Motivation to get up in the morning
Most of us deal with the occasional lazy, zero-motivation morning.
You know the feeling – you wake up knowing you have a bunch of stuff you need to get done, but you just can’t convince yourself to do any of it.
So you sleep in instead. Or maybe you get up and waste time playing Mario Run on your phone. Before you know it, 11:00am has arrived and you’ve done nothing.
A reader asked me how to deal with this problem recently:
“Do you have any advice for someone who plans out everything the night before, but then loses all motivation the next morning?”
Even though my girlfriend likes to occasionally accuse me of secretly being a robot (which isn’t true – I love circulating oxygen through my clearly biological respiratory system and exhaling carbon dioxide as much as the next fellow human), I’m not immune to this problem.
However, I’ve learned a lot over the past few years that has helped me to make lazy mornings occur far less frequently. Today, I’ll share a few ideas that will help you achieve a similar level of consistent morning productivity and motivation.
At a glance, here are the solutions for increasing your morning motivation that we’ll be going over:
- Experimenting with your schedule
- Using a morning routine to build “productive momentum”
- Reducing your intention-achievement gap with the Rule of Three
- Leveraging “pull motivation” by doing one thing you love every morning
Beep boop… er, I mean, let’s get started.
Experiment with Your Schedule
I’m a sucker for articles that detail the habits and morning routines of authors, entrepreneurs, and other famous people. I’m talking articles like:
One interesting thing that I’ve learned from reading these kinds of articles is that the schedules of individual writers differed greatly. For instance, here’s how Haruki Murakami, author books like and starts his day when he’s in novel-writing mode:
“When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4 AM and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9 PM.”
This routine differs quite a bit from someone like Margaret Atwood, who once admitted to,
“…spending the morning worrying, and then plunging into the manuscript in a frenzy of anxiety around 3 PM.”
Yet both Murakami and Atwood have been incredibly successful authors. So have many others, all with differing schedules and habits. What this says to me is that there’s no perfect formula for success; you can structure your day in whatever way you see fit, as long as it helps you maintain motivation and drives you towards achieving your goals.
Furthermore, the contrast between the different authors’ schedules illustrates a divide between what I’m going to call morning maniacs and momentum builders.
These are completely arbitrary terms that I just made up, but they fit my purposes for the moment, so I’m going to use them. And you can’t stop me because you’re too far away.
