One Method to be More Productive without Motivation
Let’s be honest, how many times have we binge-watched youtube or have scrolled through post after post to find that spark of motivation to become more productive in our lives? Trust me I’ve been there before and I want to show you that there is a way to get more stuff done, which has personally helped me to start exercising and eating healthy consistently for the past 9 months.
What’s a Realistic Solution?
This is the fact that you have to Control your Environment! I’ll say that again, control your environment. Why I say this is because we as humans naturally take the path of least resistance.
For instance, imagine you’re sitting on your couch scrolling through social media and you begin to feel hungry, so as anybody would do, you would reach out for the nearest thing to you e.g. a chocolate bar. This, unfortunately, has led to the development of an unhealthy eating habit of mine.
An actionable step I’ve taken to combat this is to make the healthy snacks much easier to get compared to the unhealthy snacks. This is in the form of having a basket full of fruits near me at all times. Along with that, I would also stop buying unhealthy snacks so that it was never in my sight.
You may be sitting there thinking that this is too simple and will never work for you. Trust me, try it out for a couple of weeks and you will see for yourself!
Other ways to Control your Environment:
Buy a pull-up bar- This has personally helped me build my back and overall improve my posture.
Create a to-do checklist- For you to quantify and keep track of tasks done.
Have an accountability partner- To make sure you are committed to your task and not get distracted.
Buy a manual, cheap alarm- To avoid using your phone as an alarm, as you may get distracted by social media as soon as you wake up.
Make sure to have a greater dose of daylight in your workspace- Click here to see scientific research done by N. Shishegar, who explain the various benefits of receiving natural light.
Remove both digital/physical clutter regularly- To improve your mental clarity and focus.
Replace plate/bowls which are smaller- So you are mindful of the portions of food that you put on your plate.
Add browser extensions- To track the amount of time spent on websites. One that I personally use is Timebite, which is a google chrome extension that shows how much time you’ve wasted versus your productive time.
Listen to music- To avoid letting external noise to affect your mood/productivity.
Why does this work?
As Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg has stated:
“Goals are harmful unless they guide you to make specific behaviors easier to do. Don’t focus your motivation on doing Behavior X. Instead, focus on making Behavior X easier to do.”
I’m sure you know that when you try to break a bad habit and become more productive, you may experience the “ah-screw-it” moment, which is when you end up going back to your old habits, as you perceive the action of holding back the habit to require a lot of willpower.
This is because habits are the brain’s way of simplifying the movements required to achieve a given result. This means that using the environment to increase friction is the best way to influence your behavior. Fogg also states, in a humorous manner:
“By designing for laziness, you can stop or reduce a behavior. For example, put bad snacks in garage on shelf that requires a ladder.”
Since your willpower is very fragile, focusing your energy on making undesirable habits harder to perform is the way to go.
Furthermore, I also believe that success is most often the result of the consistent execution of a single habit. As a result, it is no wonder that research suggests that having too many choices is the enemy of long-term goals.
In other words, having more options makes consistent behavior harder to maintain. Ramit Sethi, the New York Times bestselling author, describes this theory as the “tripod of stability”. This is the idea that you should practice routinizing some important aspects of your life to maintain consistency, but also being more aggressive with the rest of your decisions.
What about Motivation or Discipline?
I truly believe motivation is NOT something people should rely on and is something that comes and goes daily. I say this because motivation is heavily affected by my mood at that current time. Also, the mood is scientifically proven to be affected by external factors e.g. the weather. This means we have little control over when motivation comes and goes.
Click here to find scientific evidence done by A.G. Barnston on International Journal of Biometeorology, who investigates how the weather affects our motivation and productivity- on page 142 it states that ‘In conclusion, human moods and productivity appear to be affected by weather’.
On the other hand, some would say that building up your discipline is far greater than motivation to become more productive. An advocate of this ideology is Jocko Willinks, a retired US Navy Seal veteran, who says that discipline is consistent, as it is something that can be trained and built up over time.
However, where the argument falls apart is that discipline is finite, as you are working against the natural path of least resistance, as mentioned previously. If the environment is persistently less than ideal to get you towards your goals, eventually you will end up caving back into your bad habits, as we are all human at the end of the day.
I do hope this post has helped you to take some form of action to start getting stuff done, without the constant need to search for motivation.
