Maintaining Motivation

Reddit asks:

Hey, I was hoping to pick your valuable advice on something.

Do you have any advice for someone who really cant get this self-discipline and motivation together?

Over the years I’ve really had trouble with keep my discipline in check. A few things I’ve really worked hard at, they’ve come around very nicely. But lately(over past two three years) I cant really get myself to work hard for things I really want. I hate the end result. And I promise myself I’ll fix it but then it ends up happening again.

Just thought I’d ask you. Maybe you can help turn my life around. 🙂

Thanks again!

This is an expansive question; the same problem could have many causes that intermix.

In general I try to direct instinct rather than resist it. Record as much as you can and try to learn the boundaries of the way you work. Here’s some observations I made in troubleshooting myself that hopefully will raise the kinds of questions you’ll find helpful:

I personally don’t respond to schedules and routine, but I’m aware that standardization of a day is helpful to many, especially in that it automates the parts of your day you shouldn’t waste thinking time on. The first 3 hours of my day are critical, with the 1^st hour being the most important, because if I don’t start working in that window the entire day is gone. Partly because those are your most effective hours, but mostly because it’s much easier to keep doing something than to start doing something.

I also basically can’t take breaks in the conventional sense, because if I open a tab of reddit, YouTube, etc I’ll never come back. A break for my work must be a pause of direct’d rest ^{see Early Meditations} or working on a different part of the same task similar to muscle group cycling. This means I tend to go on a single project for very long sessions. I manage burnout by having several very different kinds of projects and working on them on different days.

Environment control is a big factor for me. Some combination of lighting, physical location, what I’m wearing, my posture etc that triggers a mode shift and mentally separates what I’m doing from other things. The desktop application f.lux is great for this, because I can change the whitebalance of my computer to trigger a mode shift. Recently I’ve found that having a pen display makes using my computer for drawing into a fundamentally different thing than any of its other functions, which is further help’d by my existing habit of rearranging the furniture a bit for drawing. It makes where I draw into a very different space than what it’s normally for, which is enough to trigger locational memory. There can never be food in my line of sight, and I may move it from the room entirely lest it become a distraction.

Eliminate anything that competes with what you want to do. For me this takes the form of deciding that none of the other things are an option that day. Watching things frequently competes with writing, so if my intent is to write then I have decided to not watch anything at all that day.

Similarly, I try to lower my startup cost as much as possible. Ideally there should be under 20sec between deciding to do something and doing it. I talk more about this in my piece on Activation Energy. A corollary to this startup cost rule is “if it doesn’t happen instantly, it won’t happen ever” because anything I don’t do right when I think about it may be forgotten for weeks or months. If I don’t want to do it right now, it may not happen at all. A minor workaround to this is setting a notification to nag you intermittently. This is very risky, because if you ever train yourself to ignore notification nagging, the entire technique is made worthless and it becomes a psychological abuse you inflict on yourself until you wise up and turn notifications off entirely.

Rewards and punishments don’t work at all for me because I’m the one who makes up the rule and I can easily choose not to enforce it. If I take the consequences out of my own hands, it becomes an attack on the future by the past. I’d rather be a friend to my future self and receive kindness and help from my past. Framing this externally is actually helpful, since ^{in english at least} you process your past and future as separate people from yourself, so it pays to treat them well.

I need to develop this more before I can say it confidently, but it seems to me that discipline can spring out of developing the ability to concentrate, to direct all of your mind towards what’s at hand. If that’s true, then habits like checking your phone in every free moment trains you to break your focus. Anecdotally I can say that reducing breakaway habits like these can improve your attention, but I can’t yet confirm if this contributes to larger trends like longrange discipline.

More later, after I chew on this further. It’ll also likely become an article, so expect to see some of it on my WordPress and subreddit in the next while.

That was extremely helpful! Thanks a lot. The activation energy part really hit home for me as did the part about breaks. I usually just drift away for long periods of time when I take breaks.

Do you have any advice on how to maintain motivation? Even if I motivate myself and sit down to work, with time I just lose motivation and end up just killing time and then feeling guilty at the end of the day. Its really a vicious cycle.

Keeping up the fire in your heart for whatever your doing is a difficult problem, but I have a few suggestions. Try to determine why you lose motivation, and how far you get before you do. Also try to design for failure: if you want’d to decrease motivation overall or increase the rate at which you lose it, what would you do and what’s the opposite of that?

Finally, if that never works then the best thing to do would be to keep track of how long you maintain motivation and try to design around that. Let’s say that after 2 weeks you’ve found a tight clustering of failure times around 3hrs 20. That means that you have that much time in a task, and need to optimize around it as best you can. Smooth workflows, time savings, optimum operations order, pace tuned to your workflow, moving critical work to the front, etc. Treat it like a stamina meter in a game that only recovers with sleep.

It also really underlines the need for a low activation cost, because you’ll need to work regularly to be productive. It takes a little over 2 weeks of consistency for something to become a habit, if I recall.

Planning for the fact that you’ll run out of steam should free you of guilt if you are only intending to work for a shorter time in order to maximize efficiency.

Killing time is worse than quitting. If you aren’t being productive, change gears. This is why I have so many projects.