Boosting Task Motivation

Hi,

Today's email is about key ways to increase your motivation to do the things you need to.

To get yourself to take action, it’s important for each task that you need to do to be associated with an outcome that you care about. This raises two key issues that can cause procrastination: low-value outcomes and weak associations between outcomes and tasks.

To address these issues, you first need to make sure that you have an outcome in mind that you genuinely care about. Then, you need to make sure that you can clearly see how the task that you need to do will help you achieve that outcome.

Let’s say that you need to prepare for an interview. In that case, you should first think about how succeeding at the interview will benefit you, for example by helping you land an exciting opportunity that you’ll enjoy. Then, you should think about how preparing for the interview will help you do better on it, and consequently get the opportunity you want. And, to help with all this, you can also engage in episodic future thinking, by visualizing yourself enjoying the outcomes of the tasks that you need to do.

There are a few things keeping in mind when you do this:

• When thinking about future outcomes, you can either think about positive outcomes that will come from taking action, or negative outcomes that will come from procrastinating.

• It’s sometimes better to focus on your intrinsic motivation for doing a task, like the joy of learning, rather than on an outcome that the task could lead to.

• Motivation is helpful, but it’s often insufficient enough, so you should pair this approach with other anti-procrastination techniques, like facing underlying fears.

I hope you’ll find this helpful.

Have a great week,
Itamar