I’ve been particularly looking forward to the sleep chapter in John Medina’s book Brain Rules (one of my current reading books) because I was interested to know once and for all how much sleep I needed. Was 8 hours really the magic number? What were the consequences of averaging, say, 7 hours, or 6? What about naps? I was interested in knowing how sleep affects our brains so that I could begin to see how it might affect self-motivation.

The answers were very helpful in some ways and completely unhelpful in others. What are the findings about how much sleep we need? Research so far seems to say that there is no definite number, and sleep needed varies widely from person to person. Some people (who have a condition called “healthy insomnia”) only need 4 or 5 hours a night and don’t seem to suffer any ill effects. Kids going through puberty definitely need more, preferably in the morning. There also seem to be genes that determine whether someone is a morning person (a “lark”), a night owl, or (like most of us) a “hummingbird,” which is to say someone with a “normal” sleep schedule. Sleep needs and daily schedules change as a person ages, too.

Too little sleep has serious costs
But one very clear finding across the board is that not getting enough sleep actively sabotages the brain’s abilities. As Medina puts it, “Sleep loss hurts attention, executive function, immediate memory, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning ability, general math knowledge … manual dexterity … and even gross motor movements.” Also, interrupted sleep or inadequate sleep severely limits our ability to remember things we learned that day, increases stress, and causes effects that mimic accelerated aging. Not getting enough sleep even forces the body to crave sugar while reducing our ability to make good use of sugar when we get it, playing havoc with healthy eating.

Figuring out your own sleep needs
Most of us already knew that shorting ourselves on sleep was bad (though maybe we didn’t realize it was that bad). But how do we figure out how much sleep do we actually need to not condemn ourselves to tired, inattentive, grumpy days? The best answer I can give is that we probably already know. If you wake up feeling overtired, it’s probably no secret to you that you could use more sleep. Some of us treat sleep as expendable if something else important is going on, but since even small sleep shortages can have a major impact on performance, we may be more effective if we get the right amount of sleep even though that takes away from the waking hours in which we can actually get things done. If you find yourself adding in extra “down time” during the day because you’re tired, or making mistakes, being distracted, or having trouble getting things done because of a sleep debt, then the “bonus time” you’re getting by cutting out sleep–and possibly more time besides–may be getting used up by the problems caused by not getting enough sleep. In other words, shorting ourselves on sleep is both unpleasant and unproductive.

The need for naps is built into our genetic code
Pretty much everyone, it turns out, is programmed to need about a half-hour nap in the early afternoon, although some of us need it more than others. This isn’t just an artifact of not getting enough sleep at night: it’s a normal part of the sleep-wake cycle in human beings. Many of us won’t have the option of getting this extra sleep on a regular basis, but it may be worth experimenting with it when you do have the freedom to try and seeing if it doesn’t give you a lot more energy and attention. In one study, pilots who took a 26-minute afternoon step performed 34% better than pilots who didn’t. That’s a big improvement!

At the very least, it’s best not to schedule things that require a lot of attention in the early afternoon if you can help it.

Sleep and self-motivation
How does this affect self-motivation? Pretty profoundly, it turns out. Self-motivation requires knowing what you need to do, paying attention to your priorities, devoting a little time and focus to moving forward, being self-aware, and solving problems that come up with your process. All of those things are compromised when we short ourselves even an hour or two of sleep a night. So with enough sleep, self-motivation will tend to get noticeably easier.

I know you will have gotten the advice to “get plenty of sleep” time and time again, and if you aren’t currently getting enough, it might be because you are trying to get enough time in the day to accomplish everything that’s important to you. Only you can judge whether or not a little sleep-deprivation is worth being less intelligent and less capable while the sleep debt lasts. In the past, at least, I’ve often gone with a little sleep deprivation in the service of what sometimes seems like a good cause. Put in this light, though, I’m not sure I want to continue to make that kind of a bargain. I’m beginning to think of it this way: if I can accomplish everything I already accomplish without always getting enough sleep, how much better could I do if I were actually operating at full capacity? It’ll be worth finding out.

By the way, if noise interferes with your sleep, or if you just want a little more silence in your life, you might want to try any brand of soft, foam earplugs with rounded ends (above). I’ve found these very helpful, especially for sleeping when someone else has to get up early, during travel, working while someone’s watching a TV or listening to music nearby, concentrating while my neighbor is mowing the lawn, etc. I haven’t been as happy with plastic earplugs or with the kind that are made of harder foam and don’t have a rounded end. Fortunately, the earplugs don’t block out sound completely, so it’s still possible to hear (faintly) a phone ringing or an alarm going off even while wearing them.

Photo by tempophage

Learning and memory can be essential in self-motivation. Why? Well, consider two examples.

Let’s say a man, Scott, has trouble with being late, and he’s trying to change his habits to always be on time or a little early. Scott has three children, all in school, with various afterschool activities. Sometimes they take the bus home, but sometimes Scott needs to pick them up, while sometimes his wife, Selena, does. Sometimes activities get changed at the last minute.

