Has there ever been an easier time to get motivated? Great technology, information at our fingertips, new business opportunities make things easier.
Has there ever been a harder time to get motivated? So many things eat into our time; so many distractions and obstacles prevent us from getting what we really want. Do we even know what we really want?
Struggling to get motivated could be a case of not knowing what you want, knowing what you want but not knowing how to get it, or being distracted or prevented from achieving it.
What about overwork? It is suggested that doing more than 54 hours of work a week (not to mention on top of household chores, looking after children, and the rest) is dangerous to health. 54 hours a week is 10 hours a day for 5 days – and that’s assuming we do nothing at weekends – if only!
The importance of having goals to motivate us is fundamental: Goals enable achievement and give focus. But what if the work/activity in front of us is too daunting to contemplate?
54 hours of work a week could be bad for your health. Do we all dismiss the consequences of overwork until they catch up with us?
Break down the work activity into manageable tasks with a single, fixed objective. This works just as well for our jobs as it does for other areas of life. Not only does it help us reduce and itemize the larger things ahead of us, but with a single and clear objective for each task, we get a small, motivating boost of fulfillment every time an objective is cleared.
It helps remind us – especially when doing something particularly tedious – why we are doing this and what, ultimately, we are striving for. In the case of a job we don’t like, it might help to bear in mind who, ultimately, we are striving for: our children, siblings, partners, loved ones. For other things, the bigger picture might be where we are trying to reach in life, a promotion we’re trying to get, a stage in life we need to feel contentedness.
This is one of the hardest things to do and one of the main reasons we can find it hard to get motivated. You may know the phrase ‘attention economy’: all these services, apps, and streaming sites are free because they make their money by grabbing little pieces of our attention and placing adverts within that content.
It takes tremendous willpower to say no to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Netflix, and they can be so addictive that our attention spans suffer as a result. Banishing distractions is essential for finding the motivation to pursue our real goals.
If we let the darker side of our imagination run wild, it can be all too easy to exaggerate the importance of one thing or to become sapped for energy because we have so much to do, too little time, and we don’t even know where to begin.
When we reach this stage in our thinking (usually about 9:05 Monday morning), it’s so hard to get motivated – allowing ourselves to become overwhelmed in this way only makes it worse – and it’s a vicious circle. Self-assurance is important. It’s okay not to be perfect, it’s okay not to know what to do with your life, and it’s okay to ask for help.
