Lack of sustained motivation has been the bane of my existence. The only true obstacle to everything I've ever wanted in life.
The article is cool, but not enough, when I'm not motivated, I will not do anything in those articles, I will do other things that I shouldn't be doing. Does the hack call for just work for 30 seconds. I won't. I'm unmotivated, that's the problem.
The question that is quite the un-scratchable itch for me has been, how do I sustain motivation for very long periods of time. That even if it falls, it never dies out. I've my up and down moments, but what I've noticed is that my down moments are almost as good at being as dead for a while.
I have been really focusing on my motivation and willpower lately. I used to have a very similar scenario to what you describe.
What works for me is this:
1) Recognize that my willpower is limited, like a muscle it can be exhausted and needs rest.
2) Recognize that when I'm listless that it's not a moral failing, it's essentially my willpower being exhausted.
3) Never feel guilty for that feeling of listlessness, instead use it as an opportunity to rest.
4) Pay attention to what types of rest work most effectively.
5) Never try to override this rest unless it's seriously important. (And not everything can be seriously important).
6) Recognize that you don't need to feel driven to get things done. You need to do things to get things done.
When I exhaust my will, I suck at maintaining priorities. I drive on feelings, and unless I can work myself up into a stress-filled frenzy, I'm going to do the things that I'm not supposed to be doing. However, if I do work myself into a stress-frenzy, I'm going to be working erratically and inefficiently and generally be a giant pain to be around. A lot of people live in this state to cope with these problems. Drugs, caffeine, distractions, over-exaggeration all help you maintain it.
When I'm working comfortably with motivation to spare, I can choose a task and do it. I can make a plan and stick to it. I'm very efficient relatively speaking. The most noticeable thing though is I'm a lot less emotional about the things I'm doing. I'm not angry or irritated, but I'm also not really excited either. That's not to say I'm not passionate or really interested, but I'm calm. The sort of emotional outbursts are stressful, and just being under stress drains my will.
The biggest difference I've noticed though is that when I'm able to work myself down into that calm motivated state, I'm less affected by trepidation and apprehension. I don't feel guilty about the things that I have been putting off; part of that is because I've committed to not feel guilty, but a large part is that I've got some control over my feelings. When I'm stressed and my will is exhausted, I hate myself for the things I haven't done. When I'm motivated I will pick something that has been cast aside for 3 weeks and just do what needs to be done, not feeling guilty or shameful, just continuing.
The more I can keep myself in the second state, the easier it is. I don't get as stressed, so I'm less likely to fall back into the first state. So ultimately, the real challenge is how to get back to the calm motivated state when you're in the stress-frenzy state.
The simple thinking is that "I want to get stuff done" so you push yourself to work harder and frustrate yourself that you are failing. But that generates more stress and makes it harder. The less intuitive path is to let yourself rest, and not let yourself get frustrated and stressed about it. Stop procrastinating and start resting. The difference between procrastinating and resting is really just that in the former you're worrying yourself over the things you're not doing.
I've always had up and down moments. In my down moments I can be useless. So instead of trying to never have down moments, I try to make the most of them instead of struggling with them, and never spend my up moments regretting them. Over the long term this has lead to my down moments being not as bad, not as long, and less frequent.
Everything in your comment really resonates with me—except I feel mostly powerless on getting to the second state. It either happens or it doesn't.
I can easily recognize the down periods, but like segmondy, I can't (or won't) do anything about them. In a free work environment, it's easy to rationalize not working right now with "I'm listless, it's better in the long run to rest." But too many of those occasions point to larges issues, such as not really caring about the work.
I self-identify with being intrinsically driven, as well as caring about my work. So now there's the meta-guilt of not being interested and motivated enough. Along with the normal guilt of "why won't you just harden the F up and do something."
Anyway, if you have written anything else along these lines, please post a link. I'd be very interested in reading it!
Something that has helped me. I do it regardless if I want to work on it or not.
I stopped making a choice if I work on this project. I work on the project for an hour. Not because I want too (I might not) but because that is what I do.
When I hear those voices in my head that want to put it off, or I'm too tired, or let's just skip it today, we can make it up tomorrow. I (struggle sometimes to) ignore them. This isn't a question about wanting to spend that hour on the project. There isn't a question to have. I just do it.
Once you start the voice tends to go away because I'm too busy actually doing it.
I think this is why offices work the way they do. You are not given a choice. You show up to work and you have 8 hours to do it. Someone even does the planning for you! So you have nothing else to do, so it's not a choice. You just do.
As lame as it sounds, the Nike slogan in correct. (If you look you'll see all sorts of famous people with the same motto.) You just do it. Nothing else matters. That's the trick. It's incredibly hard and most people won't. But if you really want too succeed, then you will just do it.
And if not, then maybe you are beating yourself up over something that doesn't really matter to you. It's a valid question. Do you honestly want it? Or maybe something else is pushing you to want it, but you don't really care.