So Scott might get much better at paying attention to what he’s doing before leaving to go somewhere, and he might start setting aside extra travel time in case of delays, but if his daughter shouts “We have an extra soccer practice tonight, so you have to pick me up” as she’s leaving for school in the morning and Scott doesn’t remember this fact, then his other preparations are useless, and his daughter will be left standing in front of a deserted, locked school until someone catches Scott’s mistake.

To take a different kind of example: let’s say Lisa wants to become much more organized at her job (she’s an architect). She attends a special training seminar on organization for architects, with all kinds of wonderful information–but she’s distracted during the seminar by a very sick man sitting next to her, and so while she scribbles down a lot of notes, the information doesn’t sink in. When she looks back later, her notes aren’t of much help: she wasn’t really understanding the material when she wrote it down, so she’s not going to suddenly understand it from looking at her own notes later. She has a vague recollection that the system seemed to be exactly what she needed and involved a lot of colored folders, but that’s it. The system never gets implemented and Lisa continues to spend hours every week trying to find documents she needs.

So if learning and memory are important to self-motivation, how do we improve them?  There are a few important facts to keep in mind.

Make sure you understand as you’re learning
We don’t remember things like a video recorder: our brain breaks up everything see, hear, touch, etc. into a lot of separate kinds of information and store it all over the brain, bringing it together as needed. That means that if you don’t learn something when it’s presented to you, you usually won’t be able to learn it by trying to recall the details. Effective learning requires focus at the time you’re learning.

We learn better when information has meaning
The more meaning and connections information has for us, the easier it is to remember. As an example, many top chess players can look at a chess board mid-game and instantly memorize the location of every single piece on the board. In one study, chess players with this ability were able to remember layouts set up from actual games beautifully, but were much poorer at being able to remember layouts where pieces were just set randomly around the board. The actual game layouts were meaningful to them: a possible threat to the queen here, mutually protective knights there, and so on. Random game layouts didn’t have these meanings, so they couldn’t “chunk” the information (that is, bind up many pieces of information into a single “chunk” that can be recalled as one piece), which was what was enabling them to memorize so much information so well (I’m trying to help both myself and my readers chunk concepts from posts when I use subheadings, like in this article). More meaning connections to a piece of information also gives you more possible ways to remember it when you need to.

Emotion is a powerful force in memory
We learn things better when we have emotional associations with them. Have you ever used your own personal information, or a family member’s, when making up a password? Those kinds of passwords are much easier to remember than random passwords, because our lives and those of family members have much more meaning to us than random information. (Unfortunately, such passwords are also usually easier for other people to guess.) In the same way, experiences that are powerfully joyful or frightening or that are emotionally charged in some other way tend to be very memorable. If you run out of your house while it’s on fire, you’re liable to remember that in much greater detail than if you run out of the house to get to the hardware store before it closes. (Although this is also because we tend to remember unusual things better than everyday things.)

To really learn something, start using it immediately
When learning how to do something, one of the strongest possible ways to fix it in memory is to start using it. This serves several purposes: it provides a lot more neural connections for the information; it allows you to experiment and apply the information while it’s still fresh in your memory; and it helps turn up any misunderstandings or gaps in knowledge that need to be filled in while you’re still close to the source of the original information.

One way to start using knowledge immediately is to write, talk, or teach about it. If you find out something you think will be especially useful in your life, you might consider calling up a friend and telling them about what you’ve learned, or blogging or writing a journal entry about it. This forces you to use the information in a way that creates more connections and helps you see exactly how well you’ve understood it, at the same time that you’re doing other people a service by passing it on.

Come back to the same information several times to fix it in memory
Getting information to permanently take up residence in long-term memory usually requires revisiting it several times, with perhaps a few hours to a few days between repetitions. If you make notes about something you want to learn, you can leave yourself two reminders to come back to it two more times, just to review. You can also use the write, talk, or teach approaches at timed intervals. The same amount of study spread over a day or a few days or a week seems to be much more effective than taken all at once.

How this all works in real life
So for instance, if you were writing an article on how memory applies to willpower, you might start out with some examples that people could easily envision, to give meaning to the idea that memory applies to self-motivation. You might even make those examples a little emotionally loaded, with a stranded child here, anxiety about a sick person there … actually, that sounds like it might work. Remind me to write something like that sometime!

And if you want to make the best possible use of this article, you might glance over it to make sure you understand everything, asking yourself questions about each of the major points and seeing how well you can answer them. You might then go blog about it, tell a friend about it, try to summarize the main points in a quick written outline, or go use this information to learn something else. Reviewing it twice over the next couple of days would give it the strongest chance of sticking around.

For more information on how memory works, along with other useful information about how the brain operates, I highly recommend John Medina’s book Brain Rules, which provided some of the information for this entry.

Photo by clappstar.

It can be truly humiliating. Maybe it’s never happened to you, but it certainly happens to a lot of us: you’ve been grappling with something for years–your weight, organization, starting a novel, getting the house in order, changing how you act with other people–and a day comes when you’re inspired to do something about it. So you do it! You change your eating habits or start running or create a strict rule for dealing with all incoming e-mails. Then a week or two pass, and you find you’re gone off the rails: your eating habits are worse than ever, or a busy day put you behind on your organization and you never caught up, or the trick you were going to use to remember people’s names has been forgotten itself. What happened?

