and doing nothing.
Let's say you put off cleaning up your office. You've dreaded doing it for the longest time. One day you come in and you make serious progress on that. You feel great you're all pumped up (even though in a sense you haven't accomplished anything that anyone else would view as great (maybe your mother possibly but that's about it, right)). So you complete this really small "goal". And you are all jacked up and are ready to take on something else more serious that you have put off doing.
Another example might be to cure a programming block by writing some shell script that does something you want to do that automates something. It easily accomplish-able in one sitting and provides immediate benefit. You are then in the flow to go onto tackling something larger. It's like a warm up.
I like to intersperse my day (and am lucky to be able to do so) forking from one thing to another thing. Anything that I have put off doing I can generally get myself into the groove of doing by doing something that while I might not like to do I can "accomplish". (Well, most of the time.)
See, I've always had the opposite effect. Whenever I accomplish one of my small goals, I don't get all jacked up. I just feel like crap. I'll probably feel like crap for the rest of the day. Honestly, I probably prefer focusing on the big goals because then I know that I will feel at least decent for a while until it's done.
Interesting. Thanks for that comment. I'd like to hear more of what others experience whether similar to what you feel or what I stated. I would consider myself a workaholic and prefer to do something rather than lounge around. To me doing nothing or relaxing generally feels negative with only a few exceptions or rationalizations.
Boom! This is so key and is a constant battle for me. Establishing and reaching these small goals is the key to success. Most of the time we only are made aware of big successes (like SpaceX docking with ISS), but don't see the 10 years of hard work and thousands of small successes along the way the provided fuel to continually push forward through setbacks.
I have tricked myself into achieving ambitious goals by breaking down the next few days' objectives into small, doable tasks. I will even go as granular as 'make cup of tea and fix typo while kettle boils'. I've found that if I can get into an automatic mode where I'm constantly checking off tasks, repriotising and refining what is still to be done then success creeps up on me. At some point during most days I realise I have made significant progress; at some point during the project it occurs to me that I am done.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done calls these "next actions", things you can just do instead of having to decide (probably at the last moment) where to start on them. You may like more of Allen's ideas if you weren't already familiar.
Thinly slicing a software project is also the only way I can produce a schedule that is remotely plausible, since easy task (half day) + easy task (half day) != easy project (half day).
Strings of small successes also provide fertile, solid ground for successful pivots as more is learned. An endless set of reworked plans toward overly grandiose goals can be a barren pivot quagmire.