Well, happy new year, the new beginning of your new life in 2022. After all the partying and celebrating, time for a new start.
As you know we live in a very busy world and we tend to forget why we do the work we do. So here are few tips for Monday morning motivation:
- Don’t eat or drink anything until you’ve finished your work for the morning. Why? this is the ultimate Monday morning motivation tip. This forces you to work faster than usual and get rid of the routine of having breakfast first thing in the morning.
- Listen to motivational speeches while you work. You can find them by googling “best motivational speeches of all time”.
- Set up a goal for yourself and work towards achieving it. (new year’s resolutions are perfect for this).
- Enforce your motivation with iron discipline . Your mind is like a fortress, you need to build walls around it and having an iron discipline will help you achieve that. You should treat your goals as if someone is chasing you with a gun in his hand because they are!
- Make sure you wake up early enough before starting your work/study/business activities. This tip works perfectly when combined with the first one i mentioned above about not eating or drinking anything until finishing your morning tasks because this will make it easier to get used to waking up early in the morning.
- If there is any task you don’t feel motivated doing, do it first before starting your work/study/business activities . why? because the longer you leave the hard tasks behind, the harder they will get and this can have a lasting effect on your productivity during the rest of day even though it’s just one task that made you feel unmotivated.
- Make sure when planning what to do each day, prioritize important tasks over trivial ones . It’s easy to go through trivial tasks quickly without feeling much resistance but then when confronted with important complex task that requires time and concentration, your motivation wanes because of the resistance.
- If you don’t feel like working for a prolonged period of time, then take a break and go do something else for a short while until you feel motivated again . I recommend going outside or doing some physical exercise in order to produce endorphins which will make you feel good and more eager to work again.
- To help yourself going back to being productive when feeling unmotivated, try having an accountability partner who will call you out when you slack off . This is especially useful if your business involves working from home or from a coffee shop where people won’t notice when you’re slacking off. With this tip #11 coming in just few minutes after this one
- Remember why did you start working? What was your main purpose behind doing what you do? Put it on paper so that every time an easier solution pops up in front of you -you can compare it with your original goal and action plan for achieving it-
- Visualize how happy you will feel when accomplishing each task before starting it, don’t forget about rewarding yourself after completing a certain amount of work.
- Make a list of possible consequences for not doing the work and put them in front of you as well as results from completing it. Example: if I complete this task today, then I will be able to do this and that instead of going through all the trouble trying to solve each problem at different times due to lack of time, so on and so forth.
- Be proactive- take control over your tasks before they take control over you, keep records of what you’ve done so far and plan ahead for next steps or follow ups. You can outsource small parts but remember that everything comes down to hard work and doing things yourself helps build better habits within yourself .
- Don’t spend too much time with the most negative person in your life.
- Finish a project before starting a new one.
- Stop, look and listen at least three times each day to remind yourself what’s truly important to you.
- Treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight .
- Remember that when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change .
- Always finish what you start .
- Whatever doesn’t kill your makes stronger so get busy … unless it’s a chain saw !!! (:p)
- If you have a good idea for something to do, but it is not urgent, don’t tell anybody else about it until you have finished your work for the morning.
- It never hurts to ask or offer help with a problem
- You can walk out of your boss’s office if they are not going to listen to any of your ideas
- Look people in the eye when talking to them and show interest in what they have to say
- Look at motivational articles online to inspire yourself before starting work.
- Before beginning, set goals for the day and think about how good you’re going to feel when they are accomplished.
- Spend 10 minutes thinking about what’s making you unhappy/stressed/anxious in your current workplace, then write down five solutions for each issue so that it doesn’t affect your productivity during the rest of the day (or week).
- Work late on Friday night so you get more done over the course of the weekend (and Sunday night). Try not to sleep too much during this time or it could negatively affect your Monday morning energy levels.
- Get up early to do your work before the office opens for business.
- Turn off all notifications on your phone or computer (email, Facebook, Twitter etc.) so that you’re not tempted to constantly check them throughout the day for updates.
- Stay offline at lunchtime and head outside if it’s nice weather; this will refresh your mind and give you more motivation/focus during the afternoon.
- Treat yourself to a cake (or doughnut) in the company breakroom after completing five tasks without making any mistakes (this is important as it demonstrates progress). Remember to be modest when colleagues praise you for your diligence!
- Call someone who inspires you on your journey towards success and tell them how much they mean to you.
- Speak out against micro-aggressions at work before others notice, otherwise your boss will blame your good work for the time wasted during staff meetings due to social tensions.
- Change your desktop wallpaper/screensaver (whatever it is) immediately if anyone asks what’s wrong with it; this communicates that there are no problems whatsoever and you’re willing to help others for their sake.
- Go through all articles printed in the company newsletter and bookmark any which provide insights on motivation or workplace skills so that you can use them as a resource at a later date (probably next year).
- Take every opportunity possible to interact colleagues who speak about themselves in glowing terms so that they feel empowered and focused on the tasks at hand.
- Make a list of your goals/objectives for the next week so you know what you want to accomplish before Friday night, then try to do them early in the morning when nobody is around to disturb your concentration.
- Your boss knows about everything professionally related that happens within the company; this means that if you complain about work to friends or family, they will hear about it second-hand somehow and then you’ll be branded as an unproductive member of staff by default.
- If there’s time before going home, organize all those things I mentioned earlier which have been bothering you about work.
- Make a list of all the things you could do if you were laid off from your job and how it would benefit you. This will remind you why you’re working in general and should be enough to keep going until the end of the day, especially as it’s close enough to quitting time now…
- Each week before bedtime, make a list for tomorrow of everything that needs doing so that your mind doesn’t wander onto unrelated subjects while attempting to sleep. You can also use this strategy around meal times if necessary, perhaps pairing it with paragraph 17 every other Monday evening for good measure.
Motivated yet? Then get back to work!