How to deal with the unwillingness to go to work?

Early Monday, the clock wakes up, you go to sleep as often as possible, and you leave the house in a hurry, without much cheer and willingness to face another day's work. The point is, the world doesn't care about your morning laziness at all, and you don't have much choice but to work - the question is, how?

First, it must be understood that it is absolutely normal to feel lazy and unwilling, especially after an extended holiday. Then, to avoid despair, it is worth checking out some methods that have been proven to make us push the day's work and get it started.

About procrastinating the right way

Procrastination is a bizarre way our brains find to delay appointments and leave everything to the last minute. Although this sounds totally harmful, it is possible to look at things differently.

Have you ever felt that at the end of a project deadline you commit to doing other things? For psychology, this is called “structured procrastination, ” which is our doing minor tasks that we can finish faster, even when it means ignoring the most urgent and most important task.

This is basically why you sometimes end up doing a lot of housekeeping when you need to finish a report. Behavior expert Dan Ariely has a peculiar view of structured procrastination and is not the type to support the idea that we should keep trying to keep the mailbox always clear, answering everything immediately.

The issue here, especially when you're not in the mood for work, is to think about the best way to use structured procrastination for you. Basically, you can “make a mistake” and start doing other, lightweight tasks that are part of your work commitments - so gradually everything gets done as it should. Starting with the easy part is helpful as it is still something that needs to be done, but it feels like you are not really working.

The 45 minute tactic

It is not always easy to start with the tasks that are less work, and then structured procrastination is not viable. When this happens, another way to do what is needed is to stipulate 45-minute blocks of dedication: during this time, which can even be timed if you want, the work needs to be done intensely, without checking social networks or answering messages on WhatsApp., for example.

This 45-minute focus can be done all day, and whenever the time is up, you can have a drink of water or go to the bathroom, for example. Then another 45 minutes of total dedication.

The idea of ​​time blocks is inspired by a technique called Pomodoro, which focuses on 25 minutes of intense activity, with 5-minute breaks. Each 25-minute block is a pomodoro, and after four pomodoros, the pause can be longer and last up to 30 minutes, so that the brain is relaxed and everything comes back to the next session.

Do you really need motivation?

We need to think about motivation and its concepts as well, because we tend to believe that we can only do something when we are motivated, even if it is not.

Who seeks to demystify the subject is writer Oliver Burkeman, who questions our need to do something only when we are motivated. For him, the problem is that this idea makes us think that we need to feel motivated to take something further, when in fact we can do things even if we don't feel like it.

Burkeman tells us that our unwillingness to work need not be overcome by inventing some motivational factor, but instead we can learn to live with the fact that we will not always do the things we enjoy, just. We may not feel like doing something, understanding it and doing it anyway because it is part of it. Do you agree?

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