Comment by orangebread
2 days ago
I truly appreciate how well thought out this post is. However, it's one of those things where if you didn't have motivation in the first place, it's not going to work. I've tried atomic habits. I've tried different ideas from social media of grouping rooms and things into piles to sort.
Sure, I'll get it done... eventually. But no amount of gamification will motivate me to put this much effort into habitual cleaning. I hope the author's strategy helps someone, but it assumes you have the motivation but not the methodology.
If you can, actively examine your thoughts/emotions and dissect them from a distance so to speak, when you feel stuck and have trouble to reach for motivation.
There's a power in simply accepting that it's just a feeling, whether you're tired, motivated, hungry... The feeling that you want instead, is a sort of disassociation. The stronger the feeling, the harder it will be. And then you just do the thing you need to do despite lacking motivation or being tired or whatever.
There's something liberating about it that is a bit difficult to put into words. Like "fuck it, I'm going to do it anyway". Sounds a bit stupid, but it's not entirely wrong.
However it's not a magic trick, but rather a kind of thought muscle you can try to train so to speak. It works for me increasingly, despite being quite terrible at this kind of thing. Or rather two muscles: One is creating a distance/objectivity to your feeling or state of mind, the other is to start the action. Sometimes the second part is almost automatic once you do the first part well from my experience.
Yup, and conversely, we’ve all trained the opposite “muscle” that basically says “I don’t wanna so I won’t”. Being aware of your feelings and emotions is the first step to being in control. Most people fail to adequately understand themselves and thus fail to ever overcome their lizard brain behaviors.
Actually, my method works even with very very very little motivation. The idea is that having a list of easy, routine micro-tasks ready in the morning gives you momentum. Even on a day when I have no motivation at all, I still reach a basic, acceptable level of productivity.
I even gave an example in my article about this for initial cleaning, specifically with emails. We usually wait for a day when we feel motivated to sort everything out, but that day never comes, and we end up never doing the task. The idea is to have one micro-task every day, like processing a maximum of five emails. Or even five separate tasks of one email each. And on a day when you really have no motivation, you just push yourself to handle one overdue email.
What helps me is to set up "morning routine" with tasks such as:
- get up with alarm - make the bed - shave - take vitamins - read 5 pages
Checking off 10 small tasks right in the morning sets me for a productive mood.