How to motivate yourself: simple ways to increase productivity
How to motivate yourself: simple ways to increase productivity
Motivation allows us to achieve our goals, but finding it in the first place can be tricky. Whether you want to motivate yourself for personal or professional reasons, the use of strategies and techniques can be helpful.
Set decisive goals
One of the first parts of learning how to motive yourself can be to figure out what you want to achieve. What is your goal or endgame?
When setting goals, remember to be SMART:
- Specific – what, exactly, is the goal? Cover all your bases.
- Measurable – how will you know you have achieved the goal? Could this be a weight, dress size, time taken to run a mile, KPI achieved at work?
- Attainable – being realistic is important. Setting a goal of “I want to grow wings and fly” isn’t going to be attainable. However, a goal of “I want to fly to Shanghai by the end of 2025” might be.
- Relevant – ensure your goal is relevant to some of the struggles in your life. This could mean relating your goal to the industry you work in, or your family life.
- Time-bound – set a deadline for your goal. This can help with motivation as you will only have a finite amount of time to work on your achievement.
Finding ways to measure your achievements, especially when you have met or exceeded a goal, can be great for building up your confidence and learning how to motivate yourself in future. This is where a journal could be useful for you to jot down goals and measure progress over time.
Break goals into manageable chunks
Due to this, it can also be a good idea to break your goal into manageable chunks or subcategories.
Let’s use losing weight as an example.
- First, I decide my total weight loss will be 30kg. This seems like a lot, meaning I may give up because the goal is too big.
- Therefore, I break it into manageable chunks. My first goal is now to lose 5kg. I have set my deadline as 5 weeks from today.
- In 5 weeks, I assess if I have achieved my goal. What went well? Where did I struggle. This helps me plan for the next 5kg over another 5 weeks.
- After 30 weeks, I should then have met my deadline for my main goal. Did I achieve it? What could I have done better? This information could be used to help me better plan future goals.
Build a positive mindset
Your thought patterns may be exceptionally important when learning how to motivate yourself. If you feel negatively about yourself, or don’t think you can achieve the task at hand, there is a high chance you may fail.
Likewise, those who face challenges believing in themselves and their skills may be more likely to succeed.
The real difficulty here is learning how to be more positive about the things you wish to change. It can be so simple for people to tell you to ‘just cheer up’ or ‘don’t be negative’. However, the reality can be much harder.
The first stage of building a positive mindset can be to eliminate negative thought patterns. One of the biggest examples of this can be self-doubt or criticism. You may find it useful to combine mindfulness with positivity to help you keep stress and anxiety at bay.
While it can be important to challenge and improve yourself, you may not want to be too harsh of a critic as this may deter you from trying in the first place.
Give yourself reasons
When you want to learn how to motivate yourself, understanding ‘why’ can be incredibly insightful.
Ask yourself:
- What motivates me?
- What do I get out of it?
- What impact will this make?
- How will this affect others around me?
Continuously questioning your actions, and the result of them, can help you to push through, even on days when your motivation is running dry.
Reward your efforts
Setting yourself a goal, and sticking to it, can be quite difficult. Therefore, once you have achieved something, no matter how small, you should celebrate.
Rewards don’t need to be expensive or overly grand, yet they can be used throughout daily life.
As an example:
You have a 10-page form that needs to be filled in and posted by the end of the day. Each page takes you about 20 minutes to complete.
After each page, you reward yourself with 1 round of Uno on your phone. When you’ve posted the form, you then reward yourself with a glass of wine and an episode of Big Bang Theory.
These rewards allows you to have a micro-break from a task you dislike, and can even help to motivate you with the next challenge until you, ultimately, achieve your goal. Saving the biggest reward for when you are done can also be a great way of unwinding and avoiding mental exhaustion.
Start by implementing rewards within the parts of your daily life you don’t struggle with. You may then find it easier to work on more difficult tasks, especially when you know there’s instant gratification in it for you.
Is learning how to motivate yourself hard?
The steps on how to motivate yourself may seem rather simple but, when you have no motivation to begin with, can be difficult to put into practise.
Experts state that it can take around 66 days to form a habit. Therefore, you may need to try to keep at it for at least this length of time before these strategies can be deemed as a normal part of your day.
The use of rewards may be one of the most effective ways that you can keep yourself going for that period. That doesn’t mean you need to drop those rewards afterwards, instead you may find it significantly easier to gain them.
Learning how to motivate yourself alongside others can also be useful. You can support one another and hold each other accountable for both progress and set-backs.
In certain situations, especially if the change required is due to serious health risks, you might also be able to gain support from your GP or similar services to assist you on your journey.
Have your say
Learning how to motivate yourself can be crucial, especially if you don’t want your life to remain stagnant.
While these are just some of the tips that we use to keep the motivation flowing, you might find something else that works for you
If you have some ideas regarding how to motivate yourself, or work on wellness in general, you might want to think about writing a guest post for Mindful Me.
Together, we can feel better both inside and outside ourselves, and break the stigma associated with struggles.
Freelance writer for 3+ years, currently working in marketing.
I love walks in the woods, Asian dramas, and cooking up delicious food.