There’s a simple answer to this and a more detailed answer. The simple answer is that we start things in different circumstances than we continue them in. A New Year’s resolution made at a party with friends on a full stomach (for example) turns into a thankless, lonely grind week after week, and it loses a lot of its sparkle that way.

Don’t worry: the detailed answer is much less depressing than the simple answer. But the simple answer reminds us of something essential: inspiration may drive us to start new things, but it’s our own efforts to rise above obstacles that get us through in the end.

Certainly there is such a thing as a badly-chosen goal, or a good idea for a goal that’s not practical at the moment. But for goals that are worthwhile, there are at least seven ways something that started well could run into trouble. Here’s what those seven kinds of problems are, and how to get past them.

1) The novelty wears off
Annoyingly, somewhere in our evolution we acquired a built-in trait that only allows us to enjoy something for a little while unless it changes. A dish that tastes “amazing” on the first bite and “really good” when we have it again in a few days continues to wane in amazingness as long as we keep eating it regularly. This is known as “hedonic adaptation,” and it means that anything that was delightful and new and exciting eventually becomes old hat unless there’s something renewing that excitement. When we first take on new goals, it helps a lot to understand that we need to not only take the steps to reach our goal, but to keep actively renewing our enthusiasm.

2) Our mood changes
Everyone has better and worse days, days when we feel we can do more and days when we’re mainly just trying to keep things from going wrong. What may seem easy to do on a good day can be the last thing we care about on a bad day. Fortunately, we can stop having bad days if we try, but it also helps to use tactics like rule-making and decision logging to keep ourselves happy with our goals.

3) Things get harder; complications arise
Sometimes we’ll start pursuing a goal when things are going well, but then things get harder: there are new demands on our time or finances or attention, for instance. It may become harder to find time to follow our goals. When the going gets tough, the tough organize and prioritize so they won’t lose track of what’s most important. Goals that aren’t nurtured through busy times tend to get lost in the shuffle.

4) We begin to forget
Goals and new habits need to be nourished and maintained by a process of regular feedback. If we don’t regularly remind ourselves of what we were doing and review our progress, our goals become vague, distant, and easy to forget. Once we’re no longer actively thinking about what we want to achieve, we’re sunk: those habits aren’t going to change themselves. Focusing on our priorities consistently can save them from being forgotten.

5) Just when we start flying, someone shoots us down
There will always be naysayers, whether they’re people who feel threatened by another person’s success or people who genuinely want what they think is best for you but aren’t ready to support your choices. If any of them get to you, figure out what it is they’ve told you that has sunk in and use idea repair to pull it up by the roots. Recruit them to your cause or harden yourself to their criticism: we’re each responsible for our own lives, so while it makes sense to consider good advice, if we’ve considered it and decided to go a different way, we don’t need to consider that same advice again: we’ll need our energy for other things.

6) A new interest takes over
Since things we’re getting used to become less exciting through hedonic adaptation, we human beings are seekers after novelty. This can be fine in a lot of circumstances, but not when it repeatedly derails us on old projects by tantalizing us into taking on new ones. We generally have the resources to undertake only one new thing at a time. After we’ve been in the groove on one goal for a long time, we might consider adding something else, but add something else too early and like it or not, the old goal will very likely go by the wayside. When you’re tempted by a new direction, think carefully about what you’ve invested in the goal you’re already working on and about why it’s important to you in the first place. Of course we have to keep some flexibility, but guard your progress jealously against all but the most important replacement goals.

7) Just announcing it was enough
One interesting psychological study with law students found that students who announced a study goal tended to do worse at achieving that goal than students who kept their goals private. One of the reasons this may be happening is that sometimes, a person can get enough positive feedback for just committing to something that they don’t feel the need to actually follow through–and very often the people who are there to encourage us when we start something aren’t going to be looking over our shoulders to make sure it gets done. Not following through under these circumstances isn’t so much a character flaw as it is a logistical error. Who knew that we would feel so much more satsified and resolved with our current situation just by announcing the intention to change? The enthusiasm for the actual change leaks away, and we may not even realize it’s happening.

If you might be in danger of falling prey to the announcement trap, the safest course is to only announce your goals to people who will be holding you accountable to them. Note that this is hard to do over the Internet; it’s too easy to avoid the subject, or the place where you announced it, or to say vaguely that you’re working on it. Someone who’s going to greet you in person every morning and say “Hey, how’s the novel coming?” is going to be much more help than an online friend who asks the same question, and someone who doesn’t listen to the answer isn’t going to be helpful to you regardless of where they are.

Starting new things and failing at them is so common in human experience that we tend to mark it down as a character flaw, to think that we “just don’t have the willpower.” Fortunately, willpower isn’t so much something you have as something you do. By anticipating the efforts we’ll need to make to move forward with our goals and by proactively handling the kinds of problems we’ve just talked about, we can keep ourselves on track and find ourselves just as committed on day 100 or day 1,000 as we were on day 1.

