[Sunnybayes]

I found an article from Calnewport.com that talks about motivation and why you are energized when you do work you want to and why you have to fight when you don't want to, and some physcological experiments done to confirm this. The main point of the article is that you have to ask "what is the ultimate reason that I am doing this? I'm posting this because it backs up why my little trick of asking and answering why I'm doing something helps with motivation to do it.

The Science of Procrastination Revisted: Researchers Rethink Willpower

In January, I posted an article titled The Science of Procrastination. It reported on the work of Dr. Roy Baumeister, a psychologist from Florida State University. Baumeister had demonstrated an effect called ego-depletion. The idea was simple: self-control depends on a limited resource — a resource that, like a muscle, depletes during repeated, continuous use.

The experiments were elegant and convincing. Give a subject two tasks that require self-control and they’ll do worst on the second. Replace the first task with something that requires no self-control and their performance on the second increases.

The conclusion: willpower is a limited resource. The more you use, the more you lose. So use it wisely during the day.

...
Enter Self-Determination Theory

Ryan and Deci have been amassing, for more than a decade, a substantial body of evidence supporting a model of energy and vitality that they call Self-Determination Theory (SDT).

This model overturns Baumeister’s “willpower is like a muscle” message, and provides us with a more nuanced view of why sometimes we’re energized when we face work, and why other times we are very much not.

...

In short: the effect self-control has on your willpower (vitality) depends not on how much work you’re doing, but the ultimate reason why you’re doing it.

...

Keep these experiments in mind next time you feel like your college schedule is becoming too much to bear. Remind yourself often of what is perhaps the most important question you can learn to ask: why?

Why I found this interesting is because it help explain why I found that it seemed to be so motivating to me when I constantly asked why when I wanted to do something as I said in this post:

I've been able to keep up my motivation for doing them by constantly reminding myself of my highest level goals, reminding myself of how each of these activities links into my highest level goals, better described in these post, How to stay better discipline?, Sunnybayes' interpretation. This keeps each tasks that I need to do attached to the hierarchy that is the source of my motivation.

Also here:

For example, on of my items on my life out line (basically my to do list) is to
"download all the course work" I look at this and it seems totally pointless and it would take lots of energy to bring myself to actually doing this.

But I find motivation by thinking and linking it to my highest goals like this:"download all the course work, so i get credit for my study abroad courses, so I can et my transcript down in time, so I can work at my internship during the summer, that internship will let me have time in the evening to plan how to make my escape, so that I can become wealthy, so that I can be free to create organized conciousness"

And if I don't have motivation to do a certain item, then I do this process. That way my hierarchy is whole, there are not random things that I do that are not linked to it. There I keep constant motivation to doing them. Also it is a constant reminder for me to do things that keep me on my path to my life goals.

and here:

To get the motivation in the first place, then that is when you have to go through the long chain of motivation of linking your current action in your mind to your top most goals.... to maintain your hierarchy and keep it whole instead of fragmented.

And finally here:

Motivation = You always have a reason for everything that you do. This means whatever IR you are running is linked to your hierarchy and is not fragmented. Just think of "your reason" for doing something as the link that links the "something" to your main hierarchy, and so therefore you can follow a chain of reasons all the way up to your root purpose in life. (This is why it is so important to be constantly defining what that purpose is, or you'll never have motivation)