What to Do if You Have Zero Motivation

University Short Cuts
1 day ago
5 min read

Summary of Post!

Motivation often comes after action, not before it.
Tasks feel harder when getting started requires a lot of setup and effort.
Making the first step smaller can help you begin even when you do not feel ready.
Reducing distractions and stimulation can make it easier to focus on difficult work.
Once you start, momentum can make the task feel more manageable and even meaningful.

Why Motivation Feels So Hard to Find

It’s always nice to be able to do a task without any friction. Unfortunately, that state is not quite common. In college, there will be a lot of assignments where you do not even know what to do or how to start. You may have become uninterested in the subject, or you may have just been bulldozed with a lot of tasks lately. The outcome is still the same: you do not want to do what you need to do. You may feel like you need to wait for the right time, or that the task is simply too complicated to even start, so you feel unwilling to get into the mindset to begin. Additionally, you may just not want to do the task.

Why Waiting for the Right Time Backfires

Let me ask you this question: what happens if you wait for the right time to do the task that you could have done earlier? Well, that time may never come, and you may never feel motivated enough to approach the task you have been putting off. If that happens, you may never do it, which means you will not make progress. If I had waited for the right time to do my engineering homework in college, I would still be in college right now.

The Hidden Friction of Getting Started

However, when you lack motivation, it is not so simple to just start your assignment. There are a lot of little tasks involved in getting started. You must get up from what you are doing now, grab the items you need, and find a place to sit. Then you must set everything out and get yourself ready for work. After that, you still need to focus on the assignment and do it. Finally, when you finish, you must put everything away. That is a lot of work, and the friction involved can feel extremely high.

Start Small to Build Momentum

So how can we make it easier? Well, simply starting is easy to say, but hard to implement. From my experience, though, it really can get the ball rolling. Additionally, you can trick yourself by saying, “I am just going to set out the items I need and then get to work in a little bit,” and you may actually just keep going once you begin.

When You Really Do Not Want to Do It

If you truly do not want to do the assignment or task, then you have to make the state you are currently in feel worse than actually doing it. Sometimes that happens externally, like when you do badly on an easier exam. It is helpful when that kind of pressure happens naturally; however, you cannot apply it on command or trick yourself into having motivation. So, what do we do instead?

Use Your Environment to Reduce Resistance

Well, personally, I have found that if you make your current life boring or unstimulating enough, you will tend to feel less friction and a little more motivation to do the task or assignment you have been avoiding. So that might mean no cell phone or internet. No apartment for you to clean to distract yourself from your assignment, since that still feels easier than doing your physics homework. There are no plans with other people pulling you away from your task, or at least none coming up soon. Do not fully seclude yourself from a social life, though.

Creating Conditions That Make Focus Easier

It is just you at the library, the wall, and your homework assignment. Then, once it is done, you can leave. So, what is the change here compared with waiting for the right time to do your assignment? To create motivation to do your assignment, you first create the environment to do it. You give yourself less stimulation. Research on academic procrastination shows that temptations and distractions in academic settings increase procrastination, while reducing those distractions can make academic tasks easier to start and follow through to completion (Svartdal et al., 2020). If you have time, look at this research because it outlines many of the causes and effects of procrastination, with some potential changes to reduce procrastination.

Why Less Stimulation Can Increase Motivation

Now that we live in a world where we are constantly stimulated, we often lack the desire to do the very unstimulating thing, which in college is classwork. It can be so boring, and sometimes such a grind. But if you reduce the friction by making the present moment less stimulating, you will be more willing and have more motivation to do the task. This is partly because being bored is, well, boring, and doing your assignment or task becomes slightly less boring by comparison.

Momentum Can Change How You Feel

Then, hopefully, you can build momentum in doing your assignment or task, and you stick with it. Personally, I used to hate doing my math homework assignments, partly because they were hard, which added a lot of friction. However, once I created an environment that pushed me toward doing them and built a better understanding of math, I began to build momentum and actually started to want to do the homework and learn more. I found math interesting and beautiful.

A Mindset Shift Can Open New Possibilities

Which leads me to my next point: what if you shifted your mindset about the assignment you had to do? What opportunity might you be missing out on by not doing it? There may be something interesting in doing what you did not want to do that could change the way you think or spark something that pushes you into an obsession you did not originally have. Of course, it could push you away as well, but hopefully it does not.

Final Takeaway

Overall, I hope this post has given you some things to try as you create an environment where motivation does not fade away so easily. In addition to shaping your environment, you can also build skills that help you become more motivated to do the task or assignment you do not want to do. Remember, learning takes time, and motivation will wax and wane along the way.

References

Svartdal, F., Dahl, T. I., Gamst-Klaussen, T., Koppenborg, M., & Klingsieck, K. B. (2020). How study environments foster academic procrastination: Overview and recommendations. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 540910. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.540910

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