Hack your motivation

I have been really focusing on my motivation and willpower lately. I used to have a very similar scenario to what you describe.

What works for me is this: 1) Recognize that my willpower is limited, like a muscle it can be exhausted and needs rest. 2) Recognize that when I'm listless that it's not a moral failing, it's essentially my willpower being exhausted. 3) Never feel guilty for that feeling of listlessness, instead use it as an opportunity to rest. 4) Pay attention to what types of rest work most effectively. 5) Never try to override this rest unless it's seriously important. (And not everything can be seriously important). 6) Recognize that you don't need to feel driven to get things done. You need to do things to get things done.

When I exhaust my will, I suck at maintaining priorities. I drive on feelings, and unless I can work myself up into a stress-filled frenzy, I'm going to do the things that I'm not supposed to be doing. However, if I do work myself into a stress-frenzy, I'm going to be working erratically and inefficiently and generally be a giant pain to be around. A lot of people live in this state to cope with these problems. Drugs, caffeine, distractions, over-exaggeration all help you maintain it.

When I'm working comfortably with motivation to spare, I can choose a task and do it. I can make a plan and stick to it. I'm very efficient relatively speaking. The most noticeable thing though is I'm a lot less emotional about the things I'm doing. I'm not angry or irritated, but I'm also not really excited either. That's not to say I'm not passionate or really interested, but I'm calm. The sort of emotional outbursts are stressful, and just being under stress drains my will.

The biggest difference I've noticed though is that when I'm able to work myself down into that calm motivated state, I'm less affected by trepidation and apprehension. I don't feel guilty about the things that I have been putting off; part of that is because I've committed to not feel guilty, but a large part is that I've got some control over my feelings. When I'm stressed and my will is exhausted, I hate myself for the things I haven't done. When I'm motivated I will pick something that has been cast aside for 3 weeks and just do what needs to be done, not feeling guilty or shameful, just continuing.

The more I can keep myself in the second state, the easier it is. I don't get as stressed, so I'm less likely to fall back into the first state. So ultimately, the real challenge is how to get back to the calm motivated state when you're in the stress-frenzy state.

The simple thinking is that "I want to get stuff done" so you push yourself to work harder and frustrate yourself that you are failing. But that generates more stress and makes it harder. The less intuitive path is to let yourself rest, and not let yourself get frustrated and stressed about it. Stop procrastinating and start resting. The difference between procrastinating and resting is really just that in the former you're worrying yourself over the things you're not doing.

I've always had up and down moments. In my down moments I can be useless. So instead of trying to never have down moments, I try to make the most of them instead of struggling with them, and never spend my up moments regretting them. Over the long term this has lead to my down moments being not as bad, not as long, and less frequent.

segmondy,

I've struggled with exactly what you describe, the worst were the afternoons. I'm sure you know the feeling. I would finish lunch, and instead of being pumped up and ready to go on whatever it was, I would just stare at the screen and my mental performance/motivation would drop big time. It got so bad that I turned to Adderall XR (concentrated amphetamine salts prescribed by my doctor for what I explained as "post-lunch narcolepsy") to try to make things better. It was great because I could literally do anything I put my mind to, but over time, I noticed it would leave me feeling soul-less and hollow inside for lack of a better term. I was as if I was trading in my entire personality, just to be able to get work done. So I started experimenting with some other things less crazy things. I noticed coffee with lunch kind of helped, but it would get me too excited and it left me anxious because it didn't have any inhibitory neurotransmitters to calm me down/doesn't replenish what it took out of me. So I added a little bit of GABA (an inhibitory neurotransmitter) to prolong a more balanced effect. But then I still had that sugar spike that would make me tired, so I researched a whole bunch of other things that would aid in metabolism and energy production. I finally found a combination that actually worked, but the problem was that I had to take a bunch of pills and none of the supplements I found online were in the right doses/proportions, so I would literally have to spend hours each month packing powder from my milligram scale into tiny capsules that I could take with my lunch. That process sucked big time, so I started giving it to some of my friends to see if they wanted to do a larger production run, and they were all big fans so we all looked into getting the capsules manufactured with some of the nutraceutical companies in New York...long story short, we came up with a name (Alleradd) and a website (http://www.alleradd.com) and we're doing a limited launch to a few people right now. I'd love to send you a bottle and see if you like it. So far, the response has been overwhelmingly positive and people are coming up with all sorts of other interesting uses for it. As for me, I still just use it every day with lunch and it feels great/restores my motivation. Anyway, that's it for my rant.