Photo by greekadman

In my last post, “How to Get a  Lot of Different Things Done Without Going Crazy,” I mentioned molecular neurobiologist John Medina’s point that our brains are structured so that we can only focus on one thing at a time. In Medina’s book Brain Rules, he asserts, “the brain cannot multitask.” It’s a really important point, but he is making it in a confusing way, because Medina goes on to say he’s only referring to “the brain’s ability to pay attention.” As you know if you’ve ever driven the wrong way because your mind was on something else, doing a thing doesn’t always mean paying attention to it. Medina is telling us that we can’t multifocus. Multitasking is not only possible, it’s a terrific way to get dull things done without getting bored, if used in the right way.

But since we can’t focus on more than one thing at a time, that means that if we’re multitasking, we can have at most one thing tying up our attention at a time: past that first thing, anything else we do can’t be something requires attention: it has to be something we’ve done over and over the same way.

I like folding laundry, because I always use laundry folding time to watch a movie with my son. We dump all of the clean laundry in the middle of the living room, sit around the pile, and gradually transform the pile into neat stacks of folded clothing. We take our time, talk about the movie a little when we feel like it, and when we’re done we hardly feel like we’ve done any work. It’s my son’s favorite chore, and I count it more as leisure than work.

But it’s easier for me than for my son, because I’ve been folding clothes for decades, while my son has only been doing it for a few years. Several times every folding session, I’ll notice he’s stopped folding, his attention fully on the movie. Usually this happens with a trickier item of clothing or with a particularly gripping part of the movie. Not being as used to folding as me, he can’t do it entirely on automatic, so his brain needs some of his attention for the folding, and his attention is already taken up by the movie. Since he can’t pay attention to two things at once, the clothes folding just stops, and since he was doing it automatically, he may not even notice: he may just sit there holding the shirt, transfixed.

“Fold,” I remind him, and he takes the few seconds necessary to focus on the clothing and start folding it, at which point his brain can go back to the movie.

I can understand if you don’t think of watching a movie and folding clothes as multitasking (though since I write a lot of fiction and analyze movies for plot, character, pacing, and emotional impact as I watch, watching movies for me is fun work instead of just fun), but even using our attention for fun can make boring work enjoyable.

So multitasking is simple, but multitasking attempts are doomed to fail unless the extra tasks being done are near-automatic ones. In terms of prioritizing tasks if we want to get a lot done, this suggests that it’s helpful to save the really mindless ones for a time when we’re doing something else with our mind: planning, talking on a headset phone (they’re not expensive, and they’re a good way to get housework done painlessly for some people), or even relaxing with a movie. But since even automatic tasks require a little bit of attention from time to time, we generally can’t focus intensely on one thing while automatically doing another: for example, we can’t multitask and still expect to get into flow.

I’m not suggesting we need to fill every moment of our lives with as much productivity as possible, but when we have a lot of things in front of us to do, it can help to know that some of the dullest tasks can be done while our brains are elsewhere. While there are other good ways to accomplish boring tasks, there’s a certain satisfaction in getting two things done at once: it makes us feel organized and confident, and that feeling itself is a great motivator.

Replicated guy cleaning photo by waveking1
Photo of unicyclist Tom James by Elsie esq.

As I write this it’s Saturday, the beginning of the first mostly-free weekend I’ve had in about a month. Because scheduled things take up almost all of my time during the week, I’ve amassed a list of about 30 tasks, large and small, that I’d like to get done this weekend. They probably won’t all get done, because there are only so many hours in the day, and that’s OK as long as I make good use of my time, enjoy the weekend, and get the most important ones taken care of. The question is, what’s the best way to do that?

I’ve gotten better and better at juggling multiple tasks over my lifetime, especially since I started intensively learning about the psychology of self-motivation, but it wasn’t until I came across a section on attention in molecular neurobiologist John Medina’s book Brain Rules that I understood why I’ve been getting better at managing a lot of tasks, and how to improve even more.

When Medina talks about attention, he describes how we change our focus from one thing to another: for each separate activity, we have to send a message throughout our brain telling it to first search out, then activate all the neural resources we have for that particular activity, letting the resources that have been active for whatever we were just doing go dormant. This is called “rule activation,” because as we learn, our brain developes specialized rules for how to act in different circumstances. Rule activation takes several tenths of a second, Medina says, and we can only activate rules for one task at a time. (What about multitasking? That’s a special case, and I go into it in more detail in the post coming up on Wednesday, “How to Multitask, and When Not To.”)

So why should this switchover matter? After all, if our brain can change modes in less than a second, we should be able to move from one thing to another with only a tiny hesitation. And that is possible–but only after we decide what we’re going to do and focus. Until we decide, until we’re certain about what we want to do and start to focus our attention on it, our brains don’t switch over: we’re in a holding pattern, still hanging onto the tools for the last thing we did and not sure what the next thing is. Just thinking about doing a thing is not the same as being ready to do that thing, even though we can very quickly move from thinking to committing if we try.

