Boosting Personal Productivity - How to Stay Motivated on Long Distances

Long-Term Motivation System to Ensure High Productivity in 2025

Have you ever wondered what motivates you at work? While for some people money is the driving force that keeps them moving forward, for others the opportunity to see progress and recognition is the most powerful motivator. However, even self motivated people have moments when they desperately need extra motivation to stay on track. Unrealistic expectations, multiple distractions and outright poor leadership competence are the most important factors putting business motivation at risk in 2025.

Recent Gallup research shows that 80% of employees around the globe are still not fully engaged in their work. In most cases, workers lose motivation to work because they lack meaning (or rather understanding) of what they are doing. However, lack of motivation has little to do with laziness. It's more likely to be due to unclear goals, a toxic office environment or even trivial fatigue because of not taking time off for long periods. To be motivated and ensure high productivity, you first need to dig deeper into things like self-motivation and why it can go out.

What is Motivation?

Overlooked by many managers and business owners, employee motivation has a direct impact on productivity. However, it is the force that keeps you moving towards your goals. That is, motivation fuels you at every turn and essentially determines whether you can achieve what you want or fail.

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Usually, motivation is divided into two types: intrinsic and extrinsic. Driven by personal pleasure from your activities, intrinsic motivation is tied specifically to you. As for extrinsic, it depends on punishments and rewards from superiors. Learning and performance depend largely on how well you are able to balance these two types of motivation.

Intrinsic Motivation vs. Extrinsic Motivation

Also known as self motivation, intrinsic motivation is about moving forward for your own sake, such as when you want to learn a new skill, finish a project sooner, or just get better at something. As for extrinsic motivation, it's all about bonuses, salary increments, deadlines and praise or reprimand. A Cho and Perry study found that intrinsic motivation has a 300% greater impact on employees than extrