Lack of urgency is draining our vitality
Hack your motivational system, or wallow in listlessness.
Over the course of the past year and a half that so many of us have been working from home, it often seems like time has lost all sense of meaning. Getting ready for work, commuting, taking lunch, returning home - these used to lend our lives a sense of rhythm and make us aware of the finitude of time. Now, all things blur together.
Nature comes with its own rhythm. Day and night, weather and seasonality, make time palpable. When you’re camping, if you have your wits about you, you are aware of when dusk approaches. In the last hour of daylight, you have responsibilities with physical consequences. Do you know where your headlamp is? How about your other sources of light? Have you built your campfire for the night? Have you tidied your tent, prepared your bed, and changed into your evening clothes?
Contrast the palpable viscosity of time in that untamed environment with the last five minutes you just absent-mindedly lost doom-scrolling Twitter. Or was it twenty? Who knows.
When the nature of our work is purely mental and our lives are safe with no tangible consequences for our actions or lack thereof, motivation is difficult. Add to this having fewer things to look forward to, as our social lives and recreational activities have atrophied over the past year and a half. There’s little intrinsic motivation in the day to day tasks, and, for many people, nothing and no one in particular that you need to complete them for.
It’s almost comforting to procrastinate and allow tasks to drag on half-completed much longer than necessary. It gives a background sense of anxiety that it would be bizarre to live without. Perhaps completing everything as quickly as we’re truly capable of would leave an empty void. Now what? Better to lazily watch a tv show, knowing in the back of your mind that there’s laundry to fold and emails to respond to, than to “be on top of things” and face the existential crisis of your loneliness and boredom.
There are ways to hack your motivational system. Gamification is a big category I’d be happy to explore another time if readers request it, or if I feel so inclined. Broadly speaking, though, it’s important to find something that motivates you, even if it’s not the task at hand. Is there someone you are looking forward to spending time with, someplace you would really like to go, or something you are truly excited for the opportunity to do? If not, there’s your real problem. But if anyone or anything calls you, there’s your motivation, a starting point for building your incentive and reward systems. Parent yourself.
I could go into this in greater depth another time, but as I’m trying to practice what I preach, I’ll wrap this up after only 20 minutes of writing, feel into the finitude of the rest of my day, and see what else I can accomplish.