Get motivated to get stuff done — 3 tips to get you started
It was 9:30 on Friday night. I had just finished a gruelling week of work and study. On that particular Friday I had started work at 7:30am, gone straight from work to class and then finally finished school at 9:30pm. After finishing class, my girlfriend wasn’t due home for another hour and I had nothing better to do, so I went back to my computer and studied for another hour still.
As I studied, I thought about the pottery class that my girlfriend and I had enrolled into for the tomorrow morning. I hadn’t done any pottery since high school and I was looking forward to getting my hands dirty like those nostalgic old days. Right now in my mind, pottery seemed like quite a ‘fun’ activity but ‘work’ and ‘study’ were definitely boring, tedious and things I just had to persevere with.
Would a ceramics worker living in the 19th century agree with my sentiments? A child slaving away in a factory for 14 hours per day for a below-minimum wage. I’m pretty sure that a Saturday morning pottery class would not have seemed quite as much fun for him as it would be for me.
Why is it that I thought pottery fun, but Excel is stone-dead boring? Was it because of the pressure I had put myself under to receive good school grades? Did I only consider pottery a novelty because I hadn’t had to handle a clump of wet dirt for over 20 years?
Turns out there’s some science behind what I was thinking
A few weeks later I was reading about motivation in a textbook. A section subtitled ‘Self-Determination Theory’ attracted my full attention as I realised that this concept was exactly what I had been pondering three weeks previously.
Humans can be motivated to behave in a certain way by either intrinsic (internal) or extrinsic (external) sources of motivation. According to Self-Determination Theory, people want to feel in control of their own behaviours or goals. Even though I intrinsically want to achieve a degree, the extrinsic requirement that I attend class and do my homework makes study sometimes feel like a cumbersome chore.
So how can we burn a motivational fire from within, rather than seeking help from without?
I’m glad you asked. Here are 3 tips that have worked brilliantly for keeping me motivated.
1. Chunk the work down into smaller sized bites
The larger a task is, the harder it is to get started. Any task that will take me longer than an hour to complete, I do my best to break it down into smaller tasks. For example, if I have to read a chapter of a textbook that I am expecting will take me two hours — I set myself a goal to read up to a certain page, or to read for a certain amount of time. Indeed, once I’ve started, I often will continue reading until I do end up finishing the chapter. The point here is to trick your brain into getting started on a task, at whatever cost!!
2. Reward yourself for putting the work in
This is the fun part. We are much more biased towards doing things that will provide us with an immediate reward, as opposed to things that may or may not pay off in the long run. Think eating a slice cake now vs. trying to achieve a beach-ready body for next summer. Looking trim is definitely a great goal, but cake is too delicious, and it’s right there in front of me.
3. Step back and really let the progress you’ve made sink in
It can be so easy just to keep going doing tasks and lose sight of what your original objective was in the first place. After achieving milestones, e.g., finishing an assignment or completing an exam, I make sure to step back, elevate my thoughts and recall why I am spending all of this time to study anyway. What is my end goal? What are the benefits that I will reap by achieving this goal? What have I achieved already, and how can I start to utilise what I’ve already done? Keeping this perspective at the front of mind will help you get through those hard days when you think to yourself, why am I spending time on this when there’s this great new comedy series just come onto Netflix?
Are you motivated yet?
It’s no surprise that staying motivated is all in the mind. There are numerous theories and countless essays on the topic and so we find that there is no shortage of recommendations for how one can program their brain to do the things we want to do. If you are even only slightly motivated to become more motivated, then I highly recommend you use that motivation to Google ‘motivation’ and motivate yourself even further to become a more motivated person.
