Stay Motivated and Productive

Motivational speaker Dan Lok consults experts, including myself, in his article on How To Motivate Yourself To Be More Productive When You’re Alone. His article includes helpful advice for those trying to self-motivate during the COVID-19 quarantine.

Excerpt:

If you’re stressing about how to stay motivated when you’re alone, working from home, ask yourself an important question. Do you have a rewards system in place? What you need is an internal rewards system. External motivators or external rewards (like your boss admiring your work and inviting you to an exciting conference) won’t be possible with current stay-at-home regulations. Internal rewards, however, could be something as simple as checking tasks off a to-do list. Indigo Stray Conger, a licensed therapist from Colorado, says,

“Self-motivation is difficult for most people because we typically learn from a young age to accomplish tasks through external motivators. We feel satisfaction in the form of the neurotransmitter dopamine when we receive a reward or avoid a punishment.

When you work for yourself or have goals you’d like to achieve on your own, self-motivation often needs to be translated into a rewards system in order to create an ease of accomplishment. Breaking larger goals into smaller, more manageable tasks and setting deadlines with clear motivators is the key to success.

For some people a ‘reward’ as simple as checking a task off of a list is enough to stimulate the reward center in their brain and create a small hit of dopamine, which is what external motivators are designed for. In recent years, this has been dubbed ‘gamifying’ your life, or turning tasks into a game.”

So, now you know that it’s possible to train your brain to get dopamine hits from checking tasks off your to-do list. Don’t have a list of goals that you can check off? Write out that list immediately. Pin it somewhere visible and look at it daily. This is key when it comes to mastering how to motivate yourself, and giving yourself the reward of accomplishment.

Read the full article here.