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There’s research that suggests that having too many options causes us to be more indecisive. A study found that when presented with 24 varieties of jam to sample for free at a grocery store, 60 percent of people passing by tried a sample while only 40 percent tried some jam when there were just 6 varieties. The interesting thing, though, is that only 3% of the people in the larger group bought jam, while 30% of people from the smaller group with the smaller selection actually ended up buying jam.  When given more choices, people more often than not choose to avoid choosing!

There’s more to this than our jam-buying habits, however.  There are so many instantly-gratifying distractions out there-movies, tv, and only millions of things on the internet-that it’s easy to procrastinate. That’s not the only thing that stops you, however. We also tend to have lots of things on our to-do list, and doing one thing means something else isn’t getting done.

When that list gets too big, the result is overwhelm and paralysis. You may want to kick yourself for not getting anything done, but sometimes the reality is that no one else would either. You have to take a look at your environment, physical and mental, and figure out how you’re sabotaging yourself. Sometimes the best remedy is to cut away not just the distractions, but the goals that end up becoming distractions as well.

The truth is that you can only juggle so many commitments at once. Some people may be able to handle more, but they’re not important. What can you handle right now? I say right now because you can’t use the excuse of being able to learn to handle more because you’d just be avoiding facing something you’ve probably been denying all along if any of this resonates with you so far…

You’re not all-powerful. You can’t do everything. You’re not perfect.

It’s okay. No one else is, either.

Some times when we have too many goals, as soon as we run into sticking points we turn toward another goal and leave the first one unfinished. This wouldn’t be so bad if we actually finished the second thing at least, but usually a third thing pops up.  Maybe that third thing goes unfinished when you go back to the first. The result is a lot of things that get started but very few that get finished.

So cut it out. If you have this problem, find only one or two things you can focus on and see them through to completion. If you’re not sure where to start, figure out what your priorities are first. If you have difficulty with that, get some help from someone else.

The goal here is to simplify, simplify, simplify, which research has shown to help with a jam.

P.S. Here’s the actual research article, courtesy of Columbia Business School.

Photo credit: darnok from morguefile.com

Kicking yourself when you do something wrong is perhaps the worst possible thing you can do… But we all do it anyway.  Studies by psychologist Paul Bloom (The Moral Life of Babies – NYTimes.com) suggest that from as early as 6 months old, babies have a tendency toward rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior.  It may just be perfectly natural for us to want to punish ourselves when we do something we consider to be “bad.”

Of course, it’s perfectly natural to feel bad when we hurt someone else, but there are lots of times when we don’t even hurt other people where we still feel bad and still feel the need to punish ourselves. Maybe you’re not as attractive as you feel you should be, or you’re not the right weight. Maybe you don’t make as much money or have as much status as you think you should. Maybe, if you’re a self help buff like me, you feel like you should have better habits or somehow just be better than you are right now. These are all stupid little things that don’t hurt anyone but you and yet you may still kick yourself for them. That’s because somehow it just feels right.

We tend to think of this as a way of motivating ourselves. After all, we don’t want to feel good about that thing we think is bad, right? If these bad habits felt good then we might never escape from them, right? Because of this line of thinkng, we embrace that feeling of “bad” because we think it motivates us to avoid the things about ourselves that we think are bad.

But of course, as usual, we’re wrong.

It’s hard wired into our brains to move towards the things that make us feel good and actively avoid the things that make us feel bad. If you attach bad feelings to a habit that you do all the time, such as smoking, or to an everyday state of being, such as your weight or your job, you will feel bad all the time.

Because we are hardwired to avoid feeling bad, if it’s something that you cannot escape you instead have to distract yourself by feeling good to counteract it. Bad habits such as smoking or eating junk food that causes you to put on your weight are there because they do make us feel good. Because these things make us feel good, the worse we feel the more we want them so we can feel better.

Because kicking yourself makes you feel worse, that actually makes the problem worse. When the problem just keeps getting worse you end up feeling anxious, discouraged and even depressed, and from there you can pretty much kiss any motivation you have to change goodbye.

So in order to stay on track, part of any goal to change should also include either taking the time to build a stronger acceptance of yourself so that you can be okay with your flaw or use something like 3D Mind to clear out the emotions that cause you to want to kick yourself in the first place.

Hopefully this helps to clear things up if you’re wondering why you can’t seem to keep your motivation going on your New Years resolutions.

Our brains have this amazing ability to distract, confuse, and dismay us as a way of avoiding things.  It’s totally natural, too.  We naturally want to avoid things that make us feel bad, and gravitate to things that make us feel good.  When faced with the deadly duo of having to do something that makes us feel bad (such as sitting down to write an article for your website, doing homework, or cleaning a messy house) and the possibility of doing something else that makes us feel good (screwing around playing video games, watching TV, or checking Facebook obsessively) we, of course gravitate toward the good feeling.

The thing about our brains, however is that they value things by comparison.  The difference between 3 and 30 is big, the difference between 30 and 300 is bigger, the difference between 3 and 3003 is huge, but 3000 pounds compared to 3003 pounds isn’t much of a difference at all and doesn’t seem significant.  The same goes for emotions.  When you feel pretty neutral, feeling good seems, well, good, but when you feel like crap, feeling good seems like a GREAT idea.

