How To Avoid Motivation

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“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”
- Albert Camus

It seems everywhere I turn in the blogosphere these days shows up another article on how to motivate myself to do something. It’s not that I have a terrible problem with motivation…I just procrastinate on things I don’t particularly want to do.

Why Do We Need Motivation

A recent article over at LifeHacker (13 Tricks to Motivate Yourself) makes a different point: “The best way to motivate yourself is to organize your life so you don’t have to. The idea is that explicit motivational techniques should be a backup, not your regular routine.” This is an interesting supposition. It takes a look at why we resist tasks instead of getting us blindly to do them.

Avoiding Motivation

So proceeding along the thought of eliminating motivation before we need it, what are the most common reasons we get bogged down in starting a task? It’s because the task is something we really don’t want to have to do. And if we don’t want to have to do it, why do it at all?

The thing I will be thinking about work in this light. It’s been very hard for me to get motivated for work lately. Perhaps it is time for a change.