back to indexWhy Can’t I Motivate Myself To Work?
Chapters
0:0 Cal's intro
0:45 Deep procrastination
4:0 Solutions
8:0 Dopamine sickness
00:00:02.080 |
All right, next question is from M. "What advice would you give somebody who is currently 00:00:06.560 |
in a role that meets every job satisfaction criteria but is struggling with motivation? 00:00:11.440 |
I consistently lack motivation to do deep work and have to force myself to focus. 00:00:16.240 |
This at times feels almost physically impossible, especially when working from home and leads 00:00:20.760 |
me to cycling between burnout, stress, boredom, and guilt." 00:00:24.200 |
Well, M, this is common, especially right now, especially post-pandemic. 00:00:30.560 |
There's two potential forces that might be at play here that is causing this amotivation 00:00:39.920 |
It's likely that both are maybe at play and they're mixed together, but let's talk about 00:00:44.400 |
The first is what I call deep procrastination, which is an issue I wrote about originally 00:00:49.960 |
back when I focused my blog just on students because it was in the student population that 00:00:57.660 |
Deep procrastination is where you find yourself unable to work up the motivation to do work 00:01:04.560 |
And for students, it'll be a paper that has to be submitted or a take-home exam that has 00:01:10.880 |
They cannot muster the internal motivation to even get started. 00:01:18.840 |
Oftentimes they maybe end up even having to withdraw from that semester. 00:01:24.640 |
So I observed this when I was, especially at MIT where I was at the time among high 00:01:28.200 |
achieving students, it was different than depression because in other aspects of their 00:01:36.460 |
So it wasn't an overall flattening of their ability to have sort of excitement or hope 00:01:43.360 |
There's other things are still very exciting to them, but they couldn't do schoolwork. 00:01:47.440 |
So deep procrastination could be at play here. 00:01:50.680 |
I'll talk in a second about how to service that, but let me mention the other possible 00:01:54.840 |
force at play here, which would be the idea that your mind might be dopamine sick. 00:02:01.520 |
So dopamine sick is where you have so frazzled your brain with constant targeted distraction 00:02:12.160 |
at the slightest hint of boredom delivered through your phone, delivered through your 00:02:14.920 |
computer screen that is now unable to work up the proper motivation to do something that's 00:02:24.000 |
That is so frazzled from just being stimuli bombarded with all of these algorithmically 00:02:29.480 |
expertly aimed sources of stimuli, these digital darts right to the base of your brainstem 00:02:37.080 |
that give you that metaphorical electrical charge that when it comes time to do something 00:02:41.640 |
that is comparably more stayed, that's comparably more boring, like let's start gathering sources 00:02:46.680 |
and writing this memo, your brain just can't do it. 00:02:50.400 |
And there's been an uptick anecdotally, an uptick in dopamine sickness, especially post 00:02:56.200 |
pandemic because of how much and how many people fell into a pattern of much more hyperactive 00:03:04.720 |
exposure to distraction that they would have before. 00:03:07.920 |
Because maybe they're now at home and they're working remotely so they can have the phone 00:03:14.260 |
Maybe also there is an escape what's happening. 00:03:17.040 |
You're anxious about things that are happening in the world and you can't confront them. 00:03:21.600 |
And so let me just look at the phone, let me just look at these distractions and get 00:03:27.120 |
So I think we have a lot more dopamine sickness than we had before. 00:03:29.960 |
Students are getting this very strongly because they got so embedded with their devices that 00:03:37.920 |
You say, here's a senior thesis you have to write as a high school student and their brain 00:03:44.760 |
How can I go from seven seconds before I swipe to spending hours trying to research Charles 00:03:58.720 |
Let's talk about solutions to both and you can mix and match these solutions as they 00:04:04.760 |
So what I learned about deep procrastination is that its source tends to be a combination 00:04:10.520 |
of the locus of control and motivation being away from the internal and more towards the 00:04:17.600 |
So extrinsic motivation, you're like, I don't really, this feels arbitrary to me or it's 00:04:24.480 |
But it's being for a student, it might be, I don't know, my parents wanted me to be a 00:04:27.680 |
pre-med major and this chemistry class is really hard. 00:04:30.680 |
I never even wanted to be a doctor and this class is not something I went after because 00:04:35.880 |
And in work it could be, I don't even understand why I'm writing this self-assessment report. 00:04:42.960 |
So you have this lack of intrinsic motivation for the work coupled with the work being hard. 00:04:49.080 |
So the chem class is really hard and I never wanted to be a doctor in the first place. 00:04:55.160 |
There's a lot of ambiguities around how do I even do this? 00:04:58.280 |
And it wasn't my idea to do this in the first place. 00:05:01.640 |
That combination can trigger deep procrastination. 00:05:14.840 |
Here is how I keep track of what's on my plate. 00:05:18.680 |
Maybe I'm doing capture, configure, control style system of professional workplace management. 00:05:24.080 |
I have processes in place for common collaborations. 00:05:28.040 |
There's a sense your brain gets of I am in control of how I approach my work that gives 00:05:33.920 |
it more confidence and reduces the sense of this is some ambiguous, hard, impossible task. 00:05:39.000 |
So when the hard thing gets reduced to time blocks that show up in time block plans for 00:05:43.760 |
the days and you sort of execute your time blocks for the days, it's not as hard to execute. 00:05:53.240 |
So there's a sense of hardness that sometimes come here from just you're overwhelmed, you're 00:05:56.680 |
overloaded, and your brain says this is enough. 00:05:59.440 |