The power of that contrast sometimes makes the good feeling so darn tantalizing that it’s almost irresistible.  It seems like something that you REALLY want to do…

Unless you neutralize the bad feeling you get from something you’re trying to do.  Then you become much less distract-able.

That’s how you take care of procrastination quickly and easily.

Make sense?

For the last couple of years, I have to admit that I’ve been bumbling around a bit, trying to figure out exactly what I want to be doing.  To be honest, I consider myself a failure in that I’ve achieved some of the goals I’ve set for myself, but they’ve only been small, average goals and I haven’t really set BIG goals.  Now, setting big goals in itself is not the important part.  People who tell you that big goals are what you need to really be successful tend to be stuck in an overly-positive delusional mode of thinking that is destined for failure.  I didn’t have that problem.

What I did have were fears of stepping out of my comfort zone and stepping up to the challenge of living up to my potential.  Having the ability to change your own mind is a lot of power… and a lot of responsibility.  It’s pretty comfortable to be just a regular guy, and much less intimidating.  I didn’t step up and do the things I knew I needed to do to get my ideas out there and make this site worth reading.  I pretty much kept my ideas–and my doubts–to myself.  The thing, though, is that I didn’t consciously dodge all this.  I didn’t intend to be lazy.  What happened–and this happens to everybody–was that I ran into a few emotional obstacles I had trouble tackling, and when I couldn’t seem to do anything about them I ignored them and lived my life around them.

That’s how the mind works, after all.  We build invisible walls around ourselves, all within our own mind.  We tend to avoid the things that make us uncomfortable or afraid, and that includes avoiding thinking about them.  Pretty soon, we’re thinking about anything BUT the things we’re avoiding and they tend to seem less important.

To get back on track, you have to start to look for those invisible walls.  That’s what I’ve been doing.  This post isn’t about me admitting to being a failure, however.  I don’t feel any shame for getting off track.  I realized shame is one of those things that gets in the way of getting back on track because if I can never admit that I screwed up, I can’t start honestly examining myself and where I’m at so I can make improvements.  I’m not obligated to feel bad for not being perfect.

I’m writing this post to make an announcement.  It is time to change this site.  While I am probably going to re-do the look of the web site, what I really want to change is the content and some of the ideas.  You see, quite a bit of what I have up here was written several years ago.  At this point, many of my ideas have changed and matured along with my understanding.

I’m going to take everything down and start from scratch. I’ve struggled with making some important personal changes, and because I’ve struggled I’ve had to put a lot of work into understanding what really does and doesn’t work.  Working with other people can be rather easy since it’s easy to see someone else’s problems.  Being able to see through your own problems is a really tough one… but I find it’s a skill that can be learned if you know what to un-learn.

In the next month, I’m going to un-do this website.  Then I’m going to start doing things a better way.  I like you to join me.

I realize that I’ve been out of touch for a while. Things have been very busy! I’m sure that there are lots of people who run into this. I have a good friend who’s in the same boat, rushing around, trying to get things done, and I’ve been thinking about the topic.

It would be nice sometimes to sit down and have all the time in the world to get something done. Does it happen often? Not really. Does that mean nothing gets done? Sometimes… If you let it.

I have to admit. I don’t really feel like an expert on procrastination yet. There’s talking the talk, and there’s walking the walk after all. Sometimes, though, it only seems like nothing gets done because we feel so out of control. One thing gets planned, and another comes up. When it comes to life, though, flexibility is the name of the game. Something will ALWAYS come up. Because that’s not something you can control, if you wait for things to be perfect, nothing gets done.

So you have to steal the moment.

Right now, I’m at work. I’m the manager on duty, and the only salesperson at a furniture store. I had to come in early to take down the sale tags that ended yesterday and put up the new ones. In between tagging, I can be interrupted at any time by customers and literally get pulled from one thing to the next. In fact, this has described the last couple weeks in general.

As of late, that makes it much harder to sit down and write, and I’ve been letting it slide. I’ve been thinking about it, constantly though. It’s too easy to get into the mindset of “I HAVE to get things done” and feel overwhelmed with MORE responsibility than I already feel. Instead, I’ve been focusing on how I WANT to get this done. That’s the thing about motivation, after all. If you focus on avoiding feeling bad you get nowhere, but if you focus on getting what you want you’re going to make progress.

So in a perfect world, I’d be able to sit down at my desk at home, have a cup of coffee and… Aww hell. While we’re talking about fantasies, why not have a good glass of scotch and a cigar while sitting in an old-style study filled with leather-bound books in a chair by a cozy fireplace. I could sit there pondering, idly running my fingers through my beard, finding inspiration in the musings of great authors before me…

Which is all total BS ’cause I’m really not anywhere close to being that kind of guy. And if I hold myself to that kind of standard, I’ll never, ever get anything done.

In reality, I’m a guy who spends his days running in 10 different directions at once and just wants to relax at night. I also happen to have a handy little blackberry, so what am I to do? Simple. I’ll write a few minutes at a time as I get a break. At this point, it’s not about squeezing as much productivity into my day as possible. It’s about taking control of my day in as many little chunks as possible. Again, adaptability is key.

So here’s my challenge to you. You may feel overwhelmed by all the things you have to do. Some things may not get done in their entirety. But you can take control of things by getting the little things done. So my question to you is, as you go through your busy day not getting enough done, how can you steal the moment?

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my job.