6 Project Motivation Tips

It’s January, which means resolutions like “finish my project car” have likely been scrawled many peoples’ New Year’s resolution lists. It’s a reasonable resolution and one i’ve made myself a few times—to varying degrees of success. As the years go on I’ve found a few ways that helped stack the deck in my favor and turned my project cars back into fun-to-drive cars.

30 minutes a day

The core of any project is consistent progress. A one-week break from working on your project car can easily snowball into two years. Small regular efforts often lead to more progress than attempting to carve out large chunks of time to dedicate to project work. Best intentions can’t turn wrenches.

Instead, take a relatively small chunk of time out of your schedule and create the habit of thinking about, fiddling with, and working on your project. I learned this strategy from a friend, and utilized it when I was renovating my garage space. In the end, I just needed to turn getting started into a habit and the rest started to fall in place effortlessly. After a week I looked forward to each little task and routinely lost track of time, leading to working longer than 15, 20, or 30 minutes. That’s a good thing.

Focus on one thing at a time

If you are as lucky as I am, you’ve got no shortage of ideas to research, parts to find, or tasks to complete. Even when self-imposed, it can get to feel a little overwhelming. After writing out a to-do list or at least mentally cataloging everything you’ve got going on, think through what you really want to do, or need to do, and then don’t allow yourself to get distracted.

For me the focus is usually needed most on the purchasing front. After getting excited about one project I’ll order a few parts, then while waiting on those to arrive end up ordering parts for something else and before I know it all my projects are stalled while the my bank account recovers. It makes everything move at molasses-in-January pace, but if I instead only spent on the main project, things would progress more smoothly.

Be realistic

If you have a bare chassis in the garage this winter and your goal is to drive to cars and coffee in June, you are likely setting yourself up for failure. Goals need to have some aspirational nature to them, yes, but just like how I won’t be able to bench press 400 pounds by the end of the month even if I spend every spare minute in the gym between now and then, your project can only progress at a realistic rate.

Breaking down into smaller milestone goals can really help. It allows your brain to see everything between here and there, and most importantly come to grips with whether what you desire is actually possible. Be grand with your goals, but also be sure you aren’t just setting yourself up for frustration and failure.

Set up a support system

Accountability on your work has never been easier. A text or phone check-in with a friend you trust and respect is basically free and prevents the little lies we tell ourselves from growing and halting forward motion. When a friend reached out to ask about how my Honda XR600R project has been going over the last week, I had to come to grips with the fact I haven’t even gone out and worked on it. My brain ignored that fact until I had to tell someone else.

It’s also powerful to have someone to bounce ideas and frustrations off. I know I’m guilty of making a small project into something larger in my head only to talk about it with a friend and suddenly it’s not so daunting. It’s also an opportunity to vent about when things go the other direction, and that can have a cathartic effect, too.

Make progress visible—even when it’s not

You decided your project is going to get done, but what exactly does that mean? Our brains are pretty good at remembering the next task or three, but we often push smaller, unexciting, or unmeasurable milestones out of mind. It can make a project feel frustrating when you’ve been working for weeks and failed to cross off a single line from your to-do list.

Start by writing tasks or to-dos that also include a deadline, and also be sure to write down all the things you need to do, not just the cool or exciting ones. Crossing items off the list makes the progress feel a little more real and rewarding—at least for me. A whiteboard is great for this, but if you don’t have the wall space for one, don’t underestimate a clipboard hung on a nail with a legal pad clipped in. Regardless, keep an accurate log of your work and you’ll likely be amazed how much work our gearhead brains chose to ignore before.

Start at the start

Any automotive project is nothing more than a game of pick up sticks. You can try to start at the bottom, but it will only lead to frustration. Instead, start at the start. The “easy” or quicker projects that can be crossed off are a great way to build momentum and warm up your practices and habits so you aren’t tempted to take a side track or regress when you are deep into the more difficult tasks.

In the end, automotive projects aren’t easy, and completing them on a deadline is even more difficult. Is this six-point list everything you need to succeed? Hardly, but keep these things in mind and you are likely to get that much closer to a successfully completed effort.