How To Motivate and Reward Yourself

Procrastinating over a dull, routine, or trivial task?

The solution is to increase the motivation to do the task by rewarding yourself for getting it done.

But it can’t just be any reward. It needs to be something personal that you enjoy.

Thanks to our patrons whose support allows us to make new videos – Please join us on Patreon

Hi I’m Rick,

I made a video called “To End Procrastination Boost Motivation” and the premise was that if you have a task that you’re procrastinating over because it’s boring, it’s not interesting it’s not challenging, then you can boost your motivation to do it by making the task more challenging, more interesting.

Cleaning the kitchen – blah, cleaning the entire kitchen in under 6 minutes – Woo, okay that’s going to be interesting, can I do it?

So that’s one trick I use I turn it into a game. If the kids are over and my wife’s there we may play the game together, all right commercial break, can we get dinner all cleaned up and the dishwasher loaded in the next 3 minutes, and Bam four of us go it’s great.

One of the comments on the video was can you do some stuff on how to reward yourself, I have never understood that.

So here is some stuff, what I would suggest is to find out what the reward would be for you, what it is you love to do, what is it you defer to when you’re procrastinating, what do you go do instead.

So I might be putting off writing something, or any number of things, making a call and I’m dreading it, so I’ll go down and work on my model railroad, or I’ll start tidying around the house, or I’ll go out to the garage and do something in the workshop there, maybe I’ll go well… whatever.

The point is figure out what it is you like to do and then that’s the reward, and the reward could even be scrolling for 20 minutes, put your phone down go do whatever the small task is, the boring task, get it done, come back and now you’re free to scroll.

It’s hard when you have ADHD to realize or imagine what it’s going to feel like to have that done, so doing that as well, taking a moment to think this is going to be great, I’m gonna have this done, I’m gonna have it out of the way, starting to imagine the future how you’re going to feel, powerful motivator.