Ambition does not equal success, and motivation does not equal progress. Sitting around with unfinished work beside you is a common experience. The same goes for feeling like you should be seizing the day, taking that chance or joining that club—and yet staying right where you are. Acknowledging your responsibilities, wants and passions is the easy part. Actually starting to do them is the difficult part. 

It’s a familiar struggle in my life, and has caused me to be “shut-in.” Over the years, I’ve gotten much better at it. I wanted to share my strategies of motivation in case it could help anyone else struggling with a similar hesitation I did.

There have been many guides about combating procrastination. The tried and true tips, such as breaking down goals into smaller bunches, asking yourself why you’re procrastinating and avoiding self-criticism are still good starting points. However, the tips listed here are an attempt to suggest specific actions you can take. Hopefully, the specific examples of these tips in motion will allow you to properly implement these strategies and see if they work for you.

Let’s begin with required work. For instance, finishing your homework, studying, registering for events, doing your laundry or reading that book for English class. Anything in that realm.

1: Keep associating with your task.

Maintaining the mindset of getting work done is key to staying motivated enough to complete it. Once you get back from school or work, get right to work on chipping away at your responsibilities. If you let yourself relax, dump all your work on the floor, and get into a home mindset, you run the risk of telling yourself that you’ve already clocked out for the day and you’ll just “do it tomorrow.” Keep that energy going and take care of the things you need to do while it lasts. You’re already doing your dishes, so you might as well go make that call while you’re up.

2: Don’t think about the distance you need to go.

You should still think about rationing your work, but worrying about the length of an assignment while you’re doing it isn’t advisable. A lot of tasks can feel much more annoying and convoluted when laid out on paper than in practice. You can’t let large numbers or bigger commitments hold you back. Even if you don’t finish something all at once, chugging along on a project until you’re done is much better than being paralyzed by the dread of the time commitment.

3: Set multiple limits.

Something I’ve personally adopted are flexible limits for how much of something I need to do. These limits vary depending on the urgency of the tasks, but setting goals such as “I’ll read the textbook until page 350 or until it’s 7:30” and “I’ll do this math homework until I finish or it gets dark out” helps motivates you to continue working while also giving you a bail to let you have some free time. 

Having a time limit as one of these goals is always a safe bet, allowing you to set and push for more ambitious goals with the internal knowledge that, regardless of what happens, you won’t be here all day. The fear of losing all of one’s free time can be a scary thing, so trying to remove that worry is beneficial to not being afraid to start what you need to do.

4. Don’t stop when your goals do.

Even though limits and goals can be helpful, they don’t need to be the end of your work. It’s better to see them as a minimum rather than a finish line. If you feel like you can keep working on something after you finish your goal, whether that’s the current project or something different, you don’t need to stop there! Don’t overexert yourself, but there’s never anything wrong with doing more work than planned.

There’s also some barriers that may prevent you from achieving your own personal aspirations. Here are some specialized tips and advice for those situations:

5: Don’t let other responsibilities pull you down.

Have you ever wanted to do something that you enjoy, but already know that there’s something else more important that you need to do, bogging down your will to do either task? My recommendation is, at least for the moment, to do the thing you wanted to anyway. It’s better that you were productive in one area than not at all. If that means doing the thing you enjoy over your responsibility, then so be it. Doing the thing you enjoy will likely put you in the more productive mood needed to tackle that other, less enjoyable task, even if it’s in small chunks with your own aspirations laced in between.

6: Don’t let anticipation stop you from doing things.

This can range from knowing you have plans hours in the future to having ten extra minutes before class starts. Don’t be too scared to do anything prior to your upcoming task. Ten minutes is better spent reading a few pages of a book or writing a few lines of your story than spent waiting until your free time runs out.

Finally, I’d like to bring the last major category of roadblock activities for me: getting involved. It can be scary, especially if you’ve struggled with it before. People can be mean, and sometimes it just feels better to do tasks alone instead of working with others. However, in some ways, talking to people can be a task of its own, and need a jumpstart as well. I haven’t any specific strategies, but a few mental processes that help me take that leap to talk.

7: You care about what you’re doing more than anyone else.

This is a hard concept to internalize, but you mustn’t believe that everything you do is always under intense scrutiny. Even if you do something that sparks criticism or judgement, the chances that anyone besides you will remember the event long-term is slim. Simple mistakes like stumbling over your words or making a joke that didn’t land won’t be the end of your social life, and you can’t let fear of them deter you from interacting with people. The fear still may still remain, which is completely understandable, but it will become less prevalent as you become more comfortable with talking.

8: Why not?

This is a really important question that you should ask yourself when hesitating about getting involved. If you are debating whether you should get involved in a group or try something for the first time, consider if there’s any reason not to. Oftentimes, the downside isn’t all too scary. Getting involved and talking to people has incredible benefits. Becoming part of a community really does help with isolation problems and opens up opportunities in life, so knowing what “risk” you’re taking helps you decide if you should go for it. Fully acknowledging your concerns won’t erase them, but It does help you rationalize and quell fears. Similarly, it’s easy to excuse yourself from things because you “can’t do them.” Because of this, actually thinking about why you can’t is important to make sure you’re not saying that because you just don’t want to do it, giving yourself a fair assessment of your limits or ability to complete the task at the moment.

These tips are not definite by any means, and aren’t ways to “fix” procrastination or social anxiety for good. It’s a lot more complicated than that. This article is simply a collection of tips that I’ve personally benefited from. Some tips may work better than others for different people. 

The practical situations for the tips might vary as well. You might find that asking “why not” is a good catalyst for starting training for a sport, or that stopping your fear of imminent events really helps you study for tests. The important part of it all is simply that it works, regardless of what it is or how personalized it may be. It’ll take effort, but finding your ways of starting things more efficiently is something that can be done, and is invaluable.