One of the most important parts of working for yourself–whether as a fractional worker or founder–is understanding your own habit loops and natural rhythms of productivity.
If you can't motivate yourself to show up every day, you won't succeed working fractionally. If you can't recognize how to block time on your calendar for the moments that matter, you'll focus on the wrong things. If you can't establish consistent routines and patterns that let you benchmark your own progress, you'll never recognize when you're changing state.
As more and more people pursue independent, entrepreneurial career paths, there's a lot more than simply knowing what work you need to do. You need to know how you, uniquely, can get yourself to get work done.
I don't have enough conviction around an over-arching thesis of motivation to make any broad sweeping claims for what might work for you. But I can describe what works for me.
Here are three ways I’ve learned to tune into my own so-called circadian rhythms to keep myself on track.
Methods to the Madness
How I tune into my own rhythms to keep showing up, and keep myself moving, at work
1. Set myself up for hyper-processing scenarios.
When you take in a lot of inputs, it's important to have a way to process the new information in your brain as quickly as possible. Some people can get this through meditation, long walks, or working out. I get it through writing or talking with other people. For me, writing is a way of filtering ideas so that I can keep the momentum going for the next one. If I don't egress the idea from my brain to paper, then I dwell on it. The higher throughput I have for my own ideas, the more I free up brain space for the next one. (It's no surprise to me that my greatest learning curve professionally has taken place over the last 12 months, during a moment where I've been consuming and creating content with equally rigorous gusto.)
I've also noticed that speaking with other people on highly energetic level helps me up-level my own processing and synthesis. This is why I have been increasing my participation at speaking engagements, courses, and podcasts. Every time I teach a course on a topic, I become more of an expert in it myself. Every time I speak on a podcast with a different focal area or audience, I learn something new. The more I externally vocalize my thought process, the better I get at telling the story (and the more motivated I am to stick to it).
2. Get motivated through relative competitive benchmarks.
When you work for yourself as a fractional worker or as a founder, it's hard to know how fast or slow you should be moving. One way that I keep pace is to identify relative competitive anchors, and set my sights on keeping up with that person or organization.
I'll note that, at least for me, these so-called "competitors" often have nothing to do with my actual work projects or business. They might just be people or companies at a similar stage of development (I'll set a goal, for instance, to get an app out in the app store around the same time as someone else who I know is also building an app). They might be market specific (ie: I might tell myself that I need to get a consumer product to market before my average friend is making their own apps and custom GPTs). Or they might be completely far-fetched (I have a competition going with a currently scaffolded building in NYC; my goal is to figure my shit out before that building's construction is completed). What's important to me is less about the outcome itself, and more about the relative benchmarking. I can assess if I'm moving faster or slower than other objects which are also in motion, and then calibrate my own speed accordingly.
3. Establish consistency anchors.
One of the hardest part of working on your own (particularly when you recognize that you're also trying to create your own version of reality) is that there's no consistency or grounding around you. Left to my own devices, without any grounding forces, a solo founder can float like a balloon off into the sky, never to be seen again. And that's obviously not the vibe that will work long term. So it's important to find ways to stay somewhat tethered to reality (even if no one else is holding the string).
In yoga, there's a concept of a drishti, which is a focal point on a fixed object that you can look at while you are trying the hard or more complicated balancing pose. I like to look for consistent things that stay true even when my world is changing rapidly, and lean on those things to stay grounded. Some things that work for me include: Gardening (which involves a daily upkeep on a low energy level), writing (which again, sets aside a lower energy state moment to complete a task with regularity), or keeping up with other people who have consistent habits (think about why it's so comforting to see that friend who always blogs on Fridays turn up in your inbox). Oddly enough, I found being pregnant to be the best drishti of all; I found it incredibly grounding to know that my body was making incremental progress toward its own project daily. I used my pregnancy as a powerful motivator to activate my own project work before each birth.
Identifying your own rhythms
These are three weirdly quirky motivators that happen to work for me. They likely won't work for you right out of the box. But I'm sharing them as an example of how tuned into my own motivational habits I need to be in order to keep myself moving.
There's something to be said about spending the time and intentional energy toward really understanding how to get yourself to show up and perform, day in and day out. Particularly in a world where the future of how we work (and whether we work) is more uncertain than ever, you'll be in much better shape if you know how to jumpstart your own engine.