Cheers,

s1mple

Very interesting. Maybe you're just in the wrong environment, where there's nothing to motivate you. I live in a small, 200 or so people, village. I know everybody here and not a single one has this kind of a problem.

This is probably a silly suggestion, but you can buy say a very expensive car on a loan. That way you'll have two choices:

a) work hard

b) be lazy now and have a ton of problems later - bankruptcy, no where to sleep, etc.

Your brain motivation circuitry will probably choose the easier option - a)

As favored by Ernest Hemmingway:

<quote>When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there.</quote>

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fic...

I've heard this phrased as always stop after some sudden progress that makes you eager to do more - as opposed to stopping when you're stuck and giving up:

if you're stuck, then when you think of the task it will be in your mind as a bete noire, as opposed to stopping where you've just made some progress and are eager to continue - then it will always be in your mind as something great to return to and make more progress.

Austin Kleon writes about this a lot, though he calls it chain smoking: http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/39051813256

"Instead of taking a break in between projects and worrying about what’s next, use the end of one project to light up the next one."

I started using it when I started doing freelance work and it saved my life as working at home is much more distraction prone than working at office.

I also built Tomatoes[1] a tool that I suggest to track working time effectively.

[1] http://tomato.es

Can't say enough about the pomodoro technique as well. I tried many things, this is what worked.

After training myself to work when the clock is ticking, I now find that clicking the "start" button on my timer triggers something in my brain that puts me to work. It's kind of trippy actually.

This exactly the same for me. Just out of muscle memory, my reptilian brain starts typing Reddit or Hacker News into the URL field in my browser when I'm not paying attention. If I start my day wandering down the hacker news/reddit rabbit hole, I never really get out.

So when I wake up in the morning, literally before I do anything else on my computer, I turn on Self Control (http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/), which blocks sites that kill my productivity.

I've recently adopted org-mode for emacs, and it has helped immensely. Task #1 everyday: Turn on Self Control for a few hours. The last task everyday: Close all windows and make sure org-mode is greeting me when I wake up with Task #1 for the day.

Here is some slides about this technique, the approach seems interesting : http://hashref.com/summaries/TheNowHabit.pdf I find myself in the psychologies described.

This may be unrelated, but if your social anxiety is caused by fear that your social skills are inadequate, it could be helpful to recognize that the content of what you say matters much more than your presentation. When I'm nervous about my delivery in an upcoming, important conversation, it helps me to remember that some of the most fascinating and accomplished people do not always speak fluently or present well. These people include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Paul Graham, and they certainly have not been held back by any supposed weakness in speaking style. See pg's essay, "Writing and Speaking." http://www.paulgraham.com/speak.html

I have two: if your issue is related to your business I would add a "commercial person" to manage the meetings and the conversations. Even if this person is just a decoration. The other typical recommendation about improving yourself is good but will take time.

Regarding your fears about your knowledge you can always say in the meeting: "I need to talk to my lawyer about this" and think in background.

I used to be in the same boat when I was self employed. My solution was to rely heavily on email (when possible). In cases where a phone call was necessary, I would mentally plot out the first 30 or so seconds. I found that 30 second prep was enough to get me over the hump of actually making the call. On those items where you are not knowledgeable, you can say "I will look into that and get back to you". I found 99% of people were fine with that answer.

edit: Remember, nobody likes to talking to random people on the phone. The other end of your conversation is probably feeling very similar to you.

What are some byproduct examples? I'm interested in doing more of this.

Thanks for posting that. I had got about 80% of the way towards a similar model myself, but to see one laid out and formalized like that was very helpful.

Can you give more details and maybe examples of this?

You might want to be careful with that.

I believe the company you work for legally owns anything you make while at work.