How to motivate yourself

Question

I have trouble motivating myself to do anything. Whenever I’m going to start on a project, I would just procrastinate until I need to actually do it. I just can’t motivate myself. Any tip for how to motivate yourself? There is no goal that I want to achieve and nothing seems to interest me. I can never seem to overcome that emotional hurdle to doing stuff.

Answer 1

If you can’t motivate yourself, then you don’t really have to. Organize your life in a way that let you feel motivated. Maybe you are not enjoying your current work, finding it dull and mundane, then it’s about time you think about getting a new job. You want the motivation to be a backup to your career, rather than a daily routine. Something that could make the flow of work goes more naturally could be passion. Choose to do things you have the passion for or work towards it. Find things that you like to do, that you want to do. If life is just a chronic chores to you, then you better find something to live for, as much as we have more things that we all don’t want to do.

Answer 2

How to motivate yourself…  Getting things down on habit is key to avoiding that procrastination and eventually motivate yourself. While you can’t have everything on autopilot, there are certainly few habits that you already put daily that creates a structure for your day. Start from something simple. Wake up and, hopefully, sleep on the same time every night, make breakfast without fail and then go to work. A similar productive daily routine makes everything easier to get what you need to do done. Then there is getting stuff done in the first place. Avoiding procrastination can easily be avoided by starting the things you want to finish. Once you start something, our brain is predisposed to feel dissatisfied not completing it. That will be your subconscious motivation yourself and maybe overcome that initial emotional hurdle.

Answer 3

One most important tip I want to share is first to make reasonable and realistic goals that you know you will complete. Honestly, we are terrible at sticking to long term goals since whatever we do are not immediately rewarded. Focusing on accomplishing something that you ultimately yearn for gets dull really fast. So instead of looking at the far future, try something closer. Let’s say you want to be a successful programmer. Don’t make your goal somewhere unreachable yet, something like working in Microsoft. Starts with complete this Java course with perfect score, then followed by making a website with C++. Success creates success. Keep building on it. You are easily motivated when you feel like you have won. Make small daily wins that you can manage. You get constantly motivated and one day you will reach the top, then continues to climb on.

Comments

Oh, this is really helpful, thanks for you tips on how to motivate yourself.