How to Stay Motivated

I'm going to be giving you some tips on how to stay motivated. I'd like to preface this by saying that motivation is not reliable, so these tips are meant to help you form habits of doing what you want to do, not just relying on temporary motivation.

Tip #1: Set Goals. It sounds obvious, but these are really important for steering you in a clear direction of where you want to go. For example, a good goal would be to study for an hour a day during the month before finals. For setting goals, you want to make your goals specific and quantifiable, So one hour per day sets a numerical amount and it's very specific. You also want to make your goal something you can control. Notice how I said my goal was to study a certain amount, not to get a certain grade, Because I can control how much I study, NOT the actual grade I get.

Tip #2 for goals: Set a deadline, so my example for my deadline is finals.

Tip #3: Break your goals into smaller parts. For example for my goal about studying for finals, each part would be a week or a day. And then, reward yourself for accomplishing these small parts. If you find that you don't really care about your reward anymore, change the reward. Because the point of these rewards is that if you don't feel motivated to do the actual thing You'll still feel motivated to get your reward. The reason I recommend you reward yourself for smaller parts, not the big goal is because you should avoid all-or-nothing. Don't give up just because you missed part of your goal. For example, if you don't study for a day just pick it up again the next day. It's better to do 80% of your goal than to do 30% miss a bit and then give up completely.

Tip #4: Plan for your roadblocks. When you're looking at the future, You're a lot more rational than when something's right in front of you. For example, when you're planning out your week. You feel like you really want to study, but right before you're actually gonna study you decide that you don't really want to that much. So in my example about studying, I might want to check Instagram instead of studying. So I'll turn off my phone notifications and block access to my phone using the forest app.

Tip #5: Make it fun because no one wants to do boring things, and take some breaks. If you don't take breaks you'll just get tired and burnt out, and you won't want to keep working anymore.

Tip #6: Do not beat yourself up if you mess up. If you had a friend who yelled at you every time you didn't follow their orders exactly, Would you listen to them or be their friend? Of course you wouldn't, so why would you expect the same of yourself? Be your own friend, and do not get angry at yourself if you make a mistake. It's completely okay to mess up, everyone does it even if you think I have the most put together life, I really don't; I only post 10 minutes out of my whole week on the internet. Those are my most put together ten minutes out of the whole week.

Tip #7: Utilize the four tendencies. The four tendencies is a personality framework created by Gretchen Rubin and it's concerned with how you meet outer and inner expectations. Basically, you might want other people to hold you accountable, you might like scheduling you might like inner justification or maybe something else entirely different.