Are you constantly tired and feeling unmotivated? Are your lazy days getting the best of you? Motivation is the force behind every action, yet it’s something that so many of us struggle with. It is common to experience those days when nothing seems to matter, and every task looks impossible.
You’re not alone in feeling this way; everyone experiences these lazy days from time to time. Don’t worry! There are ways to find motivation and beat those lazy days.
How to Feel Motivated and Stay Motivated
The world we live in today is incredibly fast-paced.
Everyone’s situation looks different, but most people have so much going on that it’s easy to lose focus and feel completely overwhelmed. All the things you need to get done in a day stack up, and being productive starts to seem like something you’ll never have much success at because life is just task after task and job after job.
It’s easy to lose steam. When we get home from work, it’s easy to let everything else get away from us because we so desperately want to relax.
So instead of getting up and making progress on the other chores we need to get done, we suffer a total lack of motivation and end up sitting and scrolling social media instead. We make activities like this a habit, and it’s easy to do because everyone has a phone in their pocket or purse and it’s right there, almost begging to be used.
This article will give you some great tips so that you make progress and be productive when you need to be.
While relaxation definitely matters, we should still accomplish the important tasks we accumulate throughout the day so that at the end of the week, we feel good about ourselves, and a break from the stress of the week is justified.
We can spend time with family and friends on the weekends rather than catching up on the tasks we didn’t feel motivated to do throughout the week.
Feeling Unmotivated in Your Work Environment
This past couple of years has seen change brought to the way we work, and the dynamics of what work-life looks like have drastically shifted.
Many of us stopped going into the office and instead began working from home. We can use our personal computers, borrow a work computer, and we can work all day long in our pajamas if we wanted to.
A few things were great about this because we can work independently, stay healthier in a scary time in the world, and complete our work to-do list from the comfort of our homes.
With that shift, though, many of us began to feel unmotivated.
1. Establishing a Work-Life Balance
If you’re feeling unmotivated when you get home from work, or if you work from home and you’re having a hard time switching from your work life to your personal life because the setting doesn’t change, there are some things you can do to make significant progress in motivation.
An essential element to feeling motivated is creating a balance between your home life and your work life.
If you work away from home, a great tool in staying motivated when you leave your job and get home is to turn off your work mindset and switch your focus. Motivation has a better chance of finding you if you use your time away from work establishing better habits.
Come home, and don’t check your work emails, finish up work projects, or do other work-related things.
Home is your sanctuary, and you should treat it as such. If you work away from home, you should see your chores and tasks at home as meaningful work to help you create and maintain the peaceful sanctuary that your home environment should be.
If you work from home, give yourself a stopping time, and when you get to that time, tell yourself that even if you feel like you can get just a little more work done, you need to stop.
Your work hours and your at-home hours are things that should be separate, and once you get into the habit of turning off “work you” and focusing on “home you,” you may find that you suddenly have access to much more motivation than you would if you stayed in work mode.
This balance is essential to making each moment of your day count for something and actually giving you time to relax at the end of the day or on the weekends.
2. Staying Motivated with a To-Do List
Sometimes we set unrealistic goals for ourselves.
We tell ourselves in the morning that today we need to get our work done, clean our entire house, go to two different appointments, go grocery shopping, get the laundry done and put away, prepare dinner, clean up after dinner, shower, and get to bed on time so we can get enough sleep.
Then we end up losing steam and feeling stuck when we don’t have the motivation. When we plan too much and don’t have a manageable list of what needs to be done, we lose motivation.
The root cause of lack of motivation is when we put too much on our plate and we aren’t organized in terms of our tasks.
3. Break Up Your Tasks into Smaller Challenges
To stay motivated throughout the day (this works with both your home life and your work life), and to reduce stress, break up your list of chores.
Manage the hours you have available to you by compartmentalizing your activities so that you spend a much shorter amount of time working on set tasks. Stop looking at the larger picture in terms of your goals for the day, and count the little things that need to be done as small wins when you complete them.
For example:
Jennifer works until three each afternoon. It’s Thursday, and on Saturday morning, she is hosting a brunch for her parents’ anniversary celebration. Many family members will be present, and other people that her parents have known throughout their marriage will all be at Jennifer’s house bright and early Saturday morning.
There is a lot to get done, and Jennifer is having a hard time gathering and maintaining the motivation to get things accomplished. It’s already Thursday afternoon, she just got home from work, and the stress from work is seeping into her private life, zapping her energy.
Rather than working with a huge list of things she knows that need to get done, she writes small lists in an effort to stay motivated. She makes a point to work on these tasks for a set period of time, making time to just sit, take a break, scroll social media, or just do absolutely nothing. She sets a timer for five minutes every hour, and she uses that to take a break, no matter how close she’s getting to the end of her chore list.
Doing this helps her to stay motivated.
Short breaks taken often can lead to higher productivity because it resets a person. A person may find that they have more energy when they take several short breaks throughout the day.
