Beat Resistance and Procrastination By Becoming CEO of Your Project
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When procrastinating on a personal project, we are being a bad employee and there is no line manager to track our progress nor a CEO to make big decisions.
Steven Pressfield’s consistent advice to beat Resistance is to “put your ass where your heart wants to be”, meaning that you need to physically get to your desk or your easel and start working. It might be laborious to begin but eventually, you’ll get in the flow and you’ll make progress.
It might help to get yourself a line manager to track your work. You could get a real person such as an accountability buddy, a well-intentioned friend or relative or a coach to do that. You could also get a wall calendar with boxes where you would add a tick for each day you worked on the project even for five minutes and maybe a brief description of what you have done.
One thing you might not have tried is to become your own CEO.
Become The CEO of Your Project
The CEO is responsible for the success of the business, including the vision, mission, direction and overall strategy.
A CEO is not there to please you; it is here to get results.
A CEO makes decisions.
Your role and responsibilities as the CEO of your project are to:
- Create a vision for the project and develop strategic objectives for the staff (you) to better understand the direction and expectations of your “work”. Clearly define the end result you want to achieve in words and/or pictures. Set out a plan with action steps and review it as necessary along the way, keeping the end result in mind.
- Ensure that operations are working in accordance with the overarching strategy, with the end goal of maximising results — and improving market position if that is relevant to your project.
- Allocate capital to improve return. Think of capital in terms of time, money and energy you invest in your project. Are you spending the right amount of time? Do you have too many expenses linked to your project or do you need to invest money to improve skills and systems? Are you managing your energy through extremely good self-care (sleep, food, fun and rest)
