Home office motivation is something many of us are struggling with. But are we seeing all there is in terms of staying motivated when it comes to working from home?
Home office motivation
Have you ever woken up in your home feeling motivated to start working right away? So much so that you feel you could skip your morning routine and just get going on that project?
If so, you know what an exhilarating feeling that might be. Also, you might know how hard it is to come across and hold on to. You might even find yourself craving that feeling and looking for external motivation to begin or keep working. You start looking for online resources to keep you motivated and just end up losing time in the process. So you procrastinate even further.
Home office discipline
If you flip the coin, the other side of motivation is discipline. Even if you might think that home office motivation is what you need, the truth is motivation can only take you so far. To rely on that feeling of motivation is to put pressure on yourself. And pressure is not exactly what keeps you going on the long run. So what is a better choice for the long run? What do you actually need when working from home? You and I both know it’s discipline.
But what is discipline?
We might fear even the word “discipline”. Maybe we fear it because we grew up with this idea that discipline is something hard and it comes along with punishment for lacking it.
Discipline is actually “self-control”. And it’s the type of self-control that is built on automatization and that means it gets easier and easier with practice. Our brains are used to automatize behaviours we do often in order to conserve energy. This is how we learn to ride a bike, drive a car or play an instrument.
In the beginning, all the movements we have to make in a certain order are slow and we focus greatly to remember them. Think about when you first started your job, you had to learn everything and it seemed hard because you had no idea what you were doing. And look at you now, not looking for how to do your job but looking for motivation to do something you already know how to do!
How do we switch our mindset from motivation to discipline?
That one word – mindset – is the concept we will be using to create space for a discipline that will have us go beyond fleeing motivation.
Home office discipline can seem hard to install into our new working systems for those used to working from an office building. Peer pressure might have worked so far but it’s time to switch to self-control. Not only our environment changed, but also our lifestyle and we have different stresses to deal with. There is now a need to be self-contained and get work done in our home office.
Home office motivation is based on your moods and feelings which are everchanging and can’t be relied upon.
Home office discipline is based on the natural way our brains have evolved to almost automatize behaviours we practice often.
So now we know the difference between home office motivation and home office discipline. Let’s go deeper and find out how to create a home office routine that sticks.