I find most tips and tricks for how to stay motivated and be productive to be either shallow and unhelpful or even counterproductive.
But over the years, I’ve collected a handful of ideas based on good psychology that have proven to be remarkably helpful—both for me and for clients I’ve worked with.
In the rest of this article, I’m going to share 4 hidden or untapped sources of motivation that can help you avoid procrastination and consistently do your most meaningful work.
1. Celebration Rituals
Positive reinforcement is one of the most powerful forces in all of human psychology. And it’s remarkably simple: When a behavior is immediately followed by a reward, that behavior is likely to be repeated…
- That could be a mouse tapping a button because it gives him a food pellet.
- A kid picking up her clothes without being asked because her parents praised her for doing it yesterday.
- Or an adult showing up at the gym for a second day in a row because the front desk staff was so welcoming and friendly the day before.
We all know this intuitively. But it’s amazing how often we forget to implement it—especially with ourselves.
Think about it: Of all the tasks you accomplished in the past 48 hours alone, how many of them did you give yourself any positive reinforcement for? Maybe one accidentally?
Now, I’m not saying we need to go around giving ourselves “treats” every time we respond to an email or do the dishes. But if there’s a task or project you find especially hard to stay motivated for or get done regularly, a little positive reinforcement might be surprisingly helpful. And a great way to do this is to create a celebration ritual, which is a brief but enjoyable action you take to celebrate your achievement.
For example:
- Let’s say you want to feel more motivated to work out each day after work. Well, after each workout, you might celebrate and reward yourself by watching your favorite guilty pleasure TV show on the exercise bike as a cool down for twenty minutes.
- Or let’s say you want to feel more motivated to get back into your passion for drawing and illustration. You might make it a point to share each new sketch you do with a friend by text, because the reinforcement you get from them is rewarding and motivating.
- It could be that if you want to plow through your backlog of unanswered email, you take a 3-minute break after every 10 emails you get through to put on your nice headphones and listen to one of your favorite songs as a celebration.
It’s a simple—almost silly—thing to celebrate our successes. But it’s one of the biggest low hanging fruits I see when it comes to improving motivation.
2. Self-Boundaries
Usually we hear the term boundaries and think of other people. But the ability to set and enforce boundaries with ourselves is just as important—especially when it comes to staying motivated.
Think about it like this:
- Everything you say yes to requires a bit of energy and motivation. If you said yes to every request everyone made of you, and every new idea that popped into your mind, you’d spend all your energy but make almost no progress on any one thing.
- In other words, if you say yes to every new idea you have, you’re spreading yourself very thin motivation-wise.
- Instead, if you were willing to say no more often, you’d have far more motivation for the few things that really mattered most. This is captured by the phrase, Less but better.
Of course, new things are fun and exciting. And saying no to them feels like a bummer, which is why we so often struggle to set boundaries with ourselves.
So here’s a little trick that can help: Create a Later File.
A later file is a note in your notes app where you stash every interesting, exciting, or fun idea you have.
The beauty of a later file is that it gives you permission to temporarily say no to new things (and thereby maintain motivation for the most important things you want to work on now) without feeling so bad about it because your brain trusts that you’ll remember it and can get back to it eventually.
In short, if you want more motivation for the few things that matter most, you have to be willing to say no to most things. But it’s a lot easier to do this if you reframe those nos as laters because you have a later file.
3. Environmental Design
If you asked most people whether their environment impacted their energy and motivation, you’d hear a resounding yes from just about everyone.
But if you asked those same people whether they consciously design their environments to be conducive to working optimally, you’d get a lot of silence with maybe the occasional heal-hearted yes here and there.
Like positive reinforcement, we know environmental design is important for motivation but rarely do much about it.
So, the first place to start, I think, is to ask yourself one question: What are some easy ways to make my environment more motivating or energizing for work?
Here are a few examples that former clients of mine have come up with:
- Set my thermostat to automatically turn up the heat in my home office so that it’s warm and cozy when I start working instead of frigid for 30 minutes while I wait for the heater to kick in.
- Print and display more photos of my kids and family in my studio so that it feels warmer and more inviting.
- Carve out a little space in the garage for a few weights and a treadmill so it’s easier to get a quick workout in without having to drive to the gym.
As you can see, none of these are especially dramatic or complex. Often one or two minor shifts to our environment can make a huge difference in our motivation to start and keep working.
Before we move on, I’ll share one of my personal favorite tricks for more motivation through environmental design: Work in stranger places.
If I feel low on energy or motivation for a task, I’ll often get up and go do that thing in a strange or unusual environment. For example: If I’m working on drafting a new article or podcast episode but I feel myself getting sluggish or lethargic, I’ll pack up my laptop in a backpack and go write from a bench at the park, or the coffee shop, or the library.
I’m continually amazed at how a simple change in environment can almost totally recharge my energy levels and motivation.
4. Energy-Based Productivity
How do you approach your to-do list?
- Are you a do the biggest or hardest thing first kind of person?
- Or maybe you’re a warm up with some small quick wins first then get to the bigger stuff?
- Maybe you just start at the top and work your way down?
- Do you don’t even keep a to-do list?!
Now, I’m not here to pass judgment on anyone’s preferred style of getting things done. But if you’re having trouble getting or staying motivated for certain important tasks or projects, I’ve got a suggestion for you…
Use energy, not time or difficulty, as an organizing principle.
See, your motivation to do something is highly dependent on how much energy you happen to have at that time.
Let me give you an example from my own life around exercising:
- If I don’t feel motivated to work out today is it because I’m lazy or secretly self-sabotaging? Probably not.
- More likely, it’s because I’m trying to work out in the morning, which—for me—is when I have the worst physical energy.
- But if I tried to work out around noon or 1:00 pm when I have a lot of physical energy (but not much creative energy, btw), I’d be way more likely to feel motivated and actually follow through.
So try this:
- When you look at your to-do list, try to organize it not by time, difficulty, or size; and instead, organize it according to your energy levels.
- For me, I have good creative energy but poor social or physical energy in the morning, good physical energy and social energy in the afternoon but bad creative energy, and in the evening I tend to not have great energy at all 🙂
- This means that I try to schedule creative tasks in the morning, physical and social tasks in the afternoon, and then have pretty low expectations for getting anything meaningful done in the evening or at night!
Of course, you can do this with your entire to-do list. But you can also just use it as a reflection question for a particular task or project that you seem to lack motivation for:
Given the nature of this task, when would I have the best energy to do it?
It’s a simple question that often yields surprising results.
Next Steps
Here are a few more resources you might find helpful: