5 Authentic ways to get out of a rut

5 Authentic ways to get out of a rut

Who did not experience the same thing: one day you are motivated, working all day long, lots of accomplishments and pride in yourself. The next day you are tired, you start to watch movies, eat unhealthy food and worst of all, you look back and see this was your entire day. It is already 2 AM in the night and you can’t help but feel angry at yourself: “Why did I even do that?”. Yes, you did it again. Instead of working, focusing on school, learning something new or whatever you had planned for the day, you now spent the entire day lying on the bed. You ask yourself, how to get out of a rut now! In the worst case, you had “relaxed” for weeks or even a months on end. Although you missed a lot of time, do not punish yourself. Instead, here are the instructions for the best and most effective way to get out of a rut: 

1. Clean your room 

After days or weeks of inactivity, your room is filled with dust, dirty dishes and stuff we don’t even want to know. It is time for you to clean everything up until your room looks good enough to let a friend inside. Your room must always look clean and organized, because an organized room equals an organized mind. After you finished this task, go and organize your room in different sections. Make sure you separate a recreational and working space.  

The working space should be on a table, where you have your notes and your computer. The best way to organize this space is to have a pin board on your wall. If you don’t have one, consider buying one. On this pin board, you can place every important note you have. On one piece of paper you should make a habit tracker, where you tick off every habit you do daily. The next thing you should do is write down your goals and put them next to the tracker.

This list will motivate you daily to do more. If you have an exam to study for, make a list of every topic you need to learn. The last thing you should do is make it easier to start working, one of the ways to do so is to prepare everything beforehand. Pens, laptop, notes, schoolbooks, etc. need to be reachable quickly. Now the next time you will start to work, it will be easier to make the first step. 

The next thing you should do is clean your recreational space. This could be your bed or couch, a space where you shouldn’t work, but use your free time for recreation. It’s important that you make it harder to procrastinate. For this you need to make recreation harder to start, for example: take your remote control, controller, or anything like that and make it so it will take some time and effort to get them. This could be anywhere, but not the recreational zone. The harder it is to reach your item, the longer you have time to think about your procrastination.  

At last, you should clean all your devices of unnecessary things. For your phone, you can delete or block all kinds of games, apps, or websites that you won’t need. It could be hard at first to delete things like Instagram, Twitter, or your favorite game, but for a moment consider whether you actually need it ir not. What do you use these things for? What does it bring into your life? In most cases, you just waste your time, so go ahead and delete it. 

2. Reschedule 

Now that you cleaned your room, it is time to reschedule your tasks. Take a piece of paper and write down everything you should do in the next few months. This could be learning for an exam, writing job applications, or starting that one project you always dreamed of and never did. Don’t be shy about adding as much as possible, we will sort out every task that is not important soon. After you have that list, we take a method called the Eisenhower Matrix. 

First, you need to consider for every task two options: is this task urgent and is it important? For every task that is important and urgent, you will rate it a one. Tasks that are important and not urgent, will have a two. Tasks that have are unimportant and urgent will be a three, (these could be tasks like buying an item that is in a discount for a short time in a store). At last, you give every task that is both unimportant and not urgent a four. These last tasks can be just thrown away, you don’t need to do them. 

For the next step, you should sort these in a new list. Tasks with importance should be done first, they are now the most needed. You can either sort these tasks randomly or by priority. Then you plan how much time you will need for every task and plan it into your calendar.  

3. Work on your Discipline

You now have a good base to go back to work as quickly as possible, you might as well have a lot of motivation right now! But there is one thing you need to take care of. Sometimes you have great fuel, but it won’t last forever, your motivation will sometimes just not be there. It’s foolish to rely on it.

Discipline is the way to go, it is there for you when you run out of fuel. It is a skill, so it needs to be trained, just like a muscle. You can’t get disciplined right away, it takes time. However, you can start getting better by doing tasks that are uncomfortable, exhausting and hard to do. A good “exercise” is having a cold shower every morning, the colder the better. To improve your discipline I suggest reading this guide about it.

4. Get some work done 

Another thing that you need to do is work, so now is the time to get some stuff done. Take on your tasks and just do them, start learning, practicing, or working. You already set up a working space, so use it! Put your phone away, remove all distractions, and just start working. Make sure you focus all the time, focus is one of the most important skills you need to have during work. After you have done at least one or two hours of work, where you have been efficient, you can take a break. Make sure you did some actual work, if you feel like you did not achieve enough, start again until you did enough. 

5. The last step 

You successfully got out of your rut, now it is time to celebrate. Your room is clean, everything is organized, you have a plan of what to do and you did some actual work. If you look back on how everything was a few hours ago, you feel a moment of pride in yourself. Of course, you have a reason to feel better right now, but be aware that a rut like this should not happen again.

It is not normal to fall that big if you want to be an organized and happy person. To prevent this from happening again, make sure you never fall back. That means you must establish daily habits, but you also have to journal about your day. If you will journal your mistakes daily, you’ll have it easier to stay on track. 

You can find out more about how to prevent a rut from happening before it even starts here: