I wish I could say this is the title of a fun, new Pixar movie 🙂 . Yet, it is a search for something that many of us have lost and are still struggling to find, since the start of the pandemic a year ago, motivation. Sometimes it’s there and you are highly motivated to do the chores you have in hand (which can be anything from doing the dishes, to exercising, to finishing a report, or doing an experiment). On the other hand, some days you are glued to your chair and don’t even want to watch your favorite show playing on the TV in front of you. Finding motivation is something everyone has struggled with at some point in time.
Motivation has been a subject for many discussions, talks and books, but the truth is that methods to find motivation and stay motivated vary from person to person. Even when you think you figure out which method works best for you, it might not work the next day. Many disciplines have been trying to understand the complex nature of humans for hundreds if not thousands of years. I am only an engineer and not an expert in any of these disciplines, but I know myself the best and I will share some strategies that help me find my motivation and stay motivated. I would recommend taking this advice with a grain of salt, especially for a subject as abstract as motivation. What might work for me may not work for you, but you can always just give it a try, and who knows, one of them may be helpful 🙂 .
- Let’s start with a classic one: Make a to-do-list and organize the items according to their urgency. I know that you probably have heard this one a lot, but there is a reason for that: It works! It’s really hard to start working if you have so many things on your plate and you don’t even know where to start from. Think of it this way; even when you go to a buffet, you have a plan of attack. You decide which food you like the most and put that on your plate first, and then move on to the next one, then the next, and so on. Finally, when you have all the food you want on your plate and it’s time to eat, in a split-second you decide on the order you want to eat your dishes in. You might be thinking “Oh, I should eat the french fries first because they don’t taste very delicious when they are cold”, or “Mac n’ cheese is my favorite, so I will save that for last because I want to leave the table with the taste of my favorite dish in my mouth.” It is helpful to make a game plan when you have so many things on your plate 🙂 . Also, when you are making your lists, it is very helpful to note down the required time to complete each task. You will see that some things take less time than you originally thought, but some take longer. In time, you will get better at guessing the time you need to spare for each chore since most tend to be repetitive. I notice that once I start working on my to-do-list, I typically want to keep going, because it feels so good crossing those tasks off the list! I like to start with the easiest and quickest one, even if it is not the most important thing on my list to give myself a jump start. As I continue finishing the items on my list, the feeling of accomplishment kicks in and I want to keep going (for most of the time).
- Have a goal. It is really hard to motivate yourself when you don’t know what you’re doing it for. I think this is one of the main reasons many of us lost our motivation last year when the pandemic first hit: We didn’t have any expectations for the future anymore, and we kept living the same day over and over again (Oh no! the Nelly / Tim McGraw song is stuck in my head now 🙂 ). It is easier to have a goal when you are younger since your path is mostly laid out before you. When you are a graduate student, there can be so many opportunities, you don’t know which direction to follow. Without an overarching goal in mind, it is hard to find the motivation to complete the tasks related to your professional life. Try to create a main goal and think of your smaller tasks as stepping stones that are bringing you closer to what you want to achieve. Try keeping your tasks simple, measurable, and relatively quick to accomplish, and make sure you keep track of your progress. You will see that the more you achieve, the more you want to keep going (at least in my experience).
- Simply start. We have a saying in Turkish: “Starting is halfway to finishing.” When I was younger, I never totally understood the meaning of this saying, but as I grew up I realized that starting something can be really, really hard, but when you do, to keep going is much easier. As a nerd, I would like to refer to Newton’s first law of motion: “If a body is at rest, it wants to stay at rest, and if it is in motion, it wants to keep going.” This may not have been his original intention for this law, but that doesn’t make it any less true. You just need to develop the willpower to start and nature will do the rest 🙂 . For example, if you need to do the dishes, getting up on your feet is a start just keep walking towards the sink 🙂 .
I will update this post as I develop/remember more methods that help me find my motivation. I hope that you found this at least somewhat helpful. Stay tuned for my new posts…
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