How to maintain self-motivation

A decrease in motivation can happen even at the top companies in the world. We have all had moments when we counted the hours until the end of the working day, and it was hard to push ourselves to get started with any activity at work. I’m not talking about edge case scenarios here, such as employee burnout — but even when everything seems normal in general, one may feel stuck and demotivated. As I already wrote in my article “5 life lessons I’ve learned from project management”, great results come from daily incremental actions — not a one-time activity surge. This is why maintaining motivation on a daily basis is something I consider critical for long-term success. In this article, I’m going to share a shortlist of tips and tricks that help me to stay motivated.

Get motivated by results

I clearly remember the moment when I had a series of failures at work over the course of one week. I was very demotivated and shared my disappointment with my manager during our 1:1 meeting. I stated that it seemed like everything I did resulted in a failure. So I asked what she would recommend to turn the tide. She replied with a single word — results. When one succeeds at a certain activity and a result shows itself, one gets excited about it. It brings that necessary energy to move forward and take the action needed to hit the next goal.

Since then, I added a very important routine to the beginning of each working day: start with something that you can quickly cross off your to-do list. And when I write “cross off the list,” I mean it literally. Though I work at Wrike — a work management and collaboration solution — I’m still an old-fashioned guy who writes things down for every working day. So, among other things, I always put in some minor (but still important) bullet points that can easily be crossed off the list. Common examples include:

• Checking the monthly/quarterly targets and pinging the team members who need to accelerate a bit, as well as giving praise to those who are already going at full speed
• Sending follow-ups/ calling clients
• Reviewing internal requests and taking the necessary action (such as approving, requesting additional information, and more)

I usually try to add a meaningful and manageable amount of bullet points to my daily to-do to ensure I do not get demotivated from simply looking at a multi-page document. When these minor things get crossed out, it’s immediately noticeable in my daily planner and I get that necessary energy surge to switch to something bigger and more complicated.

Break large goals into small steps

It is often the case that the next item in your to-do list is a relatively big one and it seems impossible to complete it in one go. The solution is simple: break it into a series of small, actionable steps and complete one of them at a time. Make sure that each of these substeps is measurable and meaningful. For example, if you need to get in touch with 100 new customers, formulating the subgoal as “connecting with ten customers per day” would be better than “working for 45 minutes per day on connecting with customers”. The second formulation is not measurable since it’s process-oriented, not result-oriented.

Making the steps measurable ensures that not only do you get the motivational surge from completing the daily steps toward these large goals, but you also have visibility into how you’re progressing. And when the large ones are crossed off your list, it would be clearly visible that your daily efforts have had a clear purpose and led to great results!

Review your achievements regularly

Many books on leadership, such as “Radical Candor” by Kim Scott (see the list of insights from it here [link]), state that it’s important to not only give corrective feedback to your team members but also give praise. This is most definitely something that one should do for themselves as well. Make sure to pause every now and then and reflect on all the amazing things you already achieved — targets hit, team members helped, products developed, etc. Sometimes, it may feel that the things you do on a daily basis are meaningless. But when you look back at the amazing accomplishments they led to in the past, it helps to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It would also be a good idea to create and regularly update your list of accomplishments, so you can look at it whenever you need a motivational surge. It’s never too late to start. Create a file and add all the achievements you made in the last quarter or two. Build a habit of reviewing the file regularly and updating it every time you accomplish something great.

Now that we’ve talked about the sources of motivation that work well for me, let’s discuss the common sources of demotivation. When one knows the cause of the problem, it becomes easier to spot it, acknowledge it, and take the necessary action to avoid it.

Too much work

Few things are less motivating than looking at a to-do list that stretches across multiple pages. It may feel completely overwhelming, and you may think when looking at it:e “it’s impossible to finish all this today.” The only solution to this challenge is work prioritization. Work prioritization is about choosing which items can be deprioritized at a given moment. Even when everything seems equally important, certain items always have a higher priority by such parameters as upcoming deadlines, business needs, client size, and others. My solution for work prioritization is adding a maximum of 10–12 items for each working day. It could be less if it’s clear that certain items would require more time to complete. But in order to make sure that other important items don’t get lost, I put them in the “backlog” list that I review on a regular basis. This approach is partially based on the “Getting Things Done” methodology created by David Allen (see his book with the same name for more information).

The work is too large

As discussed previously, a chunk of work that is too large may cause an internal pushback because it’s clear that it won’t be possible to finish it in a single attempt. Think about one thing that you can do to progress this project today, accomplish that thing, and cross it off your to-do list for today. Keep repeating the routine until the job is done.

It’s not clear what to do

I would honestly say that this is probably #1 in my personal list of things that demotivate me. Sometimes even the tiniest problem gets rescheduled for the next day over and over again because we don’t know how to accomplish it and unconsciously (or consciously) keep moving it to the bottom of our to-do lists. After several reschedulings, it could also be the case that the problem now has negative emotions attached to it. What usually helps me is to break such tasks into two subtasks, with the first one being “research how to address the problem,” and the second actually nailing it. In many situations, the solution can be found pretty quickly from your colleagues who already have experience dealing with this problem. In other cases, you may need to do the research yourself, and as a result, would get that necessary experience to address this type of problem moving forward.

I hope that these recommendations would be helpful for you to maintain self-motivation on a daily basis.