I follow countless entrepreneurs, websites, social pages — you name it. Many of them are unsung heroes, filling their corners of the web with little gems — nuggets of information and wisdom — left for people like me to discover. There is indeed “gold in them there hills” — if you know where to look, and you dig in the right places!

Today, I came across a simple quote on Instagram that more than likely originated from a Medium post by Anthony Moore. The quote read:

Embrace the Boredom of Consistency.

Here’s the cold, hard truth: Becoming successful can be EXTREMELY boring at times. The process requires countless hours of mundane tasks, research, administrative work, and above all else, showing up each and every day — even when you really, really don’t feel like it.

I can’t tell you how many times my ideas and the ideas of others — though probably really good! — go absolutely nowhere because of the simple fact that the daily grind and the sheer effort required to make them come to life becomes so soul-crushingly unappealing that we don’t ever get them off the ground.

My goal? I want to fill my blog posts with less inspiration and more action. As such, here are a few tips that always help me push through the boredom to achieve a greater level of consistency.

Develop a Routine — and Stick to It

Over the last several years, I’ve experimented with developing timed routines that take much of the decision-making out of my “hour-to-hour” — as my willpower steadily decreases throughout the day.

I’ve found that this method lets me devote time to the heavy lifting — like working on directional planning and steady course corrections —in the morning, when I’m most motivated. This means I can push through the hard stuff when my willpower is overflowing, and my drive is strong — before the daily grind has left my motivation tank bone-dry!

Choose 30 Minutes Over 30 Hours

It’s way easier to do something for 30 minutes than for 30 hours — wouldn’t you agree? In fact, many people fail to even put in just 1 hour toward their “BIG GOAL” simply because 30 hours seams so far away. It’s an insurmountable challenge that they just can’t face.

To tackle this, I break my projects down into Parent & Child categories. A parent category might be the name of a singular project, a business idea, or simple headings: Learning, Finance, Read / Listen, Classes / Courses, etc.

Every day, I log at least 30 minutes of work on each category. My time is automatically tracked via a Pomodoro timer. If meetings or something else gets in the way, I take it in stride — I’ll try again tomorrow.

Something about dedicating only 30 minutes to something makes it incredibly easy to start, and at the end of the day, week, month, or year, you’ll be shocked at just how much more you accomplished.

Write It Down — All Of It

Right now, I’m listening to “Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions” by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. In it, they talk about how your memory is built like a computer’s cache. It’s quick and easy to recall things that just happened, but over time, new items get filed in front of those memories, and they’re eventually dumped from your cache. When you try to recover older memories, they take up much more energy and effort to dig up.

If you’re anything like me, you’re juggling a million email follow-ups, projects, ideas, tasks, meetings — you name it. Pretty quickly, your brain’s cache is at capacity, and your mind is forced to dump something pretty important that, many times, is lost forever.

Once I started writing everything down in Trello using my “Parent / Child” category method, my mind’s cache was freed up — and a simple glance at my lists lets my pick up right where I left off. I no longer need to remember a thousand tasks, but only about 7 or 8 categories. Life is good! 🙂