It's time to get better at Taking Care of Business!
For many people, managing motivation in order to Take Care of Business (TCB) is an ongoing challenge throughout life. The goal of this post is to help you understand and name the factors that are influencing your motivation. Once you learn to identify your own motivational weak points, you'll be empowered to address them in a targeted way.
This article is based on findings from a psychological paper entitled:
The paper can be found in full here and a good summary of it is available in this LessWrong article. In short, Steel came up with what he calls ‘the procrastination equation'.*
Steel's research identified there are four main things that effect how motivated you are to do any given task. I remember them as the three things you need to address in order to Take Care of Business (TCB). These factors are:
- Time Sensitivity and Deadline (makes most sense if we view both of these together)
- Care Factor
- Belief
Let's address each of them in turn. For each, I'll briefly comment on how I address each of them and will provide links to a whole host of methods that people find useful.
*Please note: I have changed the terminology used in the original paper in order to make it more easy to remember. In the following I wrap Time Sensitivity and Deadline up into one because they're only relevant when viewed as a pair.
Time Sensitivity and Deadline
Are you the kind of person who appears to have a remarkable ability to not do things until the last minute? Maybe you don't manage to start assignments till 4am the night before it's due, maybe you don't even think about christmas shopping till Christmas eve. If this sounds like you perhaps your motivation weak point is your time sensitivity. People with low time sensitivity don't feel much of a sense of urgency about things. Time Sensitivity combines with how far away the Deadline is to influence motivation. If your time sensitivity is low, and the deadline is far away, your motivation is likely to be pretty low.
Top Tip for managing your Time Sensitivity and Deadlines
. There's one key thing that, if you learn to properly take advantage of it, will help you overcome your Time Sensitivity.
sitivity weakness: The Power of Habit! In the Ted Talk below Charles Duhigg introduces us to one of the most powerful psychological drivers that we can learn to harness, the Cue-Reward loop. Check out the 15 minute talk to unlock your power of habit.
(if you're viewing this in email the video can be seen here)
More info:
–Here's how the website LessWrong suggests you deal with a low Time Sensitivity (they call it impusliveness)
–Here's some more good tips from AlexVermeer on Impulsiveness.
Care Factor
Care factor relates to 2 types of caring. 1: Care about, 2: Care for. 1 relates to whether you ‘Care About' the outcome. It's likely that your care factor is very high for some outcomes (eg: staying alive) and maybe not as high for others (cleaning?). 2 relates to how much you ‘Care For' the actions required to get to the outcome. Here are the possible combinations of these two Care factors and the possible/likely outcomes.
- Low Care About, Low Care For: Maybe this is the case in your job or school. You don't like it and you don't think that what you're doing has any value. See below these dot points for methods to address both your care about and your care for factors.
- High Care About, Low Care For: Your motivation is probably pretty high, but you may start to feel weary as time goes on and you may burn out. This is the case for many teachers who care a lot about their students but are working in bad conditions. It's also what leads to burnout for many activists how have a long time between successes
- Low Care About, High Care For: Great, you enjoy doing the task itself! for example, you've just started to learn the piano and you're enjoying your practice. Only problem with this combo is once you hit a bit of a challenge (as is inevitable on any learning journey) and maybe you're not enjoying it so much anymore, you don't care about the outcome enough to push through
- High Care About, High Care For. Awesome, you're well on your way to success : )
Top Tip for managing your Care About. Ultimately this is about linking what you're trying to get motivated about to your life and what you want to achieve in it. This goal setting exercise can help you do this.
Top Tip for managing your Care For. Some times in life we come up against situations where we just have to do something that we don't want to. But it's important to remember that no matter what you're doing, there is always the possibility to see the action in a more negative or in a more positive light. This video by Brendon Burchard addresses how you can train yourself to see situations more positively, and to recognise when you're in a place of negative thoughts. See the bottom of this post for how I've applied this to get over some of my study obstacles.
More Info:
-Here's how the website LessWrong suggests you deal with a low care factor (they call it ‘Value')
–Here's some more good tips from Alex Vermeer on Value
Belief
Belief, like care factor, is also split into 2 main sub-categories. 1: ‘Belief that success is possible' and 2: ‘Belief that that you taking action will lead to that success'. These two points are related and you need both of them satisfied in order to feel motivated to take action.
Believing that Success is Possible: ‘Belief that success is possible' is in a large part dependent upon believing that you yourself are capable of achieving. There are three main pathways to self belief as outlined by Richard Shell in his book.(See kindle location 3166 of the book Springboard). These three pathways are:
- Someone you respect believes that ‘You Can Do It!-This is where amazing teachers come in and change lives for many students! An experiment that clearly proves this is Pygmalion in the Classroom.
- A Rite of Passage-ie: you overcome some obstacle and realise you're actually capable of achieving greatness.
- You have Faith-Maybe you have a religion or positive thinking technique or you recite mantras or having a ‘lucky charm' or something like that.
Top Tip for fostering belief that you can achieve. All three pathways to self-belief are open to you. I find that watching the 5 minute clip that I mentioned above, Pygmalion in the Classroom, to be incredibly inspiring. It helps to remind me that simply by changing expectations you change your chances of success. Ultimately, belief that you can get smarter and achieve is a question of mindset, if you'd like some more reinforcement after watching Pygmalianin the Classroom, check out this presentation that I put together on Mindset.
