American businesses and entrepreneurs spend billions on training programs, but over 90% of all training knowledge is lost within a year according to the American Society for Training and Development because the training is never implemented on the front lines.

“We don’t have a knowing problem,” says sales trainer Jim Ziegler, “we have a doing problem.”

So we spend billions more on motivation to get the troops pumped up and excited to put all that expensive training into action.

All that enthusiasm usually lasts about as long as the plane ride home.

Motivation is a depletable asset. The more you use it, the less you have. And the harder the task at hand is, the less motivated we are are to get it done.

The truth is motivation will always fail you at the exact moment you need it most: the moment you run out of it.

So what’s the missing link between all that expensive training and motivation to put it into action?

Automaticity.

I’ve got a degree in English, but the first time I ever heard the word automaticity, in a Tedx Talk from Stanford psychology professor BJ Fogg, I had to go look it up in the dictionary.

automaticity (noun): The ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit

Automaticity allows the behaviors you want to happen to happen all on their own, without you having to decide for them to happen, without you having to make them happen. It’s like magic.

Here are three ways to build automaticity into your daily routine.

1. Make it a habit.

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going,” according to author Jim Rohn.

Make it habitual and you’ll never have to motivate yourself to get it done.

The keys for habit formation are to start so small that it’s almost impossible to not succeed, find an alarm or trigger to which you can link the new desired behavior, reward yourself when you accomplish the task and then REPEAT!

We’ve all heard the old adage that it takes 21 days to build a new habit. Opinions vary. Maybe it takes 21 days. Maybe it takes 21 weeks. But if you can do it today and you can do it tomorrow. That’s a streak. And that’s a good place to start.

2. Build a robot to do it for you.

Yes, you could go tinker in the garage for a couple of years and build you an Ironman suit to help with your chores, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

You have a couple of robot devices now within arm’s length than can automate and streamline huge swaths of your working and professional life – your smartphone and your computer. All you have to do is train them.

And find the right apps.

I use Rapportive and Boomerang, along with Canned Responses and The Google Calendar Gadget from Gmail Labs to turn my gmail account into a full fledged CRM system that helps maintain my customer and vendor relationships automatically.

I use Hootsuite and Unfollowers.me to strengthen my social media presence and engagement without me having to spend 8 hours a day looking at pictures of grumpy cats on Facebook.

I use Aweber to automatically reach out to customers who fill out lead forms on my websites and I use Google Retargeting to stay in touch with the 98% of web visitors who never bother to fill out anything at all.

If you can’t find an off the shelf robot to do your dirty work. There’s always IFTTT and Zapier which can help you design custom automatization
routines for thousands of time consuming online activities.

3. Farm it out.

When all else fails, pay someone to do it.

You’ll never make $1,000 an hour or even $100 an hour, if you spend your day doing $10 an hour jobs.

Make the important stuff important and farm out the rest. Services like Fiverr, elance and TaskRabbit can help you with tasks from graphic design and accounting to stuffing envelopes and picking up your dry cleaning.

The best thing I’ve done for my business over the last few years is hire an assistant to do all the things I used to put off for weeks at a time. Bookkeeping for instance. Nothing makes me happier now than walking into the office to find that invoices have been sent to the clients, checks picked up at the post office box, deposits made at the bank and bank statements reconciled without me lifting a finger to make it happen.

It’s like magic!

Look for ways to build automaticity into your life and business and get more done regardless of your level of motivation.

Terry Lancaster is a lifelong entrepreneur, a keynote speaker and the #1 Best Selling Author of BETTER! Self Help for The Rest Of Us. He helps salespeople and entrepreneurs build BETTER! careers, BETTER! businesses and BETTER! lives, one step at a time, starting right here, starting right now.