In other words, in order to get something done, we have to choose one and only one thing to concentrate on, discarding uncertainty and distractions. The problem with this is that our lives don’t present us with one and only one thing to do at a time: often we’ll have several things that need our attention, all of them important, with new ones coming in all the time. How do we reconcile our single-focus brain with a wide variety of tasks? We need to narrow our focus to only one thing at a time, and to do that we need to temporarily dismiss everything else. We also need to have an easy way to move on to the next thing once we’re done the current task.

We often don’t do this. Often we start one task, shift to another task, check e-mail, remember something we wanted to get out of a drawer, get up to get it, get involved in a conversation, forget what we got up to fetch … in other words, we let our attention shift from one thing to another, requiring a complete brain reorientation every time.

The discipline of getting a lot of different things done, then, is a discipline of choosing one thing and ignoring everything else. If you don’t know what the one thing to choose is, the answer is easy: focus your attention on prioritizing your next selection. Putting the extra attention in the choice makes it easier to focus once you move on to doing the thing you selected, because you’ve already had the chance to consider and reject all the other things that you could be doing for that moment.

To get an extra boost of productivity from there, it’s sometimes possible to keep a queue of maybe up to three or four things in your mind. As soon as you’re done the first one, focus fully on the next, and so on. This can be fluid: you can change the order before you start doing something, but once you start, try to stick with it to the end unless things change drastically. Once you get your focus on something else, it’s not always easy to bring it back, so each time you focus your attention, focus it completely and confidently, knowing that you’ve chosen the object of your attention carefully. The secret to doing a lot of different things is to not try to do them all at once.

This process of focusing isn’t just efficient: it’s relaxing. What’s stressful about having a thousand things to do is having to deal with all of them at once. By prioritizing, you really are dealing with all of them while still freeing yourself from having to think about all of them at once.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to schedule this post and put my attention in exactly one other, entirely different place.

Photo by Jonathan Caves

I’ve mentioned in other posts how important feedback loops are to self-motivation, but I haven’t described in detail what I mean by a feedback loop or why they would be so essential. It’s high time to take care of that.

Whenever we’re talking about self-motivation, our intention is to make progress toward a particular goal and/or in toward aquiring certain habits. For instance, I might have a goal of starting a business that provides me with a living wage, or want to change a habit of being late, or be trying to lose a certain number of pounds while changing my eating and exercise habits so that I keep that weight off. A feedback loop is a system that monitors progress toward a goal or progress in acquiring habits and provides information to improve that process. In it’s simplest form, a feedback loop is made up of information about how a process has been going in the recent past, some thought about what that information says about the process, and ideas from that thought for maintaining or improving the process in future.

Why is this important? Because it’s a very common thing to start working toward a goal and then lose momentum. A feedback loop catches us when we’re losing momentum and helps us redirect so that we build momentum back up. Or in the best cases, we find nothing wrong with what we’ve been doing so far but come up with an idea to make things even better. Maintaining a feedback loop means keeping control of our own progress. Not maintaining a feedback loop usually means failure, unless there’s some powerful and regularly-occurring thing in our lives to remind us how important our goals are and keep us on track with sheer energy. As an example of one of those unusual situations where no feedback loop was required: when I was in college I met a very pretty French exchange student who spoke hardly any English. Within a few weeks, I had learned enough French on my own to hold halting conversations in it, urged on by my desire to spend time with this girl. (By the way, I didn’t get anywhere with the girl, but I still use the French). Another example: a woman who “couldn’t” lose weight for years suddenly lost weight quickly when she needed to donate a kidney to her very ill son but couldn’t because of her obesity. But most things in our lives aren’t as compelling as pretty French girls or seriously ill children, so feedback loops come in handy a lot.

Feedback loops need to occur often enough that we stay on top of our process, usually at least once or twice a week. It’s often best to schedule regular days or times to do the feedback work, so as to avoid the danger of always  pushing back feedback “just until tomorrow.”

What forms do feedback loops take? There are a lot of options:

• Writing in a journal
• Meeting or talking on the phone with a friend (preferably one whom you’re helping  to work toward their own goal)
• Participating in online forums or chat groups
• Attending meetings (Weight Watchers, Alcoholics Anonymous, writers’ groups, etc.)
• Talking out loud to yourself (preferably not in situations where it will make you look like a crazy person)
• Meeting with a professional (a coach, personal trainer, nutritionist, mentor, therapist, etc.)
• Blogging

The best feedback loop options are ones where someone or something will be waiting there for you to provide an update. If you participate in an online discussion group without promising to check in on a regular basis and without having online friends who are regularly checking on your progress, it’s easy to just not post when something goes wrong, as it inevitably will. Always try to find ways to box yourself in to delivering on your feedback. The minute that process becomes optional, a huge danger opens up of it going completely out the window.

Each time you work on feedback, start by making observations about your recent progress (or lack of progress), then move on to reflecting on what could go better, and finally decide whether there’s anything specific you should be doing differently–and if so, exactly what that is. These ideas for improvement, which can seem wonderfully clear and unforgettable when they come out, can easily be lost in the shuffle of a busy life, so I highly recommend writing them down. It can be very helpful to temporarily post them somewhere that you’ll see them regularly to help you keep them in mind.

