The Two Hurdles of Motivation: Procrastination and Diminishment

It can seem difficult to begin a journey and see it through. After all, you have to find something you want to do, figure out how to do it, be willing to put in the necessary effort to pursue it, take action, face adversity, be resilient, and continue to work until you succeed.

That is all true, but there are really simply two major hurdles to motivation: procrastination and diminishment. Notice that those are the two major hurdles in undertaking any effort: beginning and sustaining the effort. The first part is about dreading the activity and so putting it off as long as humanly possible, while the latter part is about losing motivation and giving up when the effort gets difficult or boring.

The good news is that you can equip yourself for these two situations. The most famous example of this is where we get the saying, “tie me to the mast” from: in the story of The Odyssey, Odysseus famously had his crew tie him to the mast when they came upon the Sirens whose song could not be resisted. The morale of the story in this context is that if he knew that he wouldn’t have the willpower to resist in the future, he took action beforehand to prevent himself from succumbing.

In your life, you can give yourself a set of techniques to do the exact same thing when it comes to overcoming these two major hurdles: starting a task and sustaining it. This post will focus on examples of techniques that can help you with each.

Procrastination – Starting a Task

Whether it’s getting to an event on time, doing the dishes, or completing your homework, procrastination can cause you to not get your work started. My favorite form of this is when you have a project due and begin cleaning—i.e., you know that you need to work and don’t want to be lazy…so you proceed to do other work so that you don’t feel guilty about avoiding the more important work. There are several techniques here that will help you get over the hump:

• Reverse-Procrastination – One of the most helpful techniques comes from Wayne Dyer, who discussed how his approach to eliminate procrastination was to use the same logic in reverse (e.g., “Just this one time.”). Procrastination is simply the brain’s way of giving itself excuses not to start, such as thinking, “I can do it tomorrow,” “Just this once, I’ll eat a candy bar instead,” or, “I will just do this one thing before doing the work I need to do.” Instead, if you tell yourself, “I’ll just do this one chore—it’ll take 5 minutes and then be out of the way,” you are using the logic in your favor. You don’t have to do the habit or task forever—just the one time. You then start and get over the hurdle.
• Modularizing – Sometimes, tasks are just very large and seem like they will take too long. By breaking down a larger task into smaller tasks, you’ll find more opportunities to fit the work in and won’t put it off due to time requirements.
• “Just Get Started” – I’ve personally found that I never want to do anything until I’ve gotten myself to do it for a few minutes, at which point I become in the mood and finish the job. I learned this trick with dishes when I never wanted to start them, tried to break it down into just doing a few, and then found myself doing all of them as long as I could just get started. I’ve found that most home maintenance projects that involve procrastination can easily be started and completed with this method.
• Learn How – Sometimes, people don’t begin a project because they don’t know how. Do a quick 3-second search, find the information you need, and then once you know you might be tempted to take action immediately. I used this method when I was dying to know how to make the type of oatmeal they make in hotels and on cruises, did a quick search, and as soon as I found out the secret I immediately bought the ingredients I needed.
• Get the Prerequisites – “Prep work” is often a hurdle to getting going. James Clear in his book, Atomic Habits, spoke about packing the gym back the night before so the prerequisite doesn’t become a reason to avoid exercising. This can apply to ingredients for a meal, money for a class, or fitness to join a sports league. With the pre-requisite out of the way, doing the task is easier to start.
• Try It – Some people don’t do something because they don’t know if they’ll like it. Just trying it with no commitment is a great way to see—yes, this is a double-edged sword because you might not like it and never do it again, but at least you won’t be procrastinating.
• Outsource – You won’t like everything in life. In a capitalist society, you can specialize so much that you only have to do one thing in life and pay everyone else for all other tasks (note: most people won’t, but you could). Don’t like cooking? Order food from others. Don’t like cleaning? Hire a cleaning service. Don’t like deciding between the products you need? Buy what your trusted internet reviewer suggests. When you get other people to do the work for you and you simply do more of what you do like instead to pay for it, then you never have to do it in the first place.

There are many more, but hopefully that gives you a good start on techniques to help get you going.

