Finding and staying motivated is hard for many of us. We all struggle to come up with the energy needed to pursue our goals and desires. Even when we do manage to find the drive needed, it seems to ebb or peter out over time or deserts us often at the most inopportune moments. Worse still, some of us are convinced that this is just the way it is or how it ought to be. Despite this difficulty, we all have also had days when we are so engrossed in what we are doing, so consumed by the task at hand, that our brains fail to register the passage of time or the fact that our bodies need rest—yet most days remain difficult. Why is this?

Consider children at play. Do they seem to tire out? Kids bustle with energy right about till the moment they drop off to sleep, and then they wake up ready to do it all over again. Even when they must do tasks they do not particularly enjoy, they do not seem to make a problem of it. Once it is over, they resume being their cheerful selves. What is different with us adults? The simple answer to it is that, unlike children, we are swimming against the current. A part of us is fighting to stay in control over the circumstances, even actively wishing they were different. It is like trying to drive your car with your handbrake engaged. You notice what it does to you and get upset over it. Some of us even put off the task, hoping to get back to it when we are feeling better, but if we worked only on the days we felt like it we would not accomplish much. The resistance we feel has to be kept under curbs.

Let us now look at some strategies that can help get ourselves started on a task and stay on it.

1. Create achievable goals. We are bound to feel demotivated if our goals seem unachievable. Do what you can to convince yourself that it can be done. Break a larger goal down into smaller, more approachable steps if it helps. Smaller steps are better because it is easier to assign a timeframe to them.

2. Control your environment. We are the products of our environment. Some might say we are the result of our thoughts—but these thoughts do not arise in a vacuum. So, try to create an environment where your goals are easily achieved. Structure your environment to keep out distractions. See that nothing intrudes on your time. Stay organized. Memorise the things you need to and keep the things you frequently look up nearby. Changes to our environment can have a tremendous influence over us and can help us function way better than we normally do.

3. Build yourself a process. This is something you can take advantage of if your tasks have some repeating elements. Create a process around your workflow so you do not have to spend time thinking about what other actions or tasks must follow each step. When we are confused, it gets harder to come up with the energy to press on. Creating a process—a proper road map, if you will—will more than pay back your efforts involved in creating it.

4. Focus and simplify. Nothing saps our energies like chasing after multiple goals at once. Multitasking is essentially a myth. Pursue one goal at a time, or at least assign a specific chunk of time for each of them and ensure there are no overlaps. Switching between tasks has its overhead, so if at all possible, try to focus on a single task or goal until its completion.

5. Review your progress. Do all that you can to make your goal a part of your life and measure your progress frequently. Set reminders. Create charts and such. Seeing proof of our own progress does wonders to our self-esteem and helps us stay committed.

6. Take breaks. As much as possible, do not force yourself to go on when you feel spent. Take time to recuperate and replenish. Driving with your fuel light blinking does not help in the long run! In fact, it directly affects the way you perceive things. Things appear much harder than they are when you are fatigued, and you would struggle more than you need to.

Now for the not-so-obvious aspects of motivation. The strategies mentioned above will work splendidly for those invested in their goals and those who have lives so structured that achieving their goals is almost inevitable. However, for the majority of us, these will not work as well because we have a different hurdle entirely to overcome.

The chief problem with finding motivation, to put it succinctly, is that our sense of self is not real; in other words, we are not nearly as real as we would like to believe. We think of ourselves as having an unchanging core amidst all the change that happens around us, but that is not true. What do you have in common with your five-year-old self? Very little, more than likely. The same holds true for the self of the moment and the one from a few hours before. It is just your insistence that they are the same that has you feeling that they are.

The ‘self’ is a structure thrown together when the need for one arises—a mental construct, an abstraction, a bag of sorts into which we toss whatever we can muster. What goes on to make the self of each moment are feelings, sensations and thoughts that can be found in that moment. Effectively, it is a different self that is facing a task any given day or hour, and chances are that we will see a great variance in the amount of motivation felt with each version of the self. What this essentially means is that we need to find our inspiration anew each time. Someone who expects a steady influx of motivation is setting himself up for disappointment, because the self of the moment might experience absolutely no urge to get on with a task or a goal whatsoever.

One of the factors that affects our ability to proceed with a task or goal is the meaning it takes on. A task or goal as an idea has no meaning, no emotional content attached to it. The meaning is supplied by the self, and the self keeps changing. I hope you are starting to see why we have trouble staying motivated. If the prod is external, we have little trouble sticking with our goals. When someone is holding a gun to your head, for instance, meaning is easily achieved. On all other occasions, however, it is up to us to supply the meaning. A helpful fact to remember is that we paint our world in terms of gain and loss. It is just varying shades of these that represent value in our psychological economy. If there is neither gain nor loss, it is hard to feel enthused about anything. What is meaningful to you, it is easy to see, might not hold the same significance for another. It is the same with the self of each moment.

When we frame something in terms of gain or loss, we establish a relationship with the things involved and ourselves, so gain and loss is essentially a product of thought and the self at the centre of it holds tremendous importance. If the self is disinclined to see a task’s value or if it refuses to be drawn into the relationship we hope to create, we hit a wall. This explains why we all manage to find the energy to do the things we want to and why doing what we do not want to do takes work. You can sometimes trick yourself into getting things done by setting a suitable reward or punishment or we can train ourselves to leave the self out of the mix entirely, focusing purely on the necessity of accomplishing a task or goal, pushing ourselves on by sheer will—but that is inordinately hard. You will soon tire out.

There is, however, a better approach to the problem: blotting out the self long enough for the task to get done. This relatively simple approach addresses the problem at its core, which essentially has to do with the self which is unable, among conflicting claims on our energies, to choose the one that is the least desirable to itself. What does turning off a self involve? The self is essentially the product of the world it is in; it is rooted in causes. If we shut the world out, the self vanishes along with it. What follows below is a technique I employ, though you can come up with your own using the same principles. What we attempt here is to simplify the environment by leaving out things not essential to the performance of a task—and a self is something that is nonessential.

The technique involves focusing on nothing in particular for a while or focusing on something that evokes a neutral response in us. Stare at the sky or an empty wall; I prefer staring at the sky. Large, empty spaces have this effect on me. Do it just long enough till you reach a point where your mind fails to find anything to connect to. With practise, you will learn to recognise that sweet spot. Then start on your task directly. It helps you get past the resistance you would otherwise experience. A few minutes into your task, there are fewer chances of any resistance arising.

Many people have their own version of this exercise, especially those who work long hours and still seem happy at its end. But very few of them know this is how they do it—turning off their self, which means that they sometimes cannot turn on this superpower when they really need it. If there are interruptions, they struggle to get back. I have seen people transition to their get-things-done selves or lack of selves with little more than a shrug or a sharp intake of breath. Some of us just need more elaborate rituals to get into that state.

It is crucial to remember that our environments exert an inordinate amount of influence over us, but even more important are the thoughts in our heads. The environment takes on different meanings depending on the thoughts. What we achieve and what we do not are both ultimately tied to what goes on inside that three-pound brain of ours, and it all comes down to how good we are at arranging the disparate thoughts and ideas inside there to create meaning out of them. But counting on meaning to see you through might not work every time. Removing the self from the equation—the self that forms the hub from which all meaning radiates—will help you get around this.