Ways to Stay Motivated When Every Day Is the Same as Yesterday

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- It can be tough to stay motivated when all the days blend into one. You might feel lucky to have a job, yet still struggle to concentrate on tasks or maintain enthusiasm for your work. Even responsibilities you once enjoyed can lose their sizzle.

This is especially true if your job seems superfluous to the Covid-19 crisis. “Most of us are not searching for the cure for coronavirus, and we're not care workers,” says Bruce Daisley, a senior executive at Twitter who wrote Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job. Still, he says, work can be a good distraction: “If we can maintain a healthy relationship with our jobs, it can be a way to keep our minds off of some of the stressful things we're going through.”

The first bit of motivation maintenance you can do is cut yourself some slack. “Being kind to ourselves is the most important thing right now,” Daisley says. “This is a singular and hopefully once-in-a-lifetime experience. Don't worry if you're not doing Nobel-caliber work.”

Second, reclaim some time for focused work, what Daisley calls “monk mode”—uninterrupted time you can use for your most important projects. This prevents your entire day from feeling like a Sisyphean fight to achieve Inbox 0. “If we pause the interruptions that are besieging us, we can actually get far more done than we realize,” he says. “Most of us can afford to switch off that communication for an hour.”

You might even try keeping a list of what you're getting accomplished—a done list rather than a to-do list—to reinforce a sense of forward motion. Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile, who studied thousands of diary entries from hundreds of workers, found that those who reported small, daily wins felt more motivated. It checks out: Regardless of what you're working on, making headway is itself a powerful motivator. Progress is its own reward.

Another motivator is learning. In Eat Sleep Work Repeat, we meet Amy Edmondson, also of Harvard Business School, who documented a study of heart surgeons learning a challenging new procedure. Those who approached it as a chance to expand their skills reported higher levels of enthusiasm than those who framed it as just one more thing to get done.

Seeing the impact of their work on patients boosted their motivation even more. You might not be doing heart surgery, of course, but you'll be more inspired if you visualize those you're helping, whether they're clients, customers, or colleagues.

Daisley points out that when most of us look back on jobs we've loved, we don't think of the work we were doing as much as the people we were doing it with. So try focusing less on the task itself and more on creating connections with your colleagues.

In a remote environment, it's easy to slip into a transactional, task-oriented mode and forget to forge those ties. Daisley gives the example of a team that takes time on Mondays to discuss what they watched on TV over the weekend. “It sounds desperately unproductive, and yet those moments that seem unproductive make us feel more connected to our colleagues, connected to something larger,” he says. “If we strive to be continuously productive and to always feel like we're getting something done, we might find in the end that work feels somewhat empty.”