Motivation Maintenance: Keeping The Drive Alive

Image courtesy of dqj103

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a guest post by Ali Hale of The Office Diet and Alpha Student.

When undertaking a big project – losing weight, starting a new business, writing a novel – you probably draw motivation from your expected end result. Perhaps you cut out a picture from a magazine to represent an ideal weight, imagine your bank balance increasing month-on-month with your business running well, or picture that book with your name on the spine.

This sort of visualization is definitely a boost to motivation, and gives you the push you need to get started on the path to your goal. If your enthusiasm seems to occasionally wane along the way, though, you’ll want to look for some lower-level, day-to-day motivations.

When you’re wondering whether all the healthy eating and exercising is worth it, when you’re still struggling to get your new business off the ground, or when your novel has stalled part way through chapter three, that end goal can seem very far away. Here’s how to keep your motivation and enthusiasm up:

1. List what you enjoy about actively working on your project

(By “project”, I mean any long-term set of actions leading to a specific goal – not necessarily a work-related “project”.)

Get a piece of paper, or open a new document on your computer, and list what you enjoy most about working on your project. These are the benefits you get on a daily basis, as you head towards your end goal.

For example, if your big project is writing a novel, the day-to-day things that you enjoy might be:

• The fun of creating characters and putting them in difficult situations
• The sense of achievement when you meet the day’s wordcount
• Sharing your work-in-progress with friends in a writers’ group

If you can’t find anything that you enjoy on a day-to-day basis, it’s time to reconsider whether this is a goal you should have. With any big goal, the journey to get there is as important as reaching it: don’t assume that achieving the goal itself is what makes you feel happy or fulfilled. So if you want to have written a novel because you’d enjoy seeing your name in print, but you dread approaching the keyboard each day, rethink your goal.

2. Set small and specific sub-goals

If your end goal is going to take a long time to reach, it helps to break it down into smaller chunks, and set these as specific sub-goals. This lets you get a regular sense of achievement, and the feeling that you’re making progress – very important for your motivation levels!

For example, if your big project is to redecorate your entire house, you might set sub-goals like:

• Clean out the basement
• Paint the spare bedroom
• Get the hallway recarpeted

Any project can be broken down in this way. Even if your project can’t be “seen” until it’s finished (maybe you’re creating a website), you can still set sub-goals of completing small parts of it. For an extended written piece, try setting word-count goals. For any project, you can set goals of spending a certain amount of time working on it.

3. Track how far you’ve come towards your goal

When you’ve been working for months, and you still have a long way to go, you might feel quite dispirited. It helps hugely to see how far you’ve come, and this simply means keeping track of progress – ticking off sub-goals as you achieve them, or recording statistics related to your project.

For example, if your big project is to lose weight, you could track:

• How much you weigh each week
• Your eating habits each week (to see how they’re improving)
• How you look – get someone to photograph you every 2 or 4 weeks for a visual record.

When you’re three or four months into your project, you can look back over all those weeks of records to see that you have made progress and that you’re infinitely nearer your goal than you were before you started on Day One!

4. Celebrate milestones along the way

Setting small sub-goals, and tracking your progress, puts you in an ideal position to celebrate the milestones that you reach. Most projects will have significant moments where you can say with confidence that you’ve achieved something worthwhile – even though you aren’t yet at your final goal.

For example, if your big project is to get your Bachelors’ degree, your milestones might be:

• Successfully being accepted onto a degree course
• Passing your first set of exams
• Completing your first significant piece of coursework

Reward yourself when you reach a milestone: go out for a nice meal, buy champagne, treat yourself to a day doing whatever you like, or buy a CD or book that you’ve been wanting to get your hands on. Celebrating your achievements in this way can give you added enthusiasm to push on towards the next milestone; most of us are more motivated by rewards than we like to admit.

5. Get rid of niggles in your project

However much you set yourself small goals, track progress and reward yourself, you’ll find that there are some aspects of your project which bore you, frustrate you, or take up too much of your time. Identify these “niggles” – and be ruthless in eliminating or at least diminishing them.

For example, if your big project is creating a successful blog, you might remove niggles by:

• Paying someone else (or bribing a spouse/child) to do routine administration tasks
• Automating as many tedious, repetitive aspects as you can
• Asking a friend to guest-post once a fortnight for you

Try not to get held back by niggles or feel that they are an inevitable part of your road to success which must be endured. There are few unpleasant aspects to your project which you can’t overcome with a bit of creativity. Even if your project is something like “healthy eating” (you can’t really outsource “not eating chocolate”), you can take action to reduce food preparation time or to make resisting temptation easier by not having junk food in the house.

6. Set a schedule for working on your project

Most of us feel motivated when we’re fully on top of things, and ahead with the work which we’re doing (whether that’s paid work, or work towards a personal goal). And most of us feel correspondingly demotivated when we feel that we’re behind, floundering and getting overwhelmed. Setting a project schedule can be a huge step towards feeling in control.

For example, if your big project is starting a freelance business “on the side”, you might:

• Devote half an hour each morning to reading about your industry
• Make the first hour of your evening “freelancing time”, to look for clients or work on client projects
• Set aside a full morning or afternoon at the weekend for freelancing purposes

Having a specific day of the week, or a specific hour of the day, devoted to your project – and sticking to it without making excuses – means that you have a structure in place to help you towards success. Trying to fit your project in when you “have time” almost inevitably means you’ll end up getting very little done.

What big project(s) are you working on? What helps you find your day-to-day motivation for making progress towards your end goal?

Ali Hale is a writer, blogger and postgrad student. She runs The Office Diet (RSS feed) and Alpha Student (RSS feed), and writes for several large blogs.

ALSO, if the subject interests you, be sure to check out her post on Up-And-Coming-BLogger called Staff Blogging: Get Paid To Practice Your Blogging.