The age of technology with smart phones etc has speeded up much of our day to day lives; we can now communicate with immediacy thanks to messaging and emails, we can shop without cash and can pay for our shopping with contactless cards. Life has never been faster and yet this increased pace of life can result in us having unrealistic exp
ectations both of others and ourselves and an inability or unwillingness to play the long game.
When we set ourselves a goal we often assume we should be able to achieve it quickly and when we don’t we can feel disappointed and demotivated and give up. Some goals can be achieved quickly, but many require persistence before results are seen. Persistence is easier when we chunk up our goals. The goals can be personal, work or fitness-related but all can, on some level, be chunked up into a series of steps or phases. The advantage of chunking is that each step or stage of action becomes more manageable and achievable and as such boosts and maintains motivation because each step is forward-moving in direction and takes us closer to the end goal.
Chunking requires a revised expectation in terms of time and also in terms of our self-discipline; it can be easy to push forward with speed on days when we feel good but we do so at the risk of burnout. The tortoise understood this whilst sadly the hare didn’t!