How To Find Work Motivation When You’re Lacking The Determination
Social distancing, an influx of unfortunate news, and the abrupt change to remote work have severely impacted their overall morale and motivation though.
This lack of initiative has expanded all over. Sally M. Fox, a copywriter from the UK, sums up everyone’s low motivation in one sentence:
“With no idea when this will end and no clear delineation between work and leisure time, my usual motivational favorites, future planning, and walks in the fresh air are off-menu.”
Motivation is one of the most complex concepts out there that can make or break our days.
Why? Because literally anything can be behind motivation or a lack of drive.
Not seeing a purpose to your work. Being in an environment that’s prone to bringing up distractions. Feeling pressured or unappreciated.
Good news is that just as easily as we lose motivation, we can also boost it and make the most of our days.
The importance of staying motivated when at work
Motivation is that one tiny thing we all ignore until we realize it’s no longer with us. Behind its apparent unimportance, everything around you is the result of a highly-motivated person who didn’t give up.
This being said, having a higher dose of self-motivation drives us to keep pushing and learning until we reach our top goals. No motivation to work and you’ve set yourself to nothing.
Beyond this, you also need to work on staying motivated to keep your business going and never stray away from your targets. This subtle mix of achieving motivation and keeping it makes us feel competent, accomplished, and accountable.
“Although it can be hard to summon up work motivation each day, especially consistently, it’s well worth pushing yourself. The sense of achievement keeps driving you along. Furthermore, once you find a sense of “flow” work can be far less emotionally taxing than fixating on an endless news cycle. Yes, everybody is having bad days, but bouncing back and making sure the next is a good one is definitely the key.” — Ben Taylor, Founder @HomeWorkingClub
Frankly, every single aspect of your life is dependent on motivation to a certain degree. From staying in touch with your friends and family to getting out of a rut or improving our personal brand’s reputation.
The #1 reason you might want to gain back your motivation to work is that it just makes life easier. It gets your energy levels higher, keeps you away from procrastinating, and pushes you to do your best. All in much less time then you would if you were delaying everything. No more postponing work or snoozing in because you just can’t be bothered to do something.
How to increase your work motivation
Not all tips on work motivation are effective though. With lots of aspects influencing our day-to-day lives, how can you know what method to use first?
Every individual has one or two key things they care about. For instance, if you’re a career-driven person, your top motivation might be keeping your goal in mind at all times.
But as usual, no matter how different we are, there will always be a set of feelings and concepts that will build up to demotivate us.
Here’s how to fight back the lack of motivation:
Get rid of negative emotions
Negative feelings can keep us from focusing on our goals. All of our worries, fears, and anxieties keep us thinking of all the things that could go wrong along with other personal issues we might have. These distract us from our priorities indefinitely, having us postpone our life-long dreams until it’s too late.
The secret is to avoid having time to think about these negative aspects of your life while focusing on the good: your happiest moments, things you’ve learned, or how you’ll feel once you reach a goal.
“If you are suffering from stress or anxiety, it’s a great time to start practicing yoga and/or meditation to help change your relationship to negative thought patterns. These practices can help shift your perspective to lean towards positive thoughts and emotions, and as a result, lead to greater productivity and motivation in your personal and work life.” — Jamie-Lee Kay, Co-Founder @theotherstraw
Simply talking to other people can keep you balanced and take your mind off all the things that are bothering you:
“Talk to people, don’t bottle up your fears and concerns. Once you have let it off your chest, you may feel better and can move onwards. It’s ok to be anxious.” — Andrew Taylor, Director @Net Lawman
Plan your day and keep distractions at bay
One quick fix to help you avoid bumping into distractions is to create a schedule and stick to it. If you know you only have 1 hour to take care of a task, you’ll have to work during that time and steer clear from any social media posts, funny videos, or articles that can wait.
Use a work management tool like Paymo to plan out tasks and follow their progress as you work on getting them done. Prioritize them and start small every day, gradually expanding your goals until every single task you do on a daily basis will help you reach your ultimate goal.
Nikki Hamilton advises on automating this entire process of managing tasks:
“If there are tasks that need to be repeated over and over, create templates to take the thinking and emotion out of them. This could be as simple as drafting up a checklist to work through each time or using scheduling software to automate the workflows.”
To actually see how you’re progressing, you’ll want to monitor how you spend your time. Clock in your tasks to see how your efforts add up and whether or not the time was spent according to your priorities. If turning the timer on and off seems too much of a routine activity to you, switch to an automatic time tracking tool like PaymoPlus. The tool records everything you do on a computer [including idle time] so you can see exactly what your top distractions were and stay away from those apps or websites in the future.