I've struggled with exactly what you describe, the worst were the afternoons. I'm sure you know the feeling. I would finish lunch, and instead of being pumped up and ready to go on whatever it was, I would just stare at the screen and my mental performance/motivation would drop big time. It got so bad that I turned to Adderall XR (concentrated amphetamine salts prescribed by my doctor for what I explained as "post-lunch narcolepsy") to try to make things better. It was great because I could literally do anything I put my mind to, but over time, I noticed it would leave me feeling soul-less and hollow inside for lack of a better term. I was as if I was trading in my entire personality, just to be able to get work done. So I started experimenting with some other things less crazy things. I noticed coffee with lunch kind of helped, but it would get me too excited and it left me anxious because it didn't have any inhibitory neurotransmitters to calm me down/doesn't replenish what it took out of me. So I added a little bit of GABA (an inhibitory neurotransmitter) to prolong a more balanced effect. But then I still had that sugar spike that would make me tired, so I researched a whole bunch of other things that would aid in metabolism and energy production. I finally found a combination that actually worked, but the problem was that I had to take a bunch of pills and none of the supplements I found online were in the right doses/proportions, so I would literally have to spend hours each month packing powder from my milligram scale into tiny capsules that I could take with my lunch. That process sucked big time, so I started giving it to some of my friends to see if they wanted to do a larger production run, and they were all big fans so we all looked into getting the capsules manufactured with some of the nutraceutical companies in New York...long story short, we came up with a name (Alleradd) and a website (http://www.alleradd.com) and we're doing a limited launch to a few people right now. I'd love to send you a bottle and see if you like it. So far, the response has been overwhelmingly positive and people are coming up with all sorts of other interesting uses for it. As for me, I still just use it every day with lunch and it feels great/restores my motivation. Anyway, that's it for my rant.
Very interesting. Maybe you're just in the wrong environment, where there's nothing to motivate you. I live in a small, 200 or so people, village. I know everybody here and not a single one has this kind of a problem.
This is probably a silly suggestion, but you can buy say a very expensive car on a loan. That way you'll have two choices:
a) work hard
b) be lazy now and have a ton of problems later - bankruptcy, no where to sleep, etc.
Your brain motivation circuitry will probably choose the easier option - a)
I also like to leave a very small task undone from the previous day to help me get jump-started the next day. So if I'm finishing programming a function and the last line needs to return something, I'll just not write that last line and put a //TODO instead. The next day it helps me get in the groove of writing code after the long break.
<quote>When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there.</quote>
I've heard this phrased as always stop after some sudden progress that makes you eager to do more - as opposed to stopping when you're stuck and giving up:
if you're stuck, then when you think of the task it will be in your mind as a bete noire, as opposed to stopping where you've just made some progress and are eager to continue - then it will always be in your mind as something great to return to and make more progress.
One thing which I can highly recommend to anyone with motivation problems and help beat the procrastination is pomodoro technique [1]. When I'm stuck or can't make the first move to get into the work mood, I just hit the pomodoro timer. Somehow the ticking clock gives me boost and puts me into hours of productive work. Always! It's the only technique which works 100% in my case. Try it out for yourself.
Can't say enough about the pomodoro technique as well. I tried many things, this is what worked.
After training myself to work when the clock is ticking, I now find that clicking the "start" button on my timer triggers something in my brain that puts me to work. It's kind of trippy actually.
For me the most important thing is to start working on something first thing in the morning before I start poking around on the Internet. If I spend an hour checking up on Twitter, HN, Reddit, or whatever it totally kills my productivity for the day. If I can spend just 20-30 minutes working on work before I catch up on the day's news I have a much better time focusing on my work throughout the rest of the day.
This exactly the same for me. Just out of muscle memory, my reptilian brain starts typing Reddit or Hacker News into the URL field in my browser when I'm not paying attention. If I start my day wandering down the hacker news/reddit rabbit hole, I never really get out.
So when I wake up in the morning, literally before I do anything else on my computer, I turn on Self Control (http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/), which blocks sites that kill my productivity.
I've recently adopted org-mode for emacs, and it has helped immensely. Task #1 everyday: Turn on Self Control for a few hours. The last task everyday: Close all windows and make sure org-mode is greeting me when I wake up with Task #1 for the day.
We really are the same. I keep a journal in org-mode and in my .emacs I have cron-like periodic function that switches to my journal in the middle of the night so that it's the first thing I see when I unlock my computer in the morning. Something like:
That's an awesome idea. Anything that pares down the number of decisions I have to make to jumpstart my day...
I only picked up emacs about a month ago, investing heavily in customizing it. It has seriously helped so much with my focus since it takes out all the distractions/opportunities for context switching.
The last point is particularly useful, and quite reminiscent of what 'The Now Habit'[1][2] advocates. Some weeks I get so completely burned out, I have to force myself to do nothing but 'veg out' by watching endless netflix shows through the weekend without thinking about anything else. It's hard to allow it at first because it feels like a ludicrous waste of time, but it becomes surprisingly refreshing by the end of it.
