What is your environment encouraging?
A good question to ask fairly regularly is:
What is my environment set up to encourage?
If your living room has two couches facing a TV, that room is set up to encourage you plopping down after dinner and flying through Shrinking season 3 (best show of the past 5 years).
If you want to spend an hour on your startup each night after dinner, step one is turning the couches away from the TV.
We assume lack of willpower or productivity skills are what keeps us from doing something ambitious, but the real problem is usually that your environment isn’t set up to encourage something ambitious. As my Grandpa used to say, you’re swimming uphill.
I played college basketball and that required me to lift at 6am, go to the trainer at 10am, practice from 3:30-6:00pm (although you had to get to practice by 2:45pm), and watch film until 7pm. Every day. That’s over seven hours a day of various difficult stuff, but the team and the school had set up the conditions to make doing those things easier than not doing them. There were natural carrots and sticks, sure, but also when I went to the trainer I just walked in and they had everything set up for me. I usually just sat down on a table and they’d work on my ankle or knee or whatever. At practice, I just showed up and my practice uniform was washed an folded at my locker. The practice itself was planned down to the second. Scouting reports and film clips were made by assistant coaches - we just had to show up.
And if I didn’t show up, there were massive consequences.
Now, think about your startup.
Especially if you’re building it on the side - is your life set up to make it easier to put in an hour a day on it than not? When you wake up, what is your environment set up for you to do? When you open your laptop, what is that environment built for? What behaviors are encouraged? During that hour you’d like to be working, what does the natural flow of things take you towards?
You’ll beat yourself up for lack of willpower, but you’re really just hamstrung by your environment. This is a great thing - you are fine and capable of doing hard things. Your environment is the problem, and that is fixable.
Use my basketball environment as inspiration - how would you design an environment that made it harder for you to not work on your startup than to do it?
No need to swim uphill.