Motivation Is Overrated, Hack It Anyway

Winter is here, and productivity is low.

I’m not sure whether to cast this as a productivity problem or a motivation problem, actually. The problem with motivation is that, like passion and Pottermore, it’s overrated.

Let me clarify - when we talk about "motivation", we’re usually using the word in one of at least a couple of senses.

The first sense is the reason you want to do something - the reason you want to learn a language, or do a PhD, or run a marathon, or shear a sheep and knit a jumper from its wool in a day. This is a good kind of motivation, I think - it’s good to have a reason for doing something.

The second sense of motivation is the drive that makes you think Doing The Thing will be better than lying on the couch binge-watching Terrace House: Aloha State.

Y’all, this kind of motivation is overrated because your brain isn’t stupid. Your brain knows that nothing is better than lying on the couch watching Terrace House: Aloha State all day ("Torichan! Torichan!") and it will fight you to take this path, the fun path, the path of least resistance. That's its job.

The problem, then, with blaming your low productivity on "lack of motivation" is that this sort of suggests the solution is to get more motivation, and good luck with that.


Before I started this PhD I was working full time, so I approached my project much like I approached any job: show up 9 to 5, keep regular lunch hours, don’t watch youtube when people can see your computer screen. You don’t need drive to work a 9-5 job - you just need the desire to comply with the societal norm that this is how work is done, and the fear that you’ll get in trouble if you don’t.

But PhDs are not like jobs (not least because I don’t think you can legally be paid below minimum wage in Australia? Maybe? Who knows anymore?) When you do a PhD, you don’t get in trouble if you don’t work 9-5 - literally no-one cares - and so the work habits you spent years building up start to slip away.

In the first year of my PhD I thought I had productivity figured out. I went full-Hermione. I read books about it. Books that promised me I could hack productivity if only I knew the right strategies, the right approach.

But productivity - motivation - is tumultuous, frustrating, exciting. The relationship you have with productivity is, after the relationship you have with the person who makes your coffee in the morning, the most intense, rewarding relationship you’ll have during your PhD. (My barista knows my name. She gives me a bit of my soul back every morning. I don’t know her name. It’s not that kind of relationship.)

The one thing I’ve learnt about productivity and/or motivation in the eighteen months I’ve been doing a Phd now is that, for me at least, there is no guaranteed method of being productive. Productivity is trickery, sorcery, voodoo; as much an art as a science. To be productive is to be creative, to generate new ways of working and to alchemise the old. What works one month, one week, one day, doesn’t work the next.  You cannot "just get" more motivation, but you can create cheap knockoff copies of it. So, without further ado, here is a shortlist of my productivity tricks:

• Get to uni early. There’s no way you got out of bed at Stupid O’clock just to sit in an empty office and shitpost on facebook.
• Stay at uni late. There’s no way you stayed after everyone else has gone home for the day just to sit in an empty office and shitpost on facebook.
• Study in the same place everyday; the repetitive environment cues your brain to the fact that it’s time to work, and if you’ve had a few successful days in a row, it gives you confidence.
• Study in a different place. You haven’t yet procrastinated in this place, so it doesn’t automatically trigger your procrastination habits.
• Pay for all day parking. If you pay for an all day parking spot, you’re going to stick around to make the most of it. (You guys. I know I’m not the only one who does this - if I spend $2 an hour on parking, you better believe I will use every hour. If only the government knew how little value I place on my own time.)
• Catch the bus to your study place. (Honey I did not fight a seventeen year old sporting a Backstreet Boys haircut for a seat on the bus just to stay in my office for one hour and then leave.)
• Work in short bursts. You can do whatever you should be doing for twenty minutes. I believe in you. The time will pass anyway. And then you might want to do more.
• Study with someone else. It helps to see someone else working. (If they also procrastinate on facebook all day, dump them.)
• Surround yourself with people. Study in the library. Study in the Galleria, it has three hours free wifi. Study in Ikea, it has crappy cheap coffee.
• Reward yourself. Tell yourself you can have chocolate/coffee/the next episode of Terrace House when you have done two hours. (Just joking. This almost never works for me, I take the reward first and then don’t do the work.)
• Find a task that you want to do less than the task you should be doing. Procrastinate on the new task by doing the old task.
• Hang out with friends and family who care - about your PhD, or about you. Sugar, you are a lot to care about. You cannot care about yourself all by yourself.
• And, as always, remember that finished is better than perfect.

Any more tips and tricks? Answers on a postcard, please.