Increasing Personal Energy
How to increase Personal energy when motivation is low
The Motivation equation
Motivation Equation = (value * expectancy) / (delay * impulsiveness)
One possible algorithm for beating procrastination is the following three step process
Step 1) Identify you are are procrastinating
Step 2) Detect the cause of low motivation in the motivation equation
Step 3) Fix the underlying cause of low motivation using one of the techniques listed here.
While this approach should work for the large variety of situations where you can fix low motivation factors immediately, how do we handle situations that are beyond immediate fixes. For example, its 2 am in the darkness of the night or 2pm right after lunch. To make it worse, there is a significant mismatch between the current energy level and energy required for the task, however important and valuable the task might be.
There seem to be broadly two approaches to solve this problem
Move on: Forget the task for now and move on and come back to it later when there is an energy match.
Increase Personal Energy: Try to increase personal energy to meet the energy requirements of the task. Some techniques for increasing personal energy include going for a quick run, listening to high beats music, watching motivation videos etc.
While the above two solutions might work most of the times, I think we need to look at the relationship between the doer(subject) and the task(object) in a fundamentally different way . Most techniques discussed above make the doer central and the task subordinate to the goals of the doer. On the other hand, what if we could make the task central, and the doer then merges into the background. One of the core tenets of the Bhagavad Gita is to “Raise Yourself by Yourself”. One must do the work that needs to be done independent of one’s likes and dislikes, and whether the work is personally valuable or not in the long/short term. One must enjoy the joy of labour more than the fruits of labour.
May be this flipped-view will increase personal energy ( or perhaps personal energy is no longer a causal factor) and enable working on tasks that one may not be immediately interested in taking up.