Working nonstop and then taking one long break can lead to losing motivation and feelings of defeat.
4. Schedule Time Wisely
Tips for success in time management are plentiful, but it’s really a very simple concept. If you break up your time into smaller units and focus on those smaller bits of time rather than the entire day, you get more done.
For example, if your house is a mess, it’s easy to lose the motivation to clean up when you look at the entirety of the tasks that need to be done. It can easily stress and overwhelm you.
Instead, start in one room and tell yourself you are going to clean up or put away ten things.
It doesn’t matter if it’s ten dishes from the dishwasher, ten pieces of laundry from out of the dryer, or ten items that are out in the living room that need to be put away. Just do ten little things. Then take a break for a couple of minutes.
Stay off social media because it can be a rabbit hole that you end up stuck in. Sit down, have a snack, do some deep breathing, read an article, or do other quick relaxing things.
Then go back and do another ten things. Before long, you’ll notice that not only are your feelings more intact and positive than they were, but you still have motivation, and your day has been a success.
5. Reward Yourself
When you want to move forward and stop feeling unmotivated, some of the best advice we can give you is to reward yourself. If you feel a sense of accomplishment because you got something done, then do something for yourself as a reward.
It doesn’t have to be anything huge.
Decide before you set about your work that if you get “x” amount of tasks completed, you’re going to do “x” for you. The following is an example of a reward system you can put into place to keep your motivation up.
Feel free to use it as inspiration or build off of it.
Tony has a lot on his plate today. He’s got to clean out his entire garage. This has to be done today because it’s his only free day this week. He has given himself a list of small things that need to be done, and he thinks that if he sticks to it and takes small breaks after every dozen or so chores, he can get it all done without feeling too overwhelmed or losing motivation.
Tony starts his work, and he’s making real progress. He completes the first ten chores and then takes a break for a few minutes. He also rewards himself with a cup of coffee, and he gives himself the time it takes to really enjoy that cup. It’s a small reward, but he worked to get it. He didn’t allow it for himself until after his list of chores was completed.
Later that afternoon, as he starts to lose motivation, he tells himself that if he can get the garage finished by dinner time, after dinner, he will reward himself with his favorite video game. He hasn’t played it in weeks, and he thinks that setting aside an hour after dinner to spend time with the game he enjoys is a great way to get back on track, get his motivation back, and reward himself later.
Rewards can give you something to work towards. You can tell yourself that if you finish something, you will do something for yourself.
Hold yourself to this rule, and don’t cave and reward yourself anyway if you don’t get it done. Make sure that you don’t deprive yourself of the things that you need to maintain your physical and mental health, but do make sure that you aren’t frivolously rewarding yourself without justification.
The Good News
The good news is that if you can get into a routine, reward yourself, balance your life, and tackle small lists of chores rather than taking on everything at once, your negative feelings will be diminished. You will feel accomplished.
Everyone likes to feel good about themselves, and when you feel motivated and work towards a goal that you actually meet, you definitely feel good about yourself.
You can use these tips, advice, and practices in other facets of your life, as well.
No one likes to hear their alarm blaring in the morning, yet many of us often hit the snooze button. Some of us even hit the snooze button multiple times.
This, in turn, puts us in a rush when we finally do get up and get out of bed, setting us up for a chaotic day. Employing some of the advice given in this article can help you with that, as well.
You can tell yourself that if you get up on time every morning and leave that snooze button alone, then on Friday, you’ll treat yourself to a breakfast sandwich at your favorite diner. Or maybe a cup of specialty coffee.
You can tell yourself that if you get up and get moving in the morning every day this week, then you’ll turn the alarm off on the weekend and allow yourself to sleep in until you wake up on your own.
Using a reward system for a small chore is a great tool to use for many areas of life to keep ourselves when we feel unmotivated.
A Few Things to Remember
All of us have our moments, days, and stretches of time when we are just completely unmotivated. When you’re ill, suffering from emotional trauma, or especially busy and overwhelmed, we all have our days when things just don’t get done.
No one is perfect, and sometimes we feel unmotivated no matter what better habits we try to put into place.
Cut yourself a little slack. Tell yourself that you’ll get back to the productive version of yourself. We should always allow ourselves some grace.
You don’t have to be a superhero every day of your life. You are allowed to have off days, and you are allowed to fail now and then.
Don’t hold yourself to such high standards that you damage your own emotional and mental health, and don’t overdo your workload to the point that you put your physical health in jeopardy or at risk.
If you have a day when you feel unmotivated, then tell yourself that making progress is important, but you are also important.
Strive for a better day tomorrow, and try to develop better habits that are specific to you in order to reach your goals. You can do this, and if there are some days that you can’t, then that only means that you’re human.
However, it is important not to allow the feeling of being unmotivated to become a constant in your life. Implement the tips we have outlined in this article to ensure that you are not only able to remain motivated but also have the rest and relaxation you deserve.
