For many people in the workplace, motivation is a determinant of productivity. It significantly helps your work speed up. People rely on different ways just to boost their motivation as it is the driving force to deliver exceptional results.
What if I told you that you don’t need the motivation to stay productive? In fact, being too reliant on motivation will sabotage your momentum if you become unmotivated. You shouldn’t expect your tasks to be done with utmost ebullience every day. You can’t also go reading another motivating article, a quote, or watching motivational videos every time the driving force of your work dissipates.
There is a surprisingly effective fundamental process to work without motivation. It involves learning to turn fleeting motivation to habits that would not turn their backs on you. Here are the steps you can take to master the art of working without motivation.
Accept the Feeling of Being Unmotivated
Some people freak out when they feel unmotivated. They think it disrupts everything they’ve been working for or that they have to go back to square one again. They would feel guilty about slacking off, yet they can’t do anything about it because they don’t even want to get out of bed. The first step you can practice to start getting back on track is accepting your emotions. Stop making yourself feel guilty about feelings everybody also feels.
Assess Your Emotions
There is always a reason why you feel the way you do. Either you’re not properly compensated at your current job, you hate your boss, or you hate your work environment. Finding out what drained your motivation will help you address the problem. Recognizing your negative emotions would help you process and hopefully overcome them. Forgive yourself for not having the strength to be as productive as you usually are. If you don’t do this, you are prone to waste more time overthinking or hating yourself for being unproductive. The key to human emotions is feeling instead of denying them and not letting them overstay their welcome.
Start With the Smallest Task
Successfully assessing yourself rarely equates to a surge of motivation to start again. You might still think that a magical spark of motivation would flash before you. It happens, but you shouldn’t wait for positivity to strike. Start doing anything. Getting out of your bed even if you don’t feel like it is a great start. Doing your small daily tasks that feel arduous right now will get you going. Going to work and trying to work on your tasks with the premise that you don’t have to push yourself too hard today will put pressure off you and help you do more.
The important thing is that you tried to do something. Starting again doesn’t have to be magical. It just has to happen.
Realize That It’s Not Easy
If you decide to abandon your productivity plan for today, given that you’ve done everything you can to overcome the lack of motivation, it’s okay. Remember that the process of turning motivation-driven productivity to habitual productivity is a process. According to a 2009 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, it takes 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit. It’s not a one-day process, and even slowly working your way there will give you great results as long as you don’t give up.
Motivation is one vital factor to success, but it doesn’t always have to be present for us to move. Not relying on external motivation and sticking to consistency, persistence, and hard work still makes up the formula to success. Feeling unmotivated is fine, as long as you have no intention to stay that way for an unnecessarily long time.