Like, I don't even know what all this stuff is. 00:06:04.960 |
So it's a good time because it's a serious problem. 00:06:07.320 |
You're not able to just get normal work done. 00:06:12.760 |
You have to be ready to make some actual big changes here and a real simplification on 00:06:16.280 |
what's on your plate, even if it ruffles some feathers, may be what you need here. 00:06:21.520 |
Makes your workload seem manageable or possible to your mind. 00:06:27.200 |
And then finally, I think you need some sort of target that your professional life is serving. 00:06:33.000 |
This goes back to something like lifestyle centric career planning, right? 00:06:35.840 |
So here's the chain of influence I want here. 00:06:38.920 |
I want you to have this vision you're excited about for your life that you're not there 00:06:43.160 |
yet, but a lifestyle that's different, that resonates. 00:06:47.360 |
You need to figure out how your work fits into there. 00:06:51.960 |
I need to shift over from this work to that work or change my focus within the organization 00:06:56.360 |
because that's going to open up these options, which lets me get closer to my lifestyle. 00:06:59.640 |
But what you're trying to get here is a chain of influence from a motivating image of a 00:07:02.960 |
desired lifestyle and have that chain of influence come all the way back to the work you're doing 00:07:08.560 |
And it seems like that's arbitrary, but for the motivational sensors in our brain, that 00:07:14.860 |
This self-assessment report is going to be a pain to write, but it's part of my plan 00:07:20.740 |
to get this next promotion, which I'll then negotiate the shift over to this type of work, 00:07:26.780 |
And then I'm going to move to the upper peninsula of Michigan as my plan all specifies I should 00:07:34.860 |
Now the hard, hard effort deployed towards a goal you believe in is not, not hard. 00:07:39.300 |
It's not going to cause deep procrastination. 00:07:41.700 |
We appreciate hard things if we know why we're doing them. 00:07:45.580 |
If you're just going through your job, this should be a good job. 00:07:53.140 |
Then doing the effort could fall into this deep procrastination trap. 00:07:55.540 |
So you have to connect it to a bigger positive vision. 00:08:05.780 |
This means a regular periods throughout your day where your mind craves distractions and 00:08:09.060 |
you do not give those distractions to your mind. 00:08:11.740 |
This includes, for example, going on at least one walk or errand a day without your phone. 00:08:18.280 |
So you have no option of looking at your phone or listening to something. 00:08:25.060 |
My phone gets plugged in by the front door in the kitchen. 00:08:27.500 |
When I get home, if I need to look something up or check text messages, I have to walk 00:08:39.220 |
So you still have the phone in your apartment, in your house. 00:08:43.100 |
You still have the conveniences of, oh, I need to look up what time this thing is tomorrow 00:08:46.660 |
or text someone on meeting later, but it's not on your person. 00:08:51.900 |
So now your brain is getting used to this idea. 00:08:54.700 |
Sometimes we get distraction when we're bored. 00:09:00.560 |
Give that a couple of weeks and your brain will get much more comfortable with it. 00:09:04.140 |
You can also do interval training with your ability to concentrate on hard things. 00:09:07.380 |
Let me just do 20 minutes, 20 minutes with a timer. 00:09:12.220 |
And if I break and check email or my phone, I have to reset the timer. 00:09:16.660 |
I might freeze when you say, right, this thing is going to take five hours, but 20 minutes 00:09:22.140 |
And you start with that 20 minutes with a timer, intensely working on things until you 00:09:26.820 |
can do that pretty regularly without it being too horrifying. 00:09:32.780 |
And then once 30 minutes becomes comfortable, you add 10 more minutes. 00:09:34.980 |
So you might literally need to retrain your brain for longer and longer intervals of focus 00:09:43.460 |
Finally, I think you need to care about location. 00:09:45.900 |
You need to care about rituals for your work. 00:09:49.060 |
So you mentioned that working from home is a big part of work seeming very hard for you 00:09:58.980 |
When your home environment, your work environment is the same. 00:10:02.420 |
You're trying to wrench your mind from a domestic context into professional context. 00:10:07.520 |
Your mind is still largely ensnared in the domestic context. 00:10:11.540 |
Therefore, you don't have as much resources to actually focus on the thing ahead. 00:10:22.300 |
You do your work, renovate the garden shed, rent some office space in a small town, spend 00:10:32.620 |
So you have to see this as an issue that might require big solutions and build much more 00:10:39.320 |
I have a big walk I do to get coffee where I think I plan my day at the coffee shop. 00:10:43.140 |
And when I get back to my desk and my exotic location near my house, I immediately start 00:10:49.060 |
I go to that same coffee shop and do a shutdown routine and then do another walk to switch 00:10:56.120 |
You need radical locations to help your mind separate work from non-work, to help your 00:11:01.300 |
mind more automatically generate the motivation it needs to get going. 00:11:04.500 |
You're not just forcing it, white knuckling it. 00:11:06.900 |
Hey, let me just put this laundry basket down, walk past my kid over here who's homesick 00:11:14.160 |
And you're staring at the computer amidst all of that chaos. 00:11:17.560 |
So I don't know if you have deep procrastination. 00:11:20.780 |
I don't know if it's some mix of those two things. 00:11:23.800 |
But think about those solutions and the types of solutions that seem to resonate with you. 00:11:29.580 |
That'll probably point you towards what the real problem actually is. 00:11:32.880 |
Did you come up with a term, dopamine sickness? 00:11:44.800 |
Well, there's a show about the opioid crisis called Dope Sick. 00:11:50.860 |
That's probably what I'm implicitly playing off of.