There are two particular traps I hope you’ll avoid when working with feedback loops. One is beating yourself up: the past is absolutely unchangeable; all we can do is learn from it and find ways to make better choices in the future, which is exactly what you’re doing if you’re using a feedback loop. There is very rarely any need to take yourself to task other than to recognize how you feel about your choices and actions recently.

The second trap is the infamous phrase “I’ll just have to do better.” “Doing better” is not a plan for improvement: it’s a vague wish that gets us nowhere. Yes, we often want to improve how we’re working toward our goals, but if what we’ve been doing so far hasn’t been good enough, that’s an indication that we need to do something not just better, but differently. Perhaps you had planned to get two chapters written in the past week for a book you’re working on, and you actually only got about a quarter of a chapter down. Resolving to “just do better” in the coming week ignores the fact that some very real problems seem to have occurred and will need solutions. Perhaps you haven’t set aside specific times to write and need to do so now. Perhaps you have set aside times to write, but you’ve let yourself be distracted by e-mail and the Internet at those times, in which case you need to focus on ways to prevent distractions. Perhaps you’ve avoided working on your book because you’re worried that it’s gotten off to a very bad start, in which case you need to decide what it is you really want to do next. In all cases, a problem with motivation is not a moral failing or an indication that you’re a weak-willed person: it’s always some kind of specific complication (or more likely, a cluster of complications). Address the complication, and motivation will improve.

That’s a quick view of a large and important subject. I hope you’ll take away not only an understanding of what feedback loops are, but also a willingness to use them in parts of life that are important to you, anywhere that you want to improve or make progress. You’ll need something to keep motivation going, and while it’s ideal if you have something along the lines of a pretty French girl to inspire you, in a pinch, a feedback loop will do.

I’m not particularly interested in playing video or computer games, and you may well not be either, but taking a close look at them can provide us with some surprisingly useful information about how we motivate ourselves. And although in most cases, video games don’t motivate players to do anything particularly constructive, the lessons we take from them can be applied to virtually any kind of goal.

To get an idea of why we would care about video or computer games, think about the times you’ve seen someone who was very involved in one. They may play for hours at a time, postponing food and drink and bathroom breaks, accomplishing difficult tasks despite regular failures and setbacks, disregarding most of the world around them in favor of singleminded attention to a goal. A hard-core gamer might do this every day they can, week after week. Even children with ADD and ADHD seem to be able to focus intently on video games, according to research.

When this kind of attention is directed at video games, it’s a little disturbing. Having fun is great, but being obsessed with a video game is probably not the healthiest way to live. The interesting part comes when we imagine this same amount of focus and perserverance applied to some other task, like practicing the violin, studying algebra, building a house, or examining a patient in a health clinic. In fact, the description of someone who’s absorbed in a video game sounds an awful lot like the description of someone experiencing flow. Are there lessons we can learn from video game playing to understand better how to focus on other, more useful tasks?

Sorry, that’s a dumb question. You’ve probably read the title of this post, so you already know the answer is “yes.” I hope you’ll accept my apology for wasting your time with that kind of rhetorical silliness: I know you’re busy. Let me cut to the chase.

What is it about video games that engages attention and brings out so much focus and determination? It’s a combination of factors, each of which can be applied to self-motivation. Don’t be fooled by the fact that the video game is external to the person playing it, because there is no real carrot or stick. The forces driving a determined gamer all occur within their mind: they are the exact mental triggers that can potentially make any activity compelling.

Challenging, but Not Overwhelming
Video games strive to be hard enough that the player always has to focus attention in order to survive or succeed, but easy enough that eventually almost anyone who keeps trying can become skillful. The initial difficulty makes the later accomplishment much more gratifying, and ensures that the player can’t turn attention away from the game without sacrificing success.

When we want to accomplish something in our own lives, it can be helpful to array the job in front of us so that we have to dive in and work hard. This means creating goals that are difficult to achieve. Instead of having a goal of “cleaning the house,” you can have the goal of “making the kitchen spotless in 45 minutes.” If your kitchen would normally take you an hour and fifteen minutes to clean well, this is a difficult goal. You’d have to focus hard and work at top efficiency, ignoring distractions. When the kitchen is clean, level 1 has been cleared, so to speak. Whether or not you managed to complete the job in 45 minutes barely matters once the kitchen is actually clean. Then on to level 2 …

The Next Thing Needs to Be Done Right Away
In most good electronic games, there’s always another monster lurking, another disaster that needs to be averted, another question to answer. You can’t complete one thing and then relax: you complete one thing and immediately turn your attention to the thing after it, because your only other choice is failure.

In the same way, if you’re working on starting a home business, the most productive way to go about it is to know exactly what you need to achieve–probably in the form of a to do list–and to go about methodically completing one thing after the other. You write the business plan. As soon as that’s done, you immediately start on the financial projections, and then launch directly into the marketing plan, and so forth. The easiest way to keep these tasks going is to not just to keep a task list, but to make sure that the next task to do is already at the top of your list . This takes active management of the list to handle the changing situation. If you have a reliable queue of things to do, you can concentrate on one at a time and work through them without having to hesitate or lose momentum due to not knowing what to do next. If you finish a task and the next one isn’t already identified, make prioritizing your tasks itself the next thing you do.