Believing that you taking action can lead to success: This is the crunch. And it's a legitimate question “If I do this, will it actually make me any better”. In some scenarios it's obvious that taking the action will lead to improvements but it others it isn't that clear. At this point it's super important to stress the importance of being strategic in how you spend your time practicing/taking action. This point opens this blog post up to the world of productivity/learning literature, but for now I'll just keep it to a top tip.
Top Tip for believing that you taking action will lead to success. Be Strategic! The best way that I now of doing this is through the 5 step learning method of S.A.(U).L.T. This is the method that I use to learn efficiently and it enabled me to do well in my Economics and Physics degrees at University. I don't think that I'm a genius by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think that I work hard and I work smart. I hope that the S.A.(U).L.T Learning process can help you to learn quickly and efficiently too.
More Info:
–Here's how the website LessWrong suggests you deal with a low level of belief (they call it expectancy)
–Here's some more god tips from Alex Vermeer on Expectancy
–Josh Kaufman's 4 step method of learning anything in 20 hours
–Tim Ferriss' fast learning approach as outlined in the book ‘The Four Hour Chef‘.
Ollie's Methods
How do I address my own time sensitivity? I have one trick that I often use when I have low motivation because I feel like a test is a long way away. I look at past exams. This makes me aware of my knowledge gap (chances are I'll see many of the questions and think ‘holy moly, I have no idea how to do this!) and motivates me to study straight away. For situations in life when I don't have that “look at a test” option I'll often self-impose a deadline. One recent example was when I wanted to learn about mindset, so I put my hand up to run a workshop on mindset at the University of Tasmania. Nothing like a deadline to get you motivated!
How do I address my Care Factor? At times whilst doing my undergrad in physics my care factor was pretty low. Eg: “How does knowing anything about a quark ever going to affect my life???”. At times like these I'd sit down at my desk and lay my books out in front of me. I'd then close my eyes and force myself to smile and repeat over and over to myself “I love physics, I love learning, I can't wait to work on these problems and learn all about quarks.”. This technique takes advantage of the fact that your body language shapes who you are and I found it incredibly helpful.
Another approach here is to address the ‘Care For' element. If we develop mastery based goals rather than performance based goals we're in a better position to stay motivated over the long run. There are two clear examples of this in my life:
-When I started this blog the initial impetus was that I came to a realisation that being a successful and well respected academic/teacher/person these days needs an online presence, so I set about to do that. I was spending a heap of time on twitter trying (relatively unsuccessfully) to get more followers and was trying to post every week on this site to keep things moving. Eventually I came to the realisation that I would enjoy things more if I didn't pressure myself to post but instead posted when I felt like it and to use posts as a way to order and consolidate my own thinking. Since changing my outlook on posting, maintaining this blog has been much more enjoyable for me.
-The second example is running. I find that running to ‘look healthy and fit' isn't incredibly motivating for me. I used to try to get personal records but I found that the pressure of having to beat my previous PR was actually working as a de-motivator for me. I have started to run without a watch, I just head out of the house with my sneakers on and get moving and take in the view. If I feel like it I'll really push myself, if I don't I just coast. Either way, by focusing on making the task itself enjoyable I've made both my blogging and jogging more sustainable.
One last thing… For those in a position to decide how you spend the time, the other thing to do here is to really look in detail at what you're doing and whether you're truly following your passion. Maybe your care factor is low for a reason… maybe you really should be doing something else! Books like The 4-Hour Workweek and Springboard have really helped me to stay focused and on track.
How do I address Belief? I have a pretty strong sense of self belief, primarily through pathway 1 (parents believing in me). As such I've been motivated to explore the space of efficient learning and to really try to work out how that works for me. If I was to bullet point my approach to learning new things it would be as follows:
- Work out what I want to do/learn
- Try to find someone who's done it before and ask how they did it
- Next best thing to asking someone directly is to read about a successful person's approach (If you find a book that looks like it's going to cover the topic nicely, google the author with google's video filter and you can often find a really concise summary that will work as a good primer for your brain before you read it, or instead if you're really pressed for time)
- Surround myself with other people with similar goals (eg: Every monday I hold a hot pot at my house for people learning mandarin and people learning english and we have a great time and keep each other motivated)
- Once I've learnt something that's important for me to retain to get to my ultimate goal (if it's a learning project), I try to work out some method of remembering it. Probably a mnemonic or a rhyme or something. (see my series on cognition for more detail). And finally…
- Practice! If the task is something academic then I'll use Spaced Repetition Software to memorise it.
Conclusion
Motivation is a big one, and it's something that for me seems to wax and wane throughout life. Hopefully by dissecting motivation and understanding it better, as this article has attempted to do, we're all in a better position to keep our motivation high. Trying different techniques for motivation is something that I'm constantly reviewing and updating. It's an exciting journey.
Here's Alex Vermeer's diagram encapsulating many of the pathways to get from low care factor, low belief or low time sensitivity to motivation!
