Liz 7: Motivation (or a lack thereof)

Recently I’ve been struggling with motivation, whether it be with school work, hobbies, or even just getting myself ready in the morning. There are weeks where I can’t get anything done; I’ll wake up in the morning, barely get myself out of bed in time to go to school, just to come home and do nothing because I literally can’t find a reason to. Other times, I’ll have a thousand things I plan on doing and somehow I actually do everything. I’ll sit down and work well for hours without getting distracted. The problem is, the amount of motivation I have fluctuates so much that I can’t even tell where the issue is. So, I’m gonna reflect on my week, plus do some research, to see where the issue may be.

Monday I worked from 4-10, so when I came home I went to bed, even though I really wanted to work on homework. On Tuesday, I did a bunch of school work during my study hall and during my lunch. When I went home, I was going to do school work but ended up falling asleep on it. I then went to therapy, and when I got home the only thing I did was a calculus quiz I had due at midnight. Starting Wednesday morning, I was completely determined to get caught up on all the homework I wasn’t doing. I worked in the morning before class, during my third block class (I had finished the work I needed to do during class), during my lunch, AND I skipped the pep rally to keep working. I had work from 4-10 that night, but I came home and started one more assignment before passing out. Thursday morning, I finished the assignment from the previous night before first block, and I did a sketch for art and read the chapters in TSIS during my study hall. At this point, I was practically caught up on all my work; I had one more assignment for AP Euro that was late. I went home with a decent list of work I wanted to get done. However, I must have pushed myself too hard, because I got NOTHING done. I started my blog post, got about halfway through the first paragraph, but t
hat’s it. I tried to do work, but I physically couldn’t get myself to do it. Instead, I laid in bed all night with a show playing in the background.

According to this article I found, I exhibit about 5 causes of a lack of motivation: I’m overwhelmed, I’m mentally and physically tired, I don’t believe I’ll actually get it done, I’m impatient, and I don’t really want to spend my whole day doing school work. That’s a lot of problems to work on. But one thing I do that I’ve noticed can help a lot is lists. I always make lists of the things I need to get done during the day, breaking up my assignments to make it easier to get through all of them. I think the issue with last night was that I put waaaay too many things on my list. I had no plans, so I overwhelmed myself with a long list of school work. I just gotta remember there’s only so much I can handle.