Sudden Lack of motivation
Sometimes I just can’t get anything done.
Despite my best laid planners, my to-do lists, it’s like I suddenly have no motivation at all.
This lack of energy for the everyday stuff of life - my life, specifically - it creeps up on me out of nowhere. And the really bewildering thing? It can last for weeks on end, with no obvious cause.
I call this sudden lack of motivation being in The Hole.
Complete lack of motivation (The Hole)
When I’m in The Hole, I wake up feeling like the day is already a total write off.
My to-do lists get increasingly hypothetical. A kind of fan fiction for the type of day I would have if I weren’t such a total slug person.
From inside The Hole, you can see the life you’re supposed to be living - the important work tasks, the positive life habits you’ve so carefully cultivated and know will make you feel better (if you could just bring yourself to do them).
But from down here in The Hole, that life just all looks strangely out of reach.
Maybe it’s just one bad day. You’ll clear the decks of any non-urgent tasks, and by tomorrow feel back to your old, productive self.
But what happens when you feel the same the next day, and the day after that?
The tasks pile up.
The less you do, the less you feel you can do.
The longer you go on feeling like this, the deeper The Hole gets.
So then what - crawl in and hide forever? Or is there another option…?
Lack of motivation is normal
Here’s the thing I only recently learned. Lack of motivation is normal. In fact, it turns out that having bursts of high motivation followed by deep troughs of no motivation is baked right into the human experience.
The typical human cycle looks something like this:
(For a simple example of this cycle in action, just look at what happens when you write your to-do list straight after your morning coffee has kicked in. Then compare that list to what actually feels doable by 2pm that very same day. Then the cycle begins again the next day with your next morning coffee.)
Behavioural researcher BJ Fogg calls those bursts of energy and optimism the “motivation wave”.
Fogg says, when we’re riding the motivation wave, we all overestimate our future motivation, so we plan to get way more done than is humanly possible.
And if you think about it, this makes a kind of sense? When we’re riding the motivation wave, we’re usually feeling pretty good about ourselves and about life. Why wouldn’t we be optimistic about our future abilities?
Sure, it feels silly when, just a short time later the wave is crashing (and us with it) leaving us convinced we’ll never get anything done ever again. But as Fogg says, “it happens to the best of us. You are not dumb or frivolous or easily hoodwinked. You are human.”
You say that. But what does the literature say about slug people?
Prolonged lack of motivation: the opposite of the motivation wave
The Hole (that place of prolonged lack of motivation) is the opposite of the motivation wave.
It’s like the motivation wave has crashed so hard, it’s dumped you deep into the sand, and you have no idea how you’ll ever climb out.
Behaviour researchers like Fogg might say this is all part of the typical human cycle. But when you’ve been in The Hole for weeks on end, it can feel like the typical human cycle has been derailed somehow:
So what can you do about all this?
How do you manage to get things done, even when you’re deep in The Hole and have no motivation at all?
I’m going to tell you what I did, using BJ Fogg’s simple technique for behaviour change. It is, no shit, maybe the most useful thing I’ve changed about my work habits for years. I’m also going to tell you why it works.
But first I’m going to tell you how until recently I’ve been doing exactly the opposite of what would help me get important things done.
Your usual to-do list: a recipe for NOT getting anything done
It turns out, for years my daily to-do list was the perfect recipe for not getting anything done.
First off, it was massive. This was fine in those ‘burst of motivation’ periods. But after weeks in The Hole getting not much done, my list of tasks had really piled up. The only thing I could think to do was to keep writing every single one of them down in my journal each morning, as if today would be the day I’d somehow magically get through them.
This meant I was starting each day with a reminder of just how daunting my list of tasks had become. No wonder I felt like I had no hope of making even the smallest dent.
Even on a rare good day, when I’d tick off three or four tasks, there’d be twenty more sitting there staring at me. Plus, in the course of doing those three or four tasks, I’d usually discover more things that needed to be done, so the whole thing would actually end up longer than when I started.
The list! It’s multiplying! THROW IT OUTSIDE AND BOLT THE DOOR!
In Fogg’s terms, not only was I struggling with low motivation, but I was also trying to do something impossible: get a month’s worth of tasks done in a single day. Low motivation + an impossible task = a recipe for zero progress.
I’d thought my ever-growing to-do list might motivate me to finally get things done again. But in trying to get out of The Hole, I was just digging myself deeper.
The good news: lack of motivation doesn’t mean you can’t get things done
When motivation inevitably deserts you and you’re stuck in The Hole, that’s not a sign you’re a slug-person who should probably just learn to live underground anyway.
You say that, but at least it’s warm down here…
Here’s the good news. Fogg says, while you can’t magically increase your motivation for a given task, there are two ways you can make it far more likely you’ll do it anyway, even when you don’t have much motivation.
Make the task way easier
Have a clear and well-timed prompt, so you actually remember to do it
Doesn’t sound all that revolutionary does it?
And yet, following this exact formula is how I climbed out of The Hole the last time I was down there, far quicker and with less scraped knees than I ever have before.
Here’s how it looked in practice.
Climbing out of The Hole, one tiny task at a time
This is the tiny new habit I adopted, that ended up being an instant gamechanger.
Ready?
It’s going to blow your mind.
“When I put my coffee pot on the stove in the morning… I will write down the one most important thing I need to do today.”
