Everyday before the work day starts, take a few minutes to breathe. Clear your mind and then focus on doing what needs to get done that day. Many things will pop up in your mind. From that mental list of things write down three most important things to do on a piece of paper. Then aim to get only those three things done and try to avoid any distractions while getting those done.
That’s it. It’s best way I’ve found of beating procrastination.
Leo Babauta writes about living a life with no goals and without expectations. Yes, the blog is called zen habits and may be its only zen monks who are able to do what Leo wants people to do. That would have been ok if he wrote this for zen monks alone. But that is not the case, he writes this for everyone. I find this to be a problem.
David Damron wrote about why Leo is wrong about goals. His five reasons are that:
Leo’s rebuttals to all those points run around one argument – I have lived a life without goals and I know that it works better. I suppose that his arguments for living without expectations may also lie on the same thread of arguments.
At present, I find this philosophy of living very hard to digest. If you can live a life like Leo where you are self-employed and make enough money to support your family then it might be possible to live that way.
Yes, theoretically I’d love to be able to live without goals or expectations. I’d like to do whatever takes my fancy like spend my time climbing the mountains, swimming the seas and enjoying the peace. All would have been well if I was in a Himalayan monastery supported by philanthropy to search for the ‘ultimate truth’. But that is not the case, I live a life that we have built for ourselves after many millennia of organised human effort.
I am not trying to be philosophical when I say that this life that I am able to live is better than the life that I would have had, had everyone of us lived without goals or expectations. It is a better life from a utilitarian perspective. Sure there are many more who are poor and suffering from the time when Buddha walked the earth. But there are also many many more who are able to experience new things, live longer and have the ability to contribute to humanity than those who did in Buddha’s times.
We have achieved what we have through innovation and hard work.
Many times the achievement has been possible only because of organised hard work. Organisations and institutions would fail without goals and a clear vision.
One may argue that at least for innovation it might be better to live a free life. We can explore and learn new things and in the process develop new things. Sure that is one way to look at innovation. Innovation is very a murky area to explore but one thing we know is that there is no fixed formula to innovate. But in certain situations, we might have been able to innovate only because we were pushed by goals and expectations.
I am not trying to destroy Leo’s idea. I think there is value in the advice but it has limited applicability. If everyone adopts this philosophy of living without goals and expectations, many things will not work and we may not progress.
Motivation to do something acts as that driving force which helps us through every phase of an activity. It gives us the energy to initiate the task, then to continue through its ups and downs, and finally also to bring it to an end.
Without the right amount of motivation, doing anything feels like dragging yourself down a road that you don’t want to walk. I am sure you can all relate to this feeling especially when as teenagers you were asked to do certain things by your parents without a good reason, for example cleaning your own room 😉
Additional motivation always help us to do something better or faster. Or at least that is what you feel happens when you feel that wee bit more motivated.
I don’t think I have to give you more reasons to convince you that motivation is an important factor in our everyday lives. I have spent quite some time in trying to understand this mysterious force with a wish to know how can I harness it better.
After speaking to many people about their source of motivation, I can conclude that almost always people have multiple sources of motivation. And it is not surprising that there are many common sources of motivation. We are all human after all. I’ll enlist a few:
Some positive sources: the desire to constantly improve (to be a better person, a better scientist, a better father or a better son), to achieve higher pleasures of life (happiness derived from completing a massive project, from helping someone or achieving a big goal)
Some negative sources: peer pressure (if she can do it, why not me? admittedly it can be a positive force sometimes), fear of failure (almost always bad and which causes so much anxiety).
Some of these sources may have struck a chord with you (like the one in the picture). And may be that after reading this short list you may not be surprised because they are very commonly the sources of motivation that many people use.
But my exploration has helped me find an additional source of motivation. One that I have used many a times unknowingly. That source of motivation comes from my constant quest to find a new source of motivation. It’s as if I treat my motivation to do something as drawing from a motivation bank. And because I treat it as a bank, I tend to look for sources that can replenish this bank.
And I don’t think I am alone in that quest, people seek new sources of motivation all the time. See for example what Alex says:
A friend told me that she had a three-tiered approach to motivation: First is motivation from the cause itself, but this is simply not enough to sustain motivation indefinitely in all situations, so the second layer was motivation from fun: the work itself should be enjoyable, but it’s just not possible to always make work fun, so the third tier was friendship: that you would work through tough times buoyed by friendship with colleagues and co-workers.
Have you got any sources of motivation that you could share with us?
Akshat Rathi 