How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To

I was hoping to see one for my personal bugbear: paralysis of choice.

The most common situation for me is to be faced with a list of projects and tasks that are more than I can handle, and doing any one of them means ignoring the others, which are all equally urgent.

I know all the GTD and Pomodoro techniques and everything else, but it's in my head where the problem lies. Once I settle in to one specific task, I can focus and get into the zone to finish it. But that first step—committing to which thing I'll do—is the hardest one. Hours can go by while I'm avoiding the question altogether. I can literally feel the anxiety in my chest whenever I try to pick one and start doing it.

Not to discount research and the potential benefits of drugs for individual use cases, but why fight the symptoms (apparent lack in motivation) with drugs instead of the cause. Why not figure out how to organize things in a way that less people struggle with these kinds of things in the first place.

What about: I am having so much fun doing other things that I don't care enough about what I should be doing? (or replace 'should' with 'know that would make me happier in the long run and also be better for my family')

Hi, from my own experience getting out of depression and then later helping a friend out of it I firmly believe you can get out of depression if you want to.

Wanting to get out of depression is the hard part because you got to be willing to do what is necessary.

You are closer than you think to getting out of depression when you say, "Maybe it is just a matter of changing how I think." It is that. You are also right about it being hard and how easy it is to fall back into the same patterns.

He's what I've done and what I got my friend to do: break out of your daily routine.

I know this sounds like advice that isn't that different than what the other commentators have posted but it's because they are partly correct. The missing part is to incrementally break out of your daily routine by incorporating small changes as you go along.

So what do I mean?

Well try walking/driving a different way home even if it takes longer. Go to a different supermarket for food. Listen to a different radio station. Even if you hate a certain genre of music try listening to it and listen to it for longer than what you would normally trial it out for. Go to a different café or restaurant. Eat or cook new food you have never considered trying. If you can, try to do stuff you wouldn't ever 'normally do.'

The trick here is to not overwhelm yourself with too many changes too quickly or to try things that are really hard for you. This way you can actually keep to the incremental changes you are making and you don't fall back into your old patterns.

Keep sticking to these changes as you make them. Soon you will find that they will start to stack and you start to feeling new feelings. As you are going along try to stretch your routine to do ever different things. Don't rush, and don't beat yourself up. If all you can do is one thing then do that until you can do the next thing.

All the best and you can make it.

Sure, we should still be researching that too, but people have been trying that, and not with all that much success. What works and doesn't work tends to vary wildly from person to person, and at best people tend to find answers that let them scrape by, not answers that really fix the problem.

And I think it's quite possible that there isn't an organizational solution. It seems very likely to me that humans have evolved to basically be as lazy as we can get away with.

It makes sense as a survival strategy to put in exactly as much effort as it takes to get your basic needs met. For most of us throughout history, this meant working our asses off to subsist. Pushing ourselves further than that would be a dangerous gamble on our resources.

So in first world countries today, many people have this problem where we can subsist on relatively little effort, compared to, say, a farmer in 8000 BC. So our motivation scales down to that context. Send someone with that little motivation back to 8000 BC and ask them to start farming, and they'd starve - except that their motivation would probably rescale to fit the new context.

And yes, there are those who find motivation easy, who don't have these problems. But I think they are significant outliers.

So my point is that I'm not sure we can really ramp up our motivation without finding ways to stress ourselves the hell out. And I don't mean "this report is due tomorrow" stress, but "winter is in one month, and I don't want to die" stress.

I'd really rather have the pill that turns me into an outlier.