That’s it.
I declared bankruptcy on my old, terrifying to-do list. But instead of giving up on planning altogether, I made my planning habit as simple as possible.
“I will write down the one most important thing I need to do today.”
One thing.
This didn’t mean I’d only do one thing a day. I could add more tasks once I’d done the most important thing.
But it did immediately stop my daily to-do lists from spiralling into a self-defeating mess right from the outset.
Some days the ‘most important thing’ was simply whatever thing I couldn’t put off doing. A meeting I had to go to. A phone call I had to make. Other days, if my calendar was relatively clear, my ‘most important task’ could be something I’d actually look forward to, like doing some writing.
(I will still capture all the other things floating in my head that need doing, but I keep these on a separate list of ‘things I need to do soon’ - safely quarantined away from my daily to-do list.)
Notice too, how specific the prompt is
“When I put my coffee pot on the stove…”
The prompt is not something vague like “every morning I will…”, which could easily be put off.
My chosen prompt not only helped make sure I remembered my new habit, it gave me a much-needed ritual. It took a thing I would previously dread (planning my day) and gave it some breathing space in my morning, attached to something I enjoy and have to wait for anyway (coffee).
And best of all? This new tiny ritual gave me an instant win in my day. A habit that was easy enough to reliably get done each morning
When you lack motivation, rebuilding your confidence is key
That instant win each morning was so important.
When you’re in The Hole, each day that goes by further knocks your confidence in your ability to do the things that matter.
The self-talk piles up. ‘Here I go again, wasting another day...’
From down in The Hole, that other life up there on the surface, the one where you actually do the things you care about most, it looks further and further away with each passing day.
And we begin to think, ‘sure I could do all these things that matter to me, first I just have to become a completely different person. Problem solved, right?’
In The Hole, a regular, normal-person life feels impossibly hard. And we’re sure the problem is us.
But we’re just not thinking small enough.
My tiny habit with the coffee pot, it rebuilt my confidence at a time when it was awfully bruised from weeks of feeling basically useless.
That little win each morning gave me the boost to get stuck into the ‘one most important task’ I would set for myself each day (tasks which, you guessed it, I also tried to keep small wherever possible).
That most important task would often lead to other tasks.
And before I knew it, I wasn’t really in The Hole anymore.
One wrinkle: the inner critic
If you’ve read this far, chances are you are no stranger not only to the horrors of a sudden lack of motivation, but to the inner critic who often comes along for the ride. That voice making sure to tell you just how worthless you are for spending all that time stuck in The Hole.
BJ Fogg says that, if we’ve tried and failed to bed in a new habit, the problem is that we’ve made the habit too hard. “We are not the problem. Our approach to change is. It’s a design flaw -- not a personal flaw.”
But the thing is, there’s a good chance the inner critic won’t buy this, at least not at first.
‘Oh just one thing is it? So that’s all you could manage today? Well isn’t that nice. One tiny step at a time toward total career oblivion.’
Isn’t this so often the way with the inner critic? Twisting the knife most sharply, right when you’re actually doing your best to improve your situation.
Thanks mate.
I’ll say two quick things on this.
First, we’re never going to convince the inner critic with words. We’re only going to convince it with actions.
In my case, this meant giving the coffee pot planning habit a go, even though I was fairly certain it wouldn’t help (or wouldn’t help enough to make me any less of a pretend human.)
This helped me get started, which made all the difference.
People change best by feeling good
Here’s the second thing I’ll say about the inevitable inner critic chiming in. Consider this little nugget from Fogg on the science of change:
“People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.”
We have this idea that we have to feel awful to make any real progress in life. ‘No pain, no gain.’
Add to that the fact that for many of us, the script runs even deeper. We have to feel awful because, well, we are awful, right? Forget progress, we should probably feel awful just for existing? So if we’re not suffering we’re just kidding ourselves?
(Someone put THAT on a motivational poster?)
There is something both disorienting and deeply intriguing about the idea that we could change for the better not through flagellating ourselves for lacking motivation, but through making things easier on ourselves.
More than that, it doesn’t have to be just an idea.
Because here’s the thing about my coffee pot habit (“when I put my coffee on the stove, I will write down the one most important thing I need to do today”). It’s easy. I’ve been doing it for two months now, and while I don’t always do it every day, when I do, it continues to feel effortless and good.
This doesn’t silence the inner critic by any means, but for me it makes it less persuasive.
A map, not a gauge
Finally, over time I’ve realised that what I’m really doing goes beyond what I get done on any given day.
I’m shifting the way I think of my to-do list.
I used to think of my to-do list as a kind of gauge, a measure of my worth as a human (‘did I get enough done today?’). Lately I’ve begun to think of it as more of a map: ‘this is where I’ll start today.’
And once I finally get started, I often surprise myself where I end up.
For more on how to design habits that don’t require high motivation, check out BJ Fogg’s book Tiny Habits. (And speaking of tiny things that add up, if you buy it through this link a really tiny bit goes to support Big Feels Club so we can keep making more stuff like this.)
Also, speaking of getting things done… big developments are happening with our spiffy new podcast! We’ve interviewed our first two guests, and even (GASP) finally found the perfect name! (After first finding 647 terrible ones, a key part of the process.)
Watch this space for more news on that shortly :)
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— Graham