Chris A. Baird | April 23, 2020
Staying Motivated During Isolation?

You might tend to be lazy and wondering how to be staying motivated during isolation? Find out the tips that will help you gain back your energy when you self-published.

A question I have been seeing a lot about lately is, how do you stay motivated while in isolation or quarantine? During this time, you find yourself in, and well a lot of these sticks together with just general motivation.

In general, how exactly we stay motivated and productive at any time? Because there are always temptations and things that make it difficult. Many people have thought that maybe this period would be easier to stay productive because you are home.

You've got your computer, so you should be able to produce something. Is that right? Except for some reason, it seems much more tempting to watch Netflix or to eat food or whatever it might be that you are tempted to do.

So I want to hit a little bit upon how exactly you can best stay motivated during this period. And to especially keep self-publishing which is what our main goal here.

Check out this related article: Is Coronavirus Killing Book Sales?

You can check out my checklist if you would like to learn more about some of the secrets and things that have worked well for me. It helped me in publishing over 170 books that are currently on Amazon ACX and other locations.

But today, we want to take a closer look. A couple of things to remember and this is one of the starting points that I would be looking at no matter what you are doing is the triangle.

It is the most important no matter what you are dealing with and the triangle itself is the triangle of health. The first point on the triangle we are going to look at is S and that's for Sleep.

If you are not getting proper sleep, that's going to mess up everything else. So, your motivations going to have a problem. Right now, during this period of isolation, you are going to find that your sleep may be difficult.

I have even read studies that were showing that many people were having lots of difficulty sleeping. So there's a whole series of things, I wrote a book actually on this very topic of how to get better sleep.

But there is a lot of tricks in terms of how to get sleep. One of the big ones that I found is not drinking coffee or alcohol late at night. And also going to bed at the same time every night and getting up at the same time of every day regardless of what it is.

So that is a very helpful one in terms of getting better sleep and that will directly relate to your motivation. If we are tired and groggy, we are going to have difficulty staying motivated to self-published.

Boost Your Energy Level

Your next one is going to be the E and this is going to be your Exercise. That is our next point on the triangle that we're going to look at. You don't have to do too much.

10,000 steps a day would perfect but if you can only just get a few more if you are doing absolutely nothing, you're going to get between 24,000 steps a day. So if you can increase that, it gives you energy.

That energy makes you feel good and feeling good will help motivate you to self-published even in isolation. An exercise can be done inside the house doing bodyweight exercises just using your body weight. I use something called Streak exercise on my phone.

Then, the final one we are going to be doing is our Diet. And that is the next point of the triangle. While you are eating and I would suggest making sure that you are eating as healthy food as possible. The Mediterranean Diet or one of the other ones, the Dash Diet, I wrote a book on that one.

You'll find that any of these are recommended. They are definitely something that will help you stay motivated during this period. Keeping it around 1,800 to 2,000 calorie consumption per day.

Then eating food that is especially rich in protein and other nutrients that you are going to need to stay healthy during this period. I have a final thing to recommend when we are trying to stay healthy during this difficult period that we're in right now.

It is using some sort of a tracking system to see what you are doing. On the iPhone, there is an app called Streaks that I like to use. What you want to do is for your self-publishing journey, you are going to want to write down the activities that you want to do.

It even has a timer built-in and I have it on my Apple watch as well. I don't know if it's available for Android, you'll have to look that up. But it is an amazing app.

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I think you can track 12 different items but start with just one or two. Particularly start at the ones that you are finding difficult to do so. For example, in self-publishing, I'm currently working on one of my activities.

I am making my books available also through IngramSpark. I want to use 5 minutes a day getting my books, the ones that are all in Amazon, Lulu, ACX, Amazon Print, Kindle, and all these sorts of things. I want to make sure that I have paper copies also available on IngramSpark.

Track Your Progress

So that is something that I have been doing to make sure that I can get additional sales. Now, maybe for you, you want to spend also a few minutes a day in terms of writing your next book, right?

On the Streaks app, and of course, you can just use a Pomodoro method or a stop clock or whatever you'd like to use but you can set a timer, I like to set five-minute timers. You may go beyond the five minutes.

I find once I get started with an activity whether it's exercises or these other ones, you generally keep going. What you'll do then is you will send it to the timer for 5 minutes.

Make 5 minutes of progress on that activity and once you hit 5 minutes, then you hit stop, it goes off and you're done for the day. Now, you obviously can do more than that but making progress at all will keep you motivated.

In review, we discussed the triangle and that was your Exercise, your Sleep, and your Eating Habits or your Diet. Those three are the key.

Just keeping you high level motivated. Keeping you in a better shape which will make you motivated and to keep working forward.

The next thing is to try an app like Streaks or just keep track of how many days in a row you have. The Seinfeld method never breaks the chain or you get going day after day and you don't want to break the chain.

It will tell you how many days in a row you have managed and then it will keep you motivated to keep going. I suggest 5 minutes is a good starting point for activities you are not doing at all.

If you feel you are not doing enough of an activity, then figure out how much you want to do and put these things at the beginning of your day. That will also help keep you motivated in self-publishing during this challenging time we find ourselves in right now.

Check out this related article: Can You Support Your Family From Self-Publishing Alone?

So, what have you found? Have you found that it's easy to stay motivated while in isolation? Or do you find that while in isolation like many people think was 30% found it was much more difficult to stay in shape to continue to exercise?

Maybe you find that you also start to decrease your ability to stay focused. Leave a comment below.

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