Processes Over Willpower: The Real Secret to Effortless Work

Why relying on discipline is a losing game

When you start a day with no plan or direction, you find yourself pushing through it just to get the right things done. It’s an exhausting, inefficient and ultimately self-defeating way of going about your day.

On the opposite side, you find you are pulled through the day with a plan and a direction. Your day feels effortless, and at the end of it, you have energy to spare for doing the things you want to do.

I have often written about the importance of daily and weekly planning sessions. These sessions are the glue that brings together your life’s multiple strands. These are not time-consuming—the daily planning session is ten minutes, while the weekly one is around thirty minutes—but the time cost to you, if you don’t do them, is enormous. Ten minutes deciding what needs doing next, a thirty-minute session surfing through Google searches because you cannot bear to look at your task list for fear of what you may have forgotten. These all add up, and none of them helps you to complete your tasks for the day.

How do you turn things around and go from pushing through the day to being pulled?

This starts with having a plan and structure for the day. Now you could theme days if your work is structured. For instance, you could have a report-writing day on Monday, a communications day on Tuesday, and an admin day on Friday.

If your work isn’t as easily structured, it’s still possible to theme a day or two. Salespeople can use Monday morning to set up appointments for the week and Fridays to clear their admin tasks.

Having a theme for the day removes much of the decision-making. When you begin the week, you know your first task will be to make calls to set up appointments. You don’t have to think about what to do.

Processes for doing your work

This is how I get my work done each day. I have a process for doing all my work. For example, on a Tuesday morning, I open up my writing app and begin writing next week’s podcast script.