10 Ways To Bring Motivation To Your Work

With more people working from home these days, one of the biggest challenges is to bring motivation to the work you’re doing. Many of us feel the pull to procrastinate on work or find themselves doing small and meaningless tasks.

This large wave of working from has revealed a lot about people in working situations. We’ve uncovered that certain personality traits don’t mesh well with working from home in general.

This is an issue that everyone has to face at some point to overcome. If you want to be working from home, you’ll need to first be able to break procrastination, and then find reasons to bring motivation and determination to your work.

With this in mind, here are some methods that I think will help you to bring motivation to the work you do.

Try Something New

For those in web design, Web FX released a post outlining some ways to stay passionate and motivated for the work that you do.

One of the techniques that stood out to me the most was being open to doing something new. To switch things up and ensure that you’re not going through a constant and predictive cycle.

I feel that one of the biggest reasons many people struggle with enjoying their work or finding reason is the fact most businesses insist that people do the same sort of work every day and leave no room for anything different new or exciting.

This aspect takes shape now that you’re working from home and you don’t have someone looking over your work constantly. It drives home just how dull the work can get and how draining it can be.

On the reverse, doing something different or adding a layer of difficulty to it can be exciting.

Encourage yourself to finish a task faster without reducing the quality of your work.

Look for ways to improve the work you are putting out as well.

These are small, but they can add enough change to your work. It’s enough that you want to bring motivation and more determination to your work.

Get Involved With Your Industry

One other way to bring motivation to you is to be involved in your industry. This doesn’t always mean attending conferences and networking with people. It can be things like reading books from people in your industry. Or any of their other content for that matter.

Being involved in your industry gives you more perspective and understanding of the world around you. It’s very helpful and is one of the reasons many top entrepreneurs devote time to reading books in their industries.

Even if you are doing great things, sometimes you can find good nuggets of information. These can be new perspectives to tasks you find frustrating or struggle with or something else.

When you’re involved with your industry in some way, you can reignite your passion and bring more motivation. After all, with new knowledge, you’ll be getting back to your work and trying something different.

Have Personal Projects

No matter the industry you are in there are certain things that you have to work on and have to set aside your own stuff. The thing is, a lot of those personal projects are things that give you energy and bring motivation to your work.

I know that’s the case for me. Not that my clients work is demotivating, but writing for my blog or other projects gives me more motivation and energy to doing other things. I use it as a way to recharge myself and to tackle other things that I want to do.

I think it’s important that you have something that you’re doing on the side that is something that you assigned yourself. If it’s something that you are passionate for and drive for, you’ll reach a point where you’ll do that work in order to energize yourself.

Build Anticipation

One way to bring more motivation to your work is to build anticipation for it. The whole idea is to build the suspense – that excitement – for what you are about to do. This can help in terms of habit building as well, but it can also apply to your own work as well.

The idea is to focus on one aspect you are looking forward to doing… only to delay the satisfaction of doing it. It’s something not many people want to do since when we are excited for something, we often want to do it right away.

But building anticipation can be immensely powerful as it can be something to look forward to. For example, I’ve been able to routinely show up to my work out sessions as I pump myself up every day for them.

The same is true with my writing. I get excited for a topic and make a point of writing out the title. But instead of writing away right then and there, I let it sit for a bit.

The reason I do that is I often use that time to shape a few things that I want to say in my head. From powerful one liners to some unique perspectives at times, coming up with some of these lines get me further invested in the article.

Understand Motivation More

Similar to what I talked about with procrastination, many people struggle with understanding this concept.

There is more to procrastination than the decision to delay things. All the same, there is more to motivation than it being the driving force for us to do things.

There are different types of motivation like intrinsic and extrinsic. Both work, but one of them is more effective on the long-term. Furthermore, we can’t be constantly motivated all of the time.