Always Knowing the Stakes
In life, bad choices often don’t make any immediately noticeable impact. If you decide not to work on your novel today, or to ignore the argument you had with your significant other instead of considering how you could work it out together, everything may seem fine for now–but the long term effects could be a book that doesn’t get finished (or takes much longer than you wanted it to) or a relationship that becomes painful and frustrating.

In video games, by contrast, bad choices usually bring immediate trouble. If you don’t send your peasants out into the fields, your city starves and production grinds to a halt. If you don’t bother to keep an eye out for traps, you could suddenly end up impaled on something. These kinds of results tend to be very motivating: you put out your peasants or do regular scans of the area automatically to avoid trouble and prevail in the game. Creating automatic behavior is the power of a good feedback loop.

We can apply this motivating factor to our lives by reminding ourselves of the real consequences of our actions. If you have the choice of either filing your papers at the end of the work day or letting them pile up, you can focus on how enjoyable it will be coming in the next morning to a clean desk. If we want to avoid buying a bag of potato chips, you can imagine what you’ll look like the next time you put on a bathing suit if you are carrying on a love affair with Pringles. To motivate yourself to do something, think about the pleasing results. To motivate yourself not to do something, think about the unpleasant results.

Engineering Our Own Motivation
Developers of electronic games put enormous effort into designing game play, making a game as appealing and involving as possible. A relatively small amount of planning in our own lives can allow us to accomplish the same thing with our goals.

Photo by Shelms.

In a recent comment to my post Flow: What It Feels Like to Be Perfectly Motivated, Kaizan said, “I think the concept of flow as Csikszentmihalyi describes it is fantastic, but I didn’t really follow him as to how I was meant to apply it to my life.” It’s a good point: psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has researched and depicted flow beautifully, but actually finding flow takes some work. Here, based on what I know about flow so far and on my own flow experiences, is a starter “how to” list for getting into flow.

First, not every activity should be done in flow. Flow requires being able to concentrate on one particular task or related group of tasks for a substantial period of time without having to switch gears. This can happen alone or with other people, but if anyone or anything is going to need to pull your attention away from the task–ringing phones, kids needing help with homework, pets needing to be let out–it will tend to disrupt flow. That doesn’t mean a person can’t have a phone, kids, or pets, just that whenever there are potential distractions, getting into flow means making sure as well as you can that distractions are taken care of: the kids have someone else to go to, the dog has already been out, and there are no telephone calls you’ll need to take, for instance.

Flow also requires that you know what you’re doing. It’s a balance between control and challenge: if you’re just barely getting a grip on a new skill, you won’t have the control you need. That doesn’t mean you can’t get into a flow state when learning or practicing, but the ways I know of to do that are either 1) mastering the basics first, or 2) getting into flow about learning, not about the activity itself. For instance, if you’re just starting out with guitar, you could conceivably get into flow in terms of learning chord patterns if you have good learning skills, but you wouldn’t be able to immediately get into flow with actually playing the guitar.

Experiencing flow also means needing to carefully set clear goals that provide a challenge. Even thoroughly washing dishes before a deadline, believe it or not, works as one of these kinds of goals: washing dishes well but quickly is a challenge, and the ticking clock makes your goal clear and also provides another essential element:

Feedback. You need to be able to know how you’re doing as you proceed. This may be as simple as dishes washed, whether or not you’re playing the music as written, or seeing the wall you’re framing fit perfectly into the space allotted for it. This feedback needs to be immediate, something you’re getting in real time. Any activity that can’t provide that in-the-moment feeling of “Wow, this is going great!” probably can’t be done in flow.

That’s it. Surprisingly, the task being doesn’t have to be something you would usually consider fun. You don’t have to be a world-class expert at it, and you don’t necessarily need complete peace and quiet. Flow can be achieved filing papers, making a sales presentation, playing “Fur Elise” on the piano, sketching, vacuuming, teaching, brainstorming, organizing … or anything else that meets the following simple requirements: you are able to focus on it; you have a clear goal; it’s challenging yet within your abilities; you’ve already learned the basics; and you can see how you’re doing as you go.

So not everything can be done in flow–but then, not everything should be: sometimes being more responsive, relaxed, mindful, open, or social is called for instead. But as an element of a healthy lifestyle, flow provides an unmatched opportunity to operate at the our highest level while enjoying every minute.

In future posts, I’ll be following up with some descriptions of my own flow experiences, some information about applying flow to different kinds of activities, and possibly an interview or two about other people’s flow experiences.

Photo by Jim Natale

What would it feel like to be perfectly motivated, even if just for a little while? You would become really involved with what you were doing, even fascinated with it, so that you’d stop noticing distractions. You’d be excited, working hard but not wearing yourself out. You’d know exactly what you were doing and exactly what you were trying to accomplish and exactly how well it was going. Things would just flow.

