7 Steps to Get You Motivated

Stand Up and Walk Around

Standing up gets you away from whatever you are doing that is keeping you down and unmotivated. Walking around increases your circulation and acts as a transition step into your next task. Objects in motion stay in motion.

Too tired to stand up? Yawn, a lot.

Do 10 Jumping Jacks

They take less than 30 seconds which increases your heart rate and pumps hormones like adrenaline into your system. Not only is this short, intense burst of exercise good for your health, the hormones give you a boost of energy, making you want to do more stuff.

Write Down Your Accomplishments for the Week

Noting your successes will help put you in a positive mindset. Positivity improves mood and reduces feelings of depression. Depression is the antithesis of motivation.

Now Smile!

Smile for 30 seconds. Just like writing down your accomplishments improves mood, so does smiling, even if you're faking. So fake it til you make it!

By now you should be a heaping ball of activated joy. Now it's time to start focusing on your task!

Organize

Remember when your writing teacher would force you to turn in an outline before you wrote the actual paper? That's because setting a clear path gets you thinking about the entire project and what you're going to need to do in order to complete it. From there you can separate the entire project into sub tasks.

Break Your Project Into Small Tasks

Breaking a up large project into small tasks will make the project seem a lot less daunting and help keep you focused. This inspirational TED Talk by Lewis Pugh shows what you can achieve by breaking enormous, daunting goals into small milestones.

Set A Timer

Sometimes it is hard to stay on task, especially when there's a whole world out there to explore. But you owe it to yourself to stop merely thinking about your own grandiose plans and actually start acting upon them. Nevertheless, being your own motivator can make it difficult to stay motivated. There are whole industries built upon trying to keep us away from our own personal laziness, from personal trainers to managing consultants.

That's why you should outsource this critical job to someone or something else. Perhaps the cheapest one is a timer, nearly all of us have one now, be it on our computers, our phones, or in our kitchen. Heck, even Google has one that you can use.

Set a timer for 25 minutes and dedicate yourself to one task, then take a short break. Rinse and repeat 4 times - this is called the Pomodoro Technique and has received acclaim by various professional writers. After you've done 4 of the 25 minute "pomodoros" (less than 2 hours of work) go ahead and get unmotivated for a while. Then come back, stand up and do it all over again.

If you have a hard time sticking to 25 minutes, there's no reason why you can't switch it up. Find that Goldilocks time that works just right for you.


Now Get UP and Get Motivated!



Still need encouragement? Try here.