Now, how do you keep going? There are many motivational speakers saying that discipline is more important than motivation because discipline is effectively not being motivated but doing it, anyway. They say that motivation can only get you so far because you will always run into a point in your life when you don’t feel like doing something, and that’s where discipline is the difference between success and failure. So, how do you cultivate discipline? Let’s discuss some techniques:

• Buddy System – There are two elements to this: accountability and a cause outside of yourself. By yourself, the only person you are letting down is you; with a buddy, you are letting down someone else. Also, there is a punishment to not going of possibly upsetting or hurting your partner’s motivation, thus making you think several times before backing out of your routine.
• Bet Against Yourself – This trick gives you a severe punishment for quitting. If you give your friend $1,000 (or whatever amount you’re willing to “bet”) and fail to do what you say, that friend should send that money to your worst enemy (or a charity, etc.). The idea is that if you don’t follow through, there are more consequences than there are the benefit of the free time to relax.
• Conditional Rewards – In my life, I can only eat a large, high-calorie meal if I go to the gym that day. Therefore, if I want to eat pizza, I have to exercise. Rewarding positive behavior is a strong way to get you to commit. My system works in my example because the reward would be a terrible decision unless I was able to burn off the calories with exercise. You might have similar connections between your work and your reward, but it doesn’t have to be; you can simply treat yourself to a new gadget or toy every time you complete a project, motivating you to complete the project to justify the luxury purchase.
• Visualization – This could go into the first category, but since most people know that I want to put it here. There are countless stories of soldiers in battle thinking of their families to keep them going and non-profit founders picturing the problem they’re solving or the solution to motivate them to continue through the setbacks. Reminding yourself why you’re doing something when it gets hard is one of the best ways to sustain your effort. When I was training for marathons, I would imagine all the food that I would eat when I was done. When learning how to create an e-book, I would picture the e-book on my Kindle. You might imagine yourself in a new house or in a relationship when you want to keep yourself working at your job or going to the next social event (if you’re an introvert, you need motivation for those).
• Habit – Don’t underestimate the power of “muscle memory” or habit. If you go to the gym on the way home from work every day, you might be surprised when no matter how tired you are, you always find yourself parked in the parking lot of the gym because your unconscious mind took you there out of habit. If you do something consistently, your body will expect it and possibly even feel out of place if you forget to do it.
• Milestones – This is another one that can go in the first section to make it seem more believable to get started, but here they serve a purpose of keeping you going. When you hit a milestone, you see progress and can even reward yourself to stay motivated. But on top of that, “sunk cost” sinks in, and you see how far you’ve come and how much closer you are to the finish line. If you spend 18 months working on something without a break and have nothing to show for it, you might be on your last few attempts to continue through sheer will. Milestones give you a boost and something to look forward to sooner than the end goal.
• Variable Effort – If you are prone to having up and down days, feel free to adjust your effort accordingly. I know that sometimes I just know it’s not a good day to work on something but that it would be fine most other days. The tough part here is to know when that’s just an excuse, but if you are at the gym and can’t bring yourself to do anything whereas you’d normally be fine (i.e., you’re not always like that), then it might be a good time to compromise. In fact, studies show that people who are more consistent in their effort waste their time in some situations. The most famous is that taxi drivers often drive until they attain a certain amount of money, but their demand is flexible and so that causes them to make money on some days quickly but spend hours more on other days. If they instead put in the grind on the high-demand days and gave up early on the low-demand days, they would make more money. Similarly, if you can hold yourself to pushing hard when you are up to it and taking it easy when you are not, you can do this successfully. Use this technique with caution, however, so it is not just procrastination sneaking into your psyche.

So those are just a short list of techniques, as you can probably think of more. Hopefully, this helps you to push through losses of motivation to keep you going until you get it back.

Note that you do want to check whether you don’t want to do something at all or have really lost the passion where you should stop. An example is if you signed up for guitar lessons but then never took the leap—maybe you just don’t really like the guitar enough. Similarly, if you go to college for a year and want to do something else with your life, it’s possible that dropping out and pursuing that passion might be the right thing to do. So avoiding or changing your attention is not always a bad thing, but procrastinating and quitting are often negative if, for example, you waste your time instead of being productive while you’re procrastinating or you quit because you believe it’s a waste of time to continue when it’s not. In those situations, you want to find the will to continue; if you are just finding excuses not to get started so you can do some dopamine-inducing activity instead, though, then you definitely want to find ways to overcome your “laziness” or procrastination.