Getting Work Done During The Festive Season Even When You Want To Screech " I Don't Wanna!!!"

My morning email to an online business forum group I belong to was titled "I don't wanna!" And honestly, I didn't want to work at all. My body feels heavy/tired, the sun was bright and shining and all I wanted to do was hang out at my local Fournos Bakery with friends, drink unending cups of tea and watch people spend money they don't have on Christmas purchases they don't need. But I had to stay chained to my computer and get some work done.

The good news is that I was very productive - managed to do final polishing of plans/sequences for 2 non-fiction books, which I then emailed to the publisher. Client will be happy and I'm definitely chuffed to have completed this task this year.

So how did I managed to keep the old-friend brain switched on long enough to get the work done?

1. Lots of sleep - Last week my brain was mostly useless due to pain, drugs pain meds and just feeling out of sorts. So I decided to get as much rest as possible over the weekend so that even if intellectually I had no interest in working, there were no physical limitations.

2. Starting small - I know productivity experts encourage us to start with the difficult tasks first, but if I had to do that, there was no way I was every going to get started. So I had to start with things I could do (blogging, writing a game review for a client) and built from there.

3. The platform to whine endlessly about not wanting to work  Support from friends and colleagues -Yup, it was nice being able to share my misery and learning I was not the only one who didn't wanna. There were people I wanted to strangle though. My friend Lynn was high up on that list. Her crime? She was home, cabbaging, with no plans to do anything for the day beyond watching TV and puttering around her home and garden.

4. Butt glue - To get anything done, I did have to stay glued to my chair, even though I wanted to leave my office and go elsewhere ( destination didn't matter). And while there are a lot of things I can do while sitting in front of my computer in my office, once all the programmes are shut down and I can only allow myself to use Word and Adobe PDF, options become very limited ( aka, no Facebook, surfing on the net, twitter, Linked and all that happy social media stuff). So then, I could either review the sequences for the books I'm doing next year for the client while double-checking with my research documents. It seems to have worked:-)

I'm sure you all have strategies you use to push yourself to work when you're demotivated, so please share?