Motivation has an ebb and flow to it. With this in mind, if you lack motivation right now, don’t worry about it as it’ll come back to you eventually. Instead, use this opportunity to shift gears a bit. Refamiliarize yourself with your goals, why you are pursuing it, and build up deeper understanding and knowledge in that area.

Bring Motivation To Small Tasks First

The idea with this method is to bring motivation to small tasks first before building up to larger things. The larger the task demands from you, the more motivation you’ll need to see the task through.

Understanding this relationship is key because it’s connected with how your brain works as well.

You see this time and again where people set these insanely large or ambitious goals only to end up not doing it. The reason that happens is they’ve lost all motivation and their brain can’t even handle the gravity of that task.

Similar to large goals, it’s important that you break things into small tasks. If you want to bring motivation, you want to be starting out small and working on the bare minimum before challenging yourself.

Another good comparison is weight training. You need to learn the form and take on some much lighter weight before jumping into heavier weights. If not, you’re risking injury of yourself.

Have Someone Else Bring Motivation Too

Even though you are working from home, there is bound to be someone in your own life who is working from home as well. Or at the very least around. I find that when you have someone else waiting on you, it’s easier to commit to something and to show up on a regular basis.

Knowing there is someone else out there invested in you showing up and getting some work done is empowering regardless of ulterior motives. Especially if that person is someone close to you.

This strategy is great for those who.struggle in the morning.

Remove Negative Self-Talk

Even if you like to think you don’t have negative thoughts, chances are you do. I’ve had my fair share of it with all kinds of things. Sure I handle them accordingly, but I won’t deny that I have negative thoughts or doubts at various times.

That said, I know for other people it can be overwhelmingly negative and for good reason. If you feel your work is pointless or you have a crappy team or manager, it can be pretty bad.

Instead of that, make a point of replacing those negative thoughts with positive ones. Even if there is nothing good about the work you do, there can be good that stems from it.

It reminds me of an entrepreneur who had a passion for basketball. It was his dream to manage a basketball team. But instead of directing that passion towards building a business in the sporting industry, he built a completely different business unrelated to it.

He built that business up due to his passion to one day afford buying that team and managing them.

Similarly, you can use your work at your current job as a springboard to get into something you do want to be doing.

Have A Pre-Work Mode

When James Clear was part of his baseball team, he developed a strategy to help him get motivated for the game even if he wasn’t invested in the game.

In short, the strategy involved him running to various positions before practicing various pitches. The process took him 20 to 25 minutes and helped him to get into game mode as the team’s pitcher.

The whole idea of this is what if you could develop a process that could pull yourself into something? Whether it’s working out, or work in general, I think having something to get you into the mode helps.

I know it works because I’m doing something similar to that. Every workout session, I bike to the gym. Before I get into a writing session, I browse through Quora and answer a couple of questions.

These particular habits I’ve built have gotten to the point where I don’t even think about them. I do them and it allows me to bring motivation to the work I do.

Find something that ties in to what you are doing and do it for a good 20 minutes or so.

Bring Motivation By Having One Goal

The last method to bring motivation is to assign yourself one goal for the day. Goals are something I love talking about and one thing that’s helped me in lockdown is the idea of having a single goal to achieve that day.

It can be small like writing an article or it can be something larger. Whatever the case is, starting off with a single goal is a good way to bring motivation.

This all comes back to what I mentioned earlier about bringing motivation to small tasks. This is another approach where you focus on achieving that one goal. Just be sure that it’s something you can achieve over the course of the day.

Goals are a way to bring motivation to your work as it often presents you with reasons to pursue something. Good quality goals will push you to have deep reasons for doing something after all.

Bring Motivation To Your Work

Bringing motivation to your work is a simple thing in theory, but there is more to it than that. I find that with motivation, it helps to have multiple sources. Even if it ebbs and flows, having many ways to get motivated for work is helpful. It gives you those short bursts that can help during those lull periods.

To your growth!

Eric S Burdon