Just do a small fraction of what needs to be done. If I commit 1-2 minutes to the task I’ll likely do more once I actually get going.
I was frozen yesterday at the beginning of my work day. New job, too much complexity, overwhelmed, and I just wanted to avoid at all costs.
Finally I decided I had to un-freeze myself so I found my big to-do list and one item was “call this person and get their email address”.
Rest of the day I was able to keep moving, and I felt so much better.
Think about the work that is to be done and try to break it into smaller tasks. Usually I get excited at the chance of finishing something easy and quick from the list and before i know it I’m already in the flow.
Cleaning my immediate workspace so it’s tidy and minimal used to help me get out of an unproductive funk, but I became kinda obsessed with keeping it that way, so now there’s nothing left to tidy up…
Why limit yourself to your immediate workspace? I think I have a rather productive opportunity for you…
In all seriousness though I hate when someone else cleans my space.
I find it helpful to categorize all avoidant behaviors in the same bin.
Like over the years I’ve been addicted to weed, video games, reddit, etc.
When I’d stop one addiction, another would begin. Eventually I realized I had an addiction problem. The way to fix that was to go to a men’s group and face some demons and clear up old trauma.
It freed me up so I don’t feel as motivated to avoid awareness. With the basic demand for escape reduced, I stopped cycling one addiction after another.
Amphetamines
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Lyrica for me
Modafinil works great for me. Not a legal drug where I live, unfortunately, and near impossible to get past the toll after the covid for some reason.
Aren’t there a bunch of generics you can get?
Listening to classical music. It’s the thing that works wonders for me every time 😊
Yeah flight of the bumblebee always helps me feel less anxious and more grounded.
Isn’t this the soul purpose of coffee??
It depends. If you’re lazy because of lack of motivation coffee helps. If you’re lazy because of anxiety coffee can make it worse.
It really depends. Sometimes it’s actually more productive to just rest, or if it’s because of a specific issue then fix that. I don’t struggle with being productive in general, but if you’re not legitimately tired or having symptoms of physical or mental health issues, then the best thing to do is set up an environment where it’s more costly to be unproductive than being productive. Put your phone or other distractions away so you can’t see or reach them.
The 2 minute rule:
Do right away what only takes two or less minutes.
Extension to it:
Do something for two minutes. (Starting is the hardest part.) May work better with 5 or 10 depending on the task.
If you consciously skip the 2 minute rule, embrace life’s absurdity, be positively accepting towards yourself, your skip or inability or incapability.
Sometimes for me when I struggle with making progress e.g. programming it helps to just step away from the PC and just think through what the smallest possible thing is that will let me make progress, even a suboptimal solution can help as improving that iteratively later is much easier than trying to make something perfect from the start.
I try to get it done as soon as possible so I can go back to doing the things I like
But “it” is the thing I like.
Pause on weed for a few days.
I seem to feel like that all the time :-). Going for a short walk helps. So does breaking work down into baby steps and just doing bits at a time.
Keep a Bullet Journal or similar. (I actually use tasks in Outlook this way.)
Break big projects into chunks, get chunks done, even small ones. Checking off boxes gives a good sense of accomplishment.
Schedule breaks, like with a Pomodoro timer. 20 minutes of work, take a 5 minute break. Repeat. After a bunch of work cycles, take a longer break.
Drink less alcohol
Model your willpower as a limited resource and stop over-spending it.
If you make a big push, you will have less in the tank for later. It’s nothing to be ashamed of it’s just biological fact.
The way to maintain some productivity when you’re feeling unmotivated is to already have habits in place which get things done without requiring willpower.
One of the hardest things to do is to get over this implicit model of willpower as an infinite resource.
What willpower as a limited resource really, really means is this: stop spending it indiscriminately!
People think it is always the right move to do the difficult thing. But you don’t get to do an infinite number of difficult things each day. You have to ration them out.
