The Motivation Machine: How to Get & Stay Motivated for Any Goal - Nat Eliason

LessWrong gives us a more helpful equation:

As they describe it, your motivation is a function of your Expectancy (how likely you think you are to accomplish the goal) multiplied by the Value of the goal to you, divided by the product of your Impulsiveness (how distractible you are) and the Delay (how far off the result seems).

Depending on which part of the challenge you find yourself on you'll have to more aggressively design that part of your machine. You'll either need to make it so easy to start that you can't say no, or make it so easy to continue that you never stop.

Before we continue, a clarification. When I talk about "getting motivated to start a project" I mean actually starting it . Many people will say they're "motivated" to learn Spanish or take up basket weaving, but they never start. These people aren't motivated, they just have an interest. They likely want to the project, not actually it . Our challenge is to design a system that easily and reliably motivates you to action, instead of only talking about your interests over happy hour.

Increasing the reasons to start a project deals with the top of the motivation equation: Expectancy and Value. We have to create ways to dramatically increase the Value of starting the project now, as well as increase our Expectancy of succeeding.

The easiest way to increase the value of starting a project is to clearly define what outcome you will get by accomplishing the goal . If your goals aren't motivating, you may not have attached a sufficiently high value to them.

If you only want to learn Spanish because you feel like you should learn a second language, you're unlikely to see high enough Value in it. But if you have a reason like "I spend at least a month each year in Spanish speaking places and I want to be able to make friends when I'm there," you have a much stronger value.

However you choose to frame it, focus on creating a value that is intrinsically meaningful to you . If you try to justify pursuing a goal because of something you think you should do or that you're supposed to do, it won't work. That's not high value. They can't just be goals that you have chosen, they have to be goals that were generated autonomously and that resonate with your personal desires.

Your Expectancy is how likely you believe you are to succeed at this project you're taking on. Increasing it requires pulling two levers: decreasing your learned helplessness , and increasing the perceived ease of accomplishing it .

If you've ever taken on self-directed projects and failed before, or you've never been able to get yourself motivated to start them in the past, you may have developed a degree of " Learned Helplessness " around motivating yourself. It's a psychological phenomenon in which repeated failures conditions you to not bother trying, even when the factors that caused you to fail in the past have been removed.

The solution?Set small, incremental goals that are sufficiently exciting to be motivating and which you have a reasonable expectation of hitting . A good technique for this is setting process goals instead of outcome goals. An outcome goal is great for planning, but it's bad for day to day tracking since you can't control your outcomes. You can only control what you do in pursuit of those outcomes.

The challenge is keeping that high-level goal in front of you while you're working through the minutia and day to day of working to accomplish it. You can do this multiple ways, but here's what's worked well for me.

I think of my goals on three levels: quarterly, weekly, and daily. The quarterly goals are the loftiest: finish a book draft, grow my business to > $30,000 MRR, dial in my productivity system. From those quarterly goals, I can create weekly goals as well as monthly "check-in" goals to make sure I'm on track. Then from those weekly goals, I create my daily goals, either each night when I wrap up or each morning before I get started. (For more on this, read Getting Results the Agile Way ).

As such, these methods will focus on preventing distraction, avoiding procrastination, and stopping doing the "urgent unimportant" tasks instead of the " important non-urgent " ones you should be doing.