Is there any good advice on overcoming procrastination due to social anxiety? Things like phone calls, dealing with unknown people, etc. I have a fear that I am not very knowledgeable about something (like law, or buying some stuff or service) and that others will cheat me, and it causes me problems. Interestingly, if I schedule a meeting, I am willing to handle it, but if I won't, I will try to postpone a lot. And even if I gain more experience in one area, it will then creep again in in another.
This may be unrelated, but if your social anxiety is caused by fear that your social skills are inadequate, it could be helpful to recognize that the content of what you say matters much more than your presentation. When I'm nervous about my delivery in an upcoming, important conversation, it helps me to remember that some of the most fascinating and accomplished people do not always speak fluently or present well. These people include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Paul Graham, and they certainly have not been held back by any supposed weakness in speaking style. See pg's essay, "Writing and Speaking." http://www.paulgraham.com/speak.html
I have two: if your issue is related to your business I would add a "commercial person" to manage the meetings and the conversations. Even if this person is just a decoration. The other typical recommendation about improving yourself is good but will take time.
Regarding your fears about your knowledge you can always say in the meeting: "I need to talk to my lawyer about this" and think in background.
I used to be in the same boat when I was self employed. My solution was to rely heavily on email (when possible). In cases where a phone call was necessary, I would mentally plot out the first 30 or so seconds. I found that 30 second prep was enough to get me over the hump of actually making the call. On those items where you are not knowledgeable, you can say "I will look into that and get back to you". I found 99% of people were fine with that answer.
edit: Remember, nobody likes to talking to random people on the phone. The other end of your conversation is probably feeling very similar to you.
I've been working on a side project which falls into the category of hacking motivation. Streakflow[1] is based on Jerry Seinfeld's "don't break the chain"[1] mentality that I've seen mentioned here before. It really helps when you don't want to do something because the thought of having to start over is worse than just doing it.
I think the core of the motivation issue is the NOW vs longer term achievements, so my suggestion is to push longer term achievements to the "now court". How?
Well, think in byproducts of your current work: are you working on an algorithm that is complex? write an article explaining it after you understand it. Did you find an unknown development library that was very useful to your work, share it! So I see small branches of your current work that produce many deliveries.
Another way to solve the motivation issue is working with someone. This is the core idea on pair-programming.
If someone is interested I have concrete examples about delivering byproducts.
My latest theory[1] on doing things, when not motivated:
- do nothing, stay stably where you are.
- let the 'reluctance' wash off a little.
- keep doing nothing (don't get drawn away)
- make the smallest step toward your task
- do nothing
- make an additional tiny steps
- hopefully[1] steps will get easier, and bigger
- the momentum of overcoming the lack of motivation
and making progress will bring a little joy
[1] Obviously that's only my personal anecdotal experience, based on difficulty in doing physical exercise or learning music. Many times I didn't feel capable, aching, frustrated... Just putting myself into situation and see how things can go has been leading to regular surprises.
A great hack which I use (still not very good at it though) is the 2 minute technique in the GTD book. Although in the book, the author advocates it in a different manner, I prefer to use it to stop my procrastination.
So I say to myself, let me just work on the code for 2 minutes, not more. And believe me, 2 minutes is a long time! By the time the 2 mins is over I don't even notice and continue coding. This also really helps me in guitar practice. Learning a new song, or a a lick is pleasant. It's the mundane repetitive exercises one needs to do to increase the strength and endurance of your fingers. So again I say to myself, let me just do it for 2 minutes. Believe me, on certain days, that 2 minutes ends up to 4-5 hours of practice.
Thanks for posting that. I had got about 80% of the way towards a similar model myself, but to see one laid out and formalized like that was very helpful.
Also check out The Motivation Hacker by Nick Winter. That book is awesome and Nick talks about going from being too nervous to order at Taco Bell to being asked to speak at various tech and hacker conventions.
A really nice read. I'd also suggest treating one's life as a debugging session once in a while… A few choice `printf` insertions and re-running can sometimes make a world of difference. :)
It's really nothing sophisticated. It's just stepping back once in a while and looking at what's not working, trying again while changing something small and noting what does work. Surely, you already do this at some level.
I think this is all well and good, there are always things we procrastinate.
However, I think if you need to run your life like this... maybe look at what you're doing, as a whole. I don't think you should have to hack your motivation, or anything else, to get it to work.
The article is cool, but not enough, when I'm not motivated, I will not do anything in those articles, I will do other things that I shouldn't be doing. Does the hack call for just work for 30 seconds. I won't. I'm unmotivated, that's the problem.
The question that is quite the un-scratchable itch for me has been, how do I sustain motivation for very long periods of time. That even if it falls, it never dies out. I've my up and down moments, but what I've noticed is that my down moments are almost as good at being as dead for a while.