When people subscribe to this site, I ask them what their biggest productivity struggle is, and the most common answer is lack of motivation.
The usual assumption about motivation is that you need it in order to act. If you don’t have it, action’s off the table till you find it.
In this view, motivation is the gasoline for the engine that is your personal productivity. It’s the wood for your furnace, the plutonium for your reactor. You need to solve this puzzle of motivation before you can start doing.
The longer I live, the clearer it is to me that this is completely wrong. People use the word motivation in different ways, but mostly motivation is just what we call it when it’s easier to do the thing than to not do it.
Of course we love it when doing the right thing is easier than not doing it, just as we love it when the best product is also the cheapest. But it usually isn’t.
Thinking of “motivation” as an elusive resource you need in order to act just makes life harder and entrenches the habit of procrastination.
Motivation is just a form of good luck
Motivation is real. It can and does occur, and it can drive action.
When you’re inspired by a story idea, you feel motivated to get to your desk and start getting words down.
When there’s a bee in the room, you’re motivated to open the door and let it out, or swat it with a newspaper.
When it’s 2pm and your boss expects something at 4pm, you’re motivated to open that file and get that thing done right now.
In each of these cases, circumstances are making it easier to do the thing than to not do it. Your desires are aligning with your best interests.
Great! Motivation is nice when you’ve got it. As are power windows, noise-cancelling headphones, sunny days, and strokes of good luck.
In fact, I think “good luck” is basically what motivation is. You’ve stumbled across a temporary, haphazard alignment of desire and duty. Nice!
Such good fortune is uncommon, and unnecessary. If you’re only getting stuff done when this exceptional condition is present, your life will be very hard.
How to get started on a task without motivation
First, you have to abandon the idea that motivation is a necessary fuel for action. It’s not. It’s a nice-to-have.
Motivation can be cultivated, or found, sometimes — but insisting on it will do more harm than good. You can waste enormous amounts of time reading self-help and watching TED talks, hunting for that elusive surge of energy that sometimes makes things easy. Meanwhile, you’re just training yourself to be more and more helpless without it.
Getting started is really a matter of crossing a certain boundary, a divide that seems big but is actually very small: you need to get across the little gap between “not yet doing the thing” and “doing the thing.”
To the mind, this gap often seems like a vast expanse, a miserable proving ground between being a capable and motivated person, and being the unproductive shlub you feel like you are right now.
In reality, the gap is tiny — as tiny as stepping up a curb or punching through a sheet of paper. In fact, a state of doing is often just five or ten seconds away from a state of not-doing. You open the document and scroll to where you left off, and now you’re doing. You pick up a towel, start folding, and you’re doing. You write a Right Now List on a sticky note, and you’re doing. In an instant, procrastination has already ended.
I like to call the gap between not-doing and doing The Paper Wall, because it seems large and imposing until you punch through it. The paper wall is painted like it’s made of bricks and iron bands, but it’s actually standard bond paper, which is no match for a human body moving into it.
Hunting for motivation before punching through the paper wall is the procrastinator’s great mistake. That only convinces you that the paper wall really is a brick wall, which requires explosives or a bulldozer or something else you don’t have.
Don’t think, punch through
The paper wall, being illusory in nature, can fool your mind but not your body. Just move your body into the “wall” and watch it give. The other side is two seconds away and nothing can stop you but your thoughts.
So don’t think about it. Don’t talk yourself into it. It’s not a job for the mind. Just move your feet towards the task. Get your hands on the pencil, the mouse, the pile of laundry, and start going through the motions.
Once your body and brain are moving inside the task, inside the doing zone, it usually does become easier to continue working than to go back to procrastinating. If not, you keep pushing the body forward, going through the motions, until it is like that.
This shift almost always happens pretty quickly because action feels better than procrastination, once you see the two states side-by-side.
Starting is all about punching through the paper wall between those two states, not about finding the magic fuel source of motivation. You don’t need motivation, you need movement. Quick, decisive, physical. No thinking allowed until you’re on the other side.
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