Fuel for motivation

In our previous post Staying Motivated, we shed some light on a major mechanism surrounding human productivity and how to navigate it. The suggestion was to split major goals and tasks into meaningful, implementable and doable parts. When something is meaningful, it means the thing is important, significant, consequential and worthwhile. A meaningful part of the task means this part will fulfill and accomplish a particular need of the overall goal/task you are working on. It being implementable and doable suggests that it is feasible and within your capacity to execute and accomplish within a stipulated time frame.

Before the commencement of the doable parts, you might think of it as little but gradually you will realize that you are achieving more than when you used to execute tasks in small parts (relative). This suggestion is a means to spike the origin of motivation, specifically increasing the chemicals responsible for cognitive activity as you anticipate the happening of an important act. Also, the goal is to get your system excited about what you are about to do. This will activate and satisfy the part of your brain associated with pleasure reducing it’s conflict with the origin of motivation to work. 

A few things to spike your motivation and refuel your motivation tank.

• Intercept your day with tasks with micro-deadlines (10-15mins). These are the kind of accomplishments that can be checked off your list quickly. As you accomplish these tasks, you fuel your motivation tank to handle the big ones. 
• Celebrate the process and not just the results. Appreciate the work involved in accomplishing the bigger task as much as you will with the results. Knowing that you are accomplishing something with every step helps to fuel your tank to keep at it. Celebrating the little achievements can go a long way. 
• Focus on the results and the excitement that come with fully executing a project and being successful (result-driven focus). 
• Surround yourself with people interested in the project and share your results with them whether positive or negative. The recognition from others regarding your efforts to accomplish projects and the brainstorming of ideas can also increase your motivation levels.  
• Employ tools and software programs that make overwhelming tasks more doable. For example to-doist, nested task, goals on track for scheduling and breaking tasks into doable parts. Automating tasks can also help. With these, some tasks can be accomplished without your immediate involvement. These comes in handy for business men and women where marketing ads can be automated. Knowing you are checking things off your checklist despite your busy schedule will also increase your motivation levels throughout the day.

The ultimate aim of keeping motivated is to ensure productivity. Productivity is a combination of efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency describes the best way of execution. Effectiveness describes the usefulness of what is executed. In as much as both work hand in hand, you may not always experience them together. There are efficient days and effective days. Sometimes you can experience an efficient and effective day and other times you only experience one. An efficient day is one in which you execute tasks that may not necessarily be towards the achievement of a useful or life-changing goal. An effective day is one in that every task executed is towards the accomplishment of a useful and life-changing goal. However, these useful and life-changing goals are quite individualistic and contextual. 

Let me give you some contextual examples. For a student, an effective day may be attending classes, finishing assignments, and having personal studies and an efficient day will be cooking, cleaning and helping with chores. For a stay-at-home mum or dad, an effective day may be making sure that the home front is kept in good shape and comfortable (doing or supervising chores, taking care of kids among others). An efficient day on the other hand might be having time, visiting friends and watching movies. So you see, depending on where your focus is, you might have different categorizations of effective and efficient days. Also, depending on the priority, some days feel weightier than others. However, at the end of the day the exciting thing is that, there are activities. You can describe your day as productive.

Allow me to share a personal experience with you. I usually have a lot of activities to execute every day. Aside from my morning routines of meditating and spending time with God, I have language lessons, school, work, checking various portfolios and a thousand and one other things. Productivity is a necessity for me. However, my days can be quite chaotic and so sometimes I wake up wishing to be in bed. On such days, I attend to my mini-tasks first (which requires a maximum of 10 – 15 mins). You know ticking things off your to-do list fuels your motivation tank. Even on days that I feel lazy about my major tasks, I try to spend at least 30 mins of my time on effective things. Doing this helps me prevent the feeling of having a nonproductive day. The added advantage is having enough motivation for the next day. 

In a nutshell, I am saying that we all encounter days when our willpower is very low. We will rather sleep in than do anything productive. However, on such days, you can at least be efficient by focusing on the mini-tasks that can be easily accomplished. This will keep your motivation tank filled to accomplish the main tasks of the day. You can execute these tasks in the early hours of the day or in between major tasks.

As you work towards keeping the motivation, remember that proper temporal order is also necessary for the accomplishment of every project. You can break your tasks into meaningful, implementable and doable parts. However, if these parts are not ordered right, you may get stuck and still encounter the one thing you are trying to prevent, failure. Most of us fail because we are unable to work things in the right order.

This happens in every facet of life be it career, education or even relationships. When building a house, you can’t start laying the foundation when you don’t have a specific plan. Assuming you decide to start without a draft and estimate, you either end up building something way over your budget. You might even get stuck in the middle due to lack of resources or put up a building you don’t like. It is therefore essential to always do things in the right order while making room for serendipity.  

Truthfully, life in itself is not an easy journey. If you don’t find a way around it, it becomes extremely difficult to navigate. When it’s time to work, go at it with your all. When swamped and tired, take some rest. Don’t encourage a mediocre lifestyle but learn to manage your mental state to keep going on. If it means breaking projects into meaningful, implementable and doable parts to keep motivated, then do so. The ultimate aim is to be successful and not compromise our mental health along the line. We are all still on the journey and gradually we will get there. So let’s keep pushing and it will all make sense someday. Be your number one cheerleader and keep your productivity in check. Fuel your motivation and you will achieve.

Feel free to leave your thoughts, comments and feedback regarding this post. Also, feel free to suggest topics that can help you in your personal growth journey. We are always open to suggestions.

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