Chaining Motivation to Drive Productivity

Motivation and productivity are go hand-in-hand when it comes to achieving your goals.

Cut. Cut! Cut!!

Honestly, I believe anything that involves the word motivation or productivity will inevitably tend towards some clichéd conclusion that’s been beaten to death once, revived, and beaten to death again.

While we’re on it, we should also add creativity to that list of overused, zombified words.

But bear with me, I promise you to provide you with an original solution — courtesy of my creativity.

Let’s get to it.

To start off, the relationship between these motivation and productivity often embodies one of ambiguity and confusion.

People less familiar with the words might even interchange motivation for productivity despite the fact that each represents a very distinct quality unique to an individual.

It’s a common scenario. Remember that last job interview? You might say something like, “I’m a motivated employee,” to mean that you’re an asset because you have a reason to be productive.

Convoluted? Yeah. But it gets the difference across.

I guess we should start from the top and define the difference.

For me, motivation in its simplest terms exists as your reason for doing something. In contrast, productivity is a measure of the efficiency when you’re in the process of doing that something already.

Here’s a pithy expression for your digital travels. You can be motivated without being productive in the same way that you can be productive without being motivated.

The problem is that neither of those scenarios is desirable. We should aspire to be both motivated and productive when it comes to any task.

The solution is to just forget about these words entirely: motivation, productivity, creativity, greatness, and whatever other thing you use to describe the ways you can reach a goal.

Motivation, that’s just a word that some dude made up years ago. It’s the same story with the other words. Throw them out the window.

If you want to reach a goal and if you want success, you need to do something very counterintuitive: forget yourself.

The reason that I don’t lose motivation or experience huge lapses in productivity when writing is because I don’t think about how I’m not going to be motivated or productive.

This is the idea of chaining motivation to increase productivity —and once you get the idea down you can forget about these two words.

When you have a goal, all you have do to is to be relentless. I know this is starting to sound like another platitude but it’s not what you’re thinking.

Let me give you a live example. My nice, lucid, and mellifluous flow of ideas came to an abrupt stop just now as I was writing this very article. The solution is to not stop. For me, I have a set of 20 lb. weights in the corner of my room and I just pumped out a few sets.

I can feel the blood pumping through my veins and the creative juices are flowing again — no doubt! The exercise doesn’t really matter either, you can do pushups or handstands.

You don’t even have to exercise to be relentless. You just have to do things that break the regular rhythm of what you would have been doing and you have to do them continuously.

According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, did you know that some sharks will literally sink and suffocate if they don’t stop swimming constantly?

The same principle pretty much applies here. You have to be swimming constantly from moment to moment or you will sink and drown before you reach your goal. If sharks can do it, you can probably do it too.

I don’t know, maybe take off all of your clothes and walk around explore the inside of your house while leaving your fridge open. Do some straight up crazy, lunatic-level stuff at your own expense (I take no responsibility for your actions).

Then just resume writing as if nothing ever happened. That’s what being relentless and chaining motivation means, and that’s how you’ll get past all the roadblocks and get the most productivity out of your activities.

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