“Persistent people are able to visualize the idea of light at the end of the tunnel when others can’t see it”
- Seth Godin

It’s that wonderful sunny day and you are starting your new side project. You have great plans and high hopes about the success of your work. You are inspired and ready to work hard on it. Day one goes well, two, three, four and then suddenly you hit a minor hiccup and lose all the motivation to complete the project. You give up and months later, the work still remains unfinished. You look back at the age old last commit you did on the project and wish that you hadn’t wasted all these days.

Enthusiastic Phase

This is how it all starts. You are all fired up and ready to start working on your project. You start and are committed towards spending your time on it. It all goes well, you get a good deal of work done. You feel proud of yourself and even start blogging about it. Or you might be working out to be in a better shape or being all positive to bring about changes in your life. You continue doing it in spite of all the pain that you might have to go through to achieve it.

This is an awesome phase. You start feeling your confidence increase day by day. You look back at your accomplishment and feel proud about it. But then something happens.

Wearing out

You have been working for many days now. But somehow, it’s not showing the results that you expected. For someone who has been working out for couple of weeks, you are not seeing any noticeable weight loss. Or getting users for your new SAAS app is becoming difficult and this is discouraging you. You become disappointed and start doubting the effort that you are putting in. You start losing interest and focus less and less everyday finding reason to procrastinate.

At this point, you start feeling drained both physical and mentally. This phase occurs just before the dip.

Dip

Finally you reach the dip. You have hit a rock bottom where you have lost all enthusiasm and feel like quitting. Most of the time is spent procrastinating rather than on actual work. You feel like there is no one to help you and that you are fighting alone. Most of us usually give up at this phase. But if you are lucky, you might get back on track.

The dip may last days, weeks or even months.

Persisting

Most of the times, the dip will just halt your plans and you quit. But if that is not what you want then being persistent is the way out. Understanding that you are procrastinating and overcoming that by continuously working towards your goal is the key to come out of the dip.

Slow pickup

Divide the work in chunks and accomplish small tasks in a consistent manner. Understanding that this is not something that can be eliminated overnight is important. Slowly and steadily, you revive your interest back and commit yourself to complete your task.

Goal!

Once you are back on track, always keep the end result in your mind to keep you from slipping off again. Slowly but steadily, you reach your goal and that is a special feeling!