Intelligent Procrastination
Time off is time off and working time is working time. Common sense, right? Consider a situation when your motivation is low, but you really wanna get the job done. What do you do to get your level of motivation back where it should be?
Wrong Approaches
Some things seem to help, but they don’t. I will give you a few examples.
Buying something nice. Since your brain is very smart it understands that this isn’t something which isn’t aligned with your life’s purpose as well as with your personal goals. Therefore it does neither contribute to your long lasting happiness, nor to your short-term motivation.
Going to the coffee-shop, meeting people and having a small-talk. There’s nothing bad about talking to people, of course. But talking about the weather (literally) won’t motivate you. Trust me. If you feel the desire to talk with people then please have an intelligent, an inspiring talk. It could be about the society we wanna live in, about strategies to be an even better tutor or something like this. Mainly, it should be a topic which causes you to think as well as emphasizes new opportunities. Don’t talk about problems, negative stuff or how cruel the world seems to be. It won’t help you. You are on this planet to make a difference, to make the world a more friendly place to live. Negative thoughts (and talks about negative thoughts even more) only bring you down instead of motivating you.
Motivational Podcasts. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge fan of motivational audio programs like produced by Steve Pavlina, Robin Sharma and others. But: They are only for these parts of your day which cannot be used productively, i.e. when you are on your way between A and B, while cooking or simply if you could not do anything else. The tendency of doing some chores just to have the feeling you had done something while you are listening is to high. You’ll just waste your time.
Be honest to yourself (by the way, that applies to all situations in your life): Do you want to waste your time, or do you want to get re-motivated, re-interested, re-focused to finish your task? I don’t know you, but I’m pretty sure you won’t choose the first one 
Get in Touch With New Ideas
Last weekend I was really down on motivation. I tried to get into some proofs that I must understand for an upcoming oral examination, but my thoughts in my head were like a little child, running around an touching everything that came into reach. After hours I admited to myself my lack of motivation and focus (which is pretty hard for me since I’m really a workaholic). On my search on motivational content on the net I stumbled upon an insight (for me).
Motivation grows if you listen to people who speak passionately about a topic you are interested in.
Like the most insights it’s highly common sense, but to get it out of your mind and into a one-liner or even into a catchy phrase tends to be difficult. Anyway. Above I said you have to be interested in the speaker’s topic. I did not say you have to be an expert on the particular field! Pure interest is all you need. The second thing I mentioned is that the speaker has to be passionate about what he is gonna say. Why? Because interest is a very good foundation, but it’s not your (main) objective to learn while viewing inspirational content. You are there to become inspired, motivated, focused, touched, not to master a new topic. If you don’t feel a fire buring in the speaker’s heart, skip ‘em. [I'm not sure if that's a correct phrase in English language so please correct me if I'm wrong.] So, here a (very) short list of recommendations:
- TED: Ideas Worth Spreading (one of many awesome talks: Dan Gilbert talks about why we are happy)
- GoogleTechTalks
Remark: If you know more sites please leave a comment with a link. Thanks.
Dance Around
Seen the movie Elizabethtown? The main actor, Drew Baylor, dances in the woods to get in touch with the life again after designing a product which failed misserabely (it turns out his design has cost the company nearly 1 billion dollars). Of course, you should not do that in front of other people unless you want them to think of you as gone crazy 
But in your own room this is a wonderful and surprisingly easy thing to get your motivation kick-started. It’s hard to explain why it works so well (not only for me, be sure of that), so try it out and see if it works for you, too.
