How to Get Motivated to Work (Start Before You Feel Like It)

In the 1920s, the psychologist Kurt Lewin sat in a Berlin restaurant and noticed that his waiter could recite every item on an unpaid bill, then forgot the whole order the moment it was settled. His student Bluma Zeigarnik turned that into a 1927 study and found that people remembered unfinished tasks about twice as well as finished ones. If you are searching how to get motivated to work, that finding is the most useful place to start. A task you have begun keeps pulling at you. A task you have only thought about does not.

Most of the research on motivation points the same way. The feeling of wanting to work tends to arrive a few minutes after you start, so the job is to make starting cheap.

Shrink the first step until it feels silly

Pick a first action you could finish in under two minutes. Open the document and write the heading. Reply to the one email blocking the rest. Put three bullet points on a blank page. Each one opens the kind of loop Zeigarnik measured.

A five-minute timer does the same job. Set it and agree you can stop when it rings. Once the loop is open, carrying on is usually easier than closing the laptop. If the five minutes keep sliding into tomorrow, our piece on why you put work off and how to stop procrastinating goes further into the delay itself.

Decide when and where, in one sentence

Peter Gollwitzer, a psychologist at New York University and the University of Konstanz, calls these sentences implementation intentions. They take the form "When X happens, I will do Y." In a 1997 study with Veronika Brandstätter, students were asked to write a report on how they spent Christmas Eve within two days of it. Of the students who wrote down exactly when and where they would write it, 71% did it on time (12 of 17). Of those who only intended to, 32% did (6 of 19).

In 2006, Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran pooled 94 tests with more than 8,000 people and found a medium to large effect on reaching goals (d = 0.65) compared with plain intentions. Write yours on a sticky note before you finish today. "When I sit down at 9:15, I will open the budget sheet and fix row one."

How to get motivated to work on a project

Long projects stall because the finish line is weeks away and nothing on a normal Tuesday feels like progress. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer of Harvard Business School collected daily diaries from 238 people in 26 project teams, covering about 12,000 workdays, for their 2011 book The Progress Principle. The single event most linked to a good workday was making headway on meaningful work, even a small step. Setbacks hit people harder than progress lifted them.

Break the project into pieces you can finish in one sitting, and keep a list of what you got done each day. On the days you feel stuck, that list is proof the project is moving.

How to get motivated when tired

Move first. In a 2008 University of Georgia study led by Tim Puetz and Patrick O'Connor, 36 sedentary adults who reported constant tiredness rode exercise bikes for 20 minutes, three times a week, for six weeks. Both exercise groups reported 20% more energy than the group that didn't ride. Fatigue fell 65% in the low-intensity group, more than in the group that pushed harder. At Stanford in 2014, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz found that people walking scored an average of 60% higher on creative thinking tests than people sitting, even on a treadmill facing a blank wall.

Get bright light. Karin Smolders at Eindhoven University of Technology exposed people to 1,000 lux or 200 lux of light and had others wear light meters through their normal days. More light was linked to feeling more energetic, and the feeling of alertness came almost immediately. Sit near a window or switch on the overhead light before you start.

Take short breaks on purpose. Atsunori Ariga and Alejandro Lleras at the University of Illinois gave 84 people a dull 50-minute task in 2011. Most groups got steadily worse at it. The group that switched away twice for a moment showed no drop at all.

One spray before you open the laptop

Every tactic above has the same weak point. Something has to mark the moment you stop drifting and start. A cue you repeat in the same place, at the same time, turns into the "when" of your implementation intention. We use Dragon Breath.

It's a mouth spray made from chilcuague (Heliopsis longipes), a golden root from Central Mexico, wild-harvested from growth zones the Mara team selects with the help of local elders. You sit down, spray once, and within about ten seconds a bright electric buzz spreads across your tongue and mouth. Your mouth floods with saliva. The taste is earthy and a little peppery for a second, then the tingle takes over, and a clean feeling lingers after it fades. It is hard to keep scrolling your phone while that is happening, and by the time it settles you are looking at the task with your hands on the keyboard.

The buzz comes from affinin (also called spilanthol), which measures 6.9 to 8.5 mg per gram of chilcuague root. Mexican ethnobotanists (Cilia-López and colleagues) recorded families chewing the root and cooking with it as a spice. If you want the full background, read our guide to chilcuague, the Mexican root behind the tingle.

Dragon Breath – Chilcuague Extract

50 ml mouth spray. Wild-harvested chilcuague root, dual-extracted. 250+ sprays.

Add to bag

One customer, filmed moments after a first spray, put it in two words: "Definitely energized." Use it at the desk before the hard task, before a call you've been avoiding, or when you come back from lunch and the afternoon list is still untouched. Pair it with your sentence. "When I sit down, I spray once and open the file."

A spray suits this better than anything you have to prepare. The bottle lives in your pocket or the desk drawer, one spray is all it takes, and each 50 ml bottle holds more than 250 sprays. The extract is dual-extracted in organic solutions and stays sealed in Miron violet glass, which keeps air and light off the extract and adds to how long it keeps its quality. Loose root and powder sit open to both.

Dragon Breath considerations

Our recommendation, word for word from the product page. If you're pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or allergic to plants in the daisy family, ask your doctor before using it.

Questions people ask

How do I get motivated to do anything when I don't care about the task?

Lower the bar for starting and tie it to a set time and place, the way Gollwitzer's implementation intentions work. Interest often follows the first few minutes of action, and Zeigarnik's 1927 work showed an unfinished task stays on your mind.

Should I wait until I feel motivated to start working?

No. In Amabile's diary research, good workdays followed progress, so the feeling tends to come after you've moved the work forward.

How long should I work before taking a break?

There's no fixed number. In the 2011 Illinois study, people doing a 50-minute task held their performance when they switched away twice for a moment, while those who never broke off declined.

How many sprays of Dragon Breath should I use before work?

Start with one spray. Once you know the feeling, you can go up to five.