As you might already know (or have quickly guessed), this state of mind does exist, and it’s not even exceptionally rare. Probably you’ve experienced it yourself at least once or twice–maybe many times. When it works, it feels magical, because you’re working at about the highest level of difficulty you can manage, yet everything feels profoundly easy.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “chick SENT me high,” as in “This guru chick sent me high into Himalayas to find myself, but she didn’t bring me there”) has a word for this state, which he’s studied now for decades. He calls it “flow,” because when you’re in this state, you feel like you’re being carried along, as though by a river.

It’s a little misleading for me to talk about flow meaning being perfectly motivated, because while it’s true in a sense, flow only applies to short-term experiences. You can get into flow when writing a chapter of a book or giving a musical performance or playing a game of baseball or even fixing a lawnmower, but you can’t get into a single experience of flow over the course of days or weeks or months. Flow also only applies to things we’re already pretty good at: if you’re just learning something, then you need to teach your brain about each of the pieces before you can put them all together into a complex whole.

So if it doesn’t last long, and if most large, important goals take a commitment of weeks or months or years, what good is flow? Well, that long-term commitment breaks down into individual sessions of doing something: exercising, writing, cooking, talking, studying, practicing–whatever it may be. And in those individual sessions, if we get good at what we’re doing, we can strive for flow. Flow is addictive, I can tell you from experience (mostly with writing and music). It’s also pleasurable. It’s also hellaciously efficient. Even if it only comes along now and then, a little flow can turn a long-term project into a long-term source of satisfaction and thrills.

So what are the components of flow, and how do you get into it? A full discussion of that takes much more space than we have here, so I’ll summarize what flow is and follow up with more posts on the subject in the future. If you’d like to learn about flow in detail, read Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Interestingly, flow has several things in common with good self-motivation techniques in general:

• Clear goals
• A strong focus on what you’re doing (in the case of flow, so much focus that everything else is blocked out)
• Feedback as you go (in the case of flow, this needs to be immediate feedback, like a comedian gets in front of an audience or a musician gets from hearing the sounds coming out of the instrument)
• The task being challenging, but within your abilities

In addition to those prerequisites, Csikszentmihalyi describes some important signs that one is in flow:

• Your consciousness of yourself fades, and your awareness is pretty much entirely on just what you’re doing
• Your sense of time distorts: an entire afternoon may feel like half an hour
• You’re enjoying what you do, so that it doesn’t feel effortful
• You feel powerfully in control of what you’re doing.

Flow can happen on its own when the conditions are right, but with an understanding of the process, practice, and some determination, we can get better at making flow happen on purpose. Flow isn’t the main component of long-term motivation, or even a strictly necessary one, but as components of motivation go, a hellaciously efficient and deeply enjoyable state is a welcome addition to the mix.

In a follow-up article, I talk about how to get into a state of flow.

Photo by Haags Uitburo.

A recent article on the Psychology Today site by psychologist Kelly McGonigal, “The Self-Control Costs of Moral Flexibility,” talks about research that seems to show that it’s easier to make good choices when we make a rule of them. For instance, it’s easier to choose to do the dishes after dinner if you’ve made a pact with yourself to always do the dishes after dinner.

In the article, McGonigal says “What’s the best strategy, then, for making moral decisions or sticking to a behavior change? Take a principled stance that sets automatic restrictions on your behavior. Weighing the risks and benefits in each situation may seem like the more logical approach, but it’s more effective for most people to commit broadly and then not reflect on each opportunity.”

So creating rules to follow can be powerful, but there are pitfalls: using rules too much or without thinking it through carefully can cause them to fail or even backfire.

First, keep in mind that we have a limited amount of focus, attention, and effort to spare, and that learning to follow rules (even if they’re terrific rules that we’re coming up with on our own) requires all of these resources. If we try to add on a bunch of rules at once–or even two at once–we may be dooming ourselves to failure. As with new goals, it’s often most effective to get used to new rules one at a time.

Second, watch out for unintended consequences. If you make a rule to eat only at specific times throughout the day, are you piling on extra food at the end of each of those meal or snacktimes because of a fear of going hungry? If you decide to study every weeknight at 7:00, does that mean you’ll pass up a golden opportunity to study at another time because you “don’t have to?” Of course, one way to deal with these problems is to try the rules out, then evaluate how they’re working once or twice a week to see if you might be “gaming” them. Don’t try to reevaluate the rule when it’s time to follow it: by doing that you’d be second-guessing yourself at every step and giving up the whole “no struggle” advantage of rules.

Finally, only make rules for things you want to be doing pretty much all the time. Don’t make a rule that you will sit down for ten minutes at the beginning of every workday to review what you accomplished the day before if you know that at least a couple of times a week, there will be more urgent, important things to attend to as soon as you walk in the door. But this kind of rule problem, too, can be fixed with a little bit of reflection once or twice a week to see how you’re doing.

The idea of making rules about your own behavior may be offputting; if so, it may be more productive to think about taking, as McGonigal puts it, a “principled stance.” Regardless, use this technique to make use of your good thinking now to make good choices in advance and free yourself from some unnecessary indecision.

Photo by Monoglot.