Want to Boost Your Productivity? Then, Avoid the Motivation Trap.
5 Tips for Getting Started When You Lack Motivation
It is the end of your day, and you have made plans to work on an important task. But you just don’t have the motivation to do it. Your kids are finally in bed, and you have some time before you go to bed, but you have no desire to get up. So, you lay on your couch and wait to feel motivated. You mindlessly scroll through pictures on your Facebook feed. And when that gets boring, you jump on to YouTube to watch videos of random people doing the latest viral dance. It’s two hours later and you still don’t feel motivated. And you’re wondering how you can get the motivation that you need to boost your productivity. And how can you be productive – i.e. do what you intended to do with your time – when you lack motivation?
Well, the answer is simple. Get up, move, and get started. Motivation comes after action is taken.
That may seem counterintuitive, but to boost your productivity you must avoid the motivation trap – a phenomenon described by psychologist, Dr. Russ Harris, where we wait to feel motivated before we take action. The problem with waiting to feel motivated is that motivation usually comes once we have started an action, not the reverse.
If you’re waiting to feel motivated before you act, then inaction will be the end-result of most of your days.
So, you do not need to be motivated to get started and boost your productivity.
I repeat you DO NOT need to be motivated to boost your productivity in order complete the things you intend to do.
I love to exercise, but the truth is that when I leave my room at 4:30 in the morning to get on my spin bike or do strength training, I really don’t want to do it on a lot of mornings. I would rather be on my bed.
When I sit at my desk at 5:30am to write for one hour before driving to work or getting my kids ready for school, I truly lack the motivation to write on some days. Yet, I have shown up to write around the exact time, five days a week, for over two years.
You may say to yourself, “forcing yourself to do something against your will sounds like misery.” But I am not working against my will. All of these behaviors or habits are tied to my values, and I desire to do them. However, desiring to do something doesn’t mean you’re motivated to do it daily. Because most of the time, even though we know the benefits of doing something, it is not enough to make us to do it.
If we recall high school physics class and Newton’s First Law, aka the Law of Inertia: an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion. In other words, it is easier to continue to do nothing when you are already doing nothing, and it is easier to keep moving when you are already moving. And what does this have to do with motivation and boosting your productivity? I believe that to get things done, you must spend your energy on moving yourself from “rest to motion,” and once you are in “motion,” motivation is the force that keeps you moving. So, motivation comes after action.
“The common conception is that motivation leads to action, but the reverse is true – action precedes motivation. You have to “prime the pump” and get the juice flowing, which motivates you to work on your goals. Getting momentum going is the most difficult part of the job, and often taking the first step is enough to prompt you to make the best of your day.”
Think about a time that you really did not feel motivated to do something, but once you got started you suddenly felt charged and motivated, so you continued, even beyond the initial goal you had set.
Motivation is usually not what prompts you to start an act. It often comes after you have started, so action precedes motivation.
So, we must avoid the motivation trap – when the act of waiting to feel motivated before taking action leads to consistent inaction – to boost our productivity.
This then begs the question: how you can get started and boost your productivity when you lack motivation? How can you show up and do the things you intend to do when you have no desire or willpower? Let’s go over five tips that can help you.
1. Understand your “why”
You must have a reason to go from a state of rest to a state of motion, and that reason must be important to you. This reason goes back to your values – the standards and principles that weigh heavily on your personal life scale. If the action you are trying to take is incongruent with your values, then it makes it hard to get started on anything. However, when you understand your “why,” you show up even regardless of whether you’re motivated to on a given day.
If you want to read more about values, make sure you review one of my fundamental articles on the First Steps page and subscribe to receive the Time Matters workbook, which will help you define your values.
2. Engineer your environment
There can be a lot of tension when we are starting a new action or behavior; this is what the law of inertia is all about. However, we can lessen the tension and boost our productivity by creating an environment that it makes it easier to show up and do what we intend to do.
On most days, I am not motivated. I have just developed a habit of showing up.
I have developed the habit of showing up by engineering my environment with the right cues that can trigger the action or behavior I desire. This allows me to take advantage of the habit loop, the cycle of cue —> action —> reward —> cue.
For instance, faith is one my core values, so reading my Bible daily is an important action for me. So, I simply keep it on my nightstand, so it is the first thing that I see in the morning. Wellness is another important personal value, so I keep a clean pair of exercise clothes on my bathroom vanity, so I am prompted to exercise after I brush my teeth.
We can also engineer our environment to remove cues that lead to harmful habits, like scrolling mindlessly through social media for hours. As a researcher, publications and grants are key measures of my productivity. Therefore, I must write for a couple hours each day. During these hours of deep focus, I simply keep my phone outside of my office. This helps create a distraction free environment.
3. Visualize yourself doing the easiest and smallest part of your task
Sometimes we lack motivation to do something because thinking about all the steps can be overwhelming and daunting. A simple mind trick is to break the task down into small parts and picture yourself doing the easiest and smallest part of the task.
I love author, James Clear’s, "two-minute-rule" which states that to make a new habit easier to start just commit to doing it for two-minutes. I use this rule for new and established habits especially when I lack motivation. I visualize myself doing the easiest part of the action – writing one sentence for a manuscript, putting on my jogging shoes, or opening to a blank page in my journal – for simply two minutes. Suddenly, the action becomes more doable, and I find myself moving. And recall that an object in motion stays in motion, so once you start, you will go beyond two-minutes as your motivation kicks in.
4. Get an accountability partner
Accountability is what leads you to show up to work when you don’t feel like it. It is what made most of us show our face in the classroom during our years in school and it is what leads to show up to work on time.
There are many important things that may lack immediate accountability. For instance, there may be a project or report that is due in a few months that is important for your promotion. While there will be accountability closer to the deadline, there may not be someone holding you accountable to it daily. In addition, there may also be professional and personal goals that are only important to you so no one really holds you accountable to them.
Having an accountability partner who will follow up on your commitment to your personal and professional goals is key. I have had a writing accountability partner for my research for over one year. We meet virtually for one-hour every week, discuss our progress and weekly goals and then write in silence for 45-minutes. This relationship works because she is a researcher like myself and understands my goals, and, she is not my best friend or sister, so I would feel embarrassed if I showed up every single week and said “Well, I didn’t do anything I said that I would do.”
5. Celebrate even if all you did was show up
The reality is that with all the things that we juggle in life as women, there will be times when all we can do is just show up. There have been moments where all did was put on my exercise clothes and get on my bike and promptly get off because I was tired. And in those moments, I was genuinely tired, so I needed to rest. Even if I didn’t do what I intended, I still showed up and this will make showing up the next time so much easier.
In conclusion, the next time you are feeling unmotivated and are wondering how to boost productivity, remember action precedes motivation. Don’t fall into the motivation trap or you will still be waiting to start working towards your goals on January 1st, 2023. Act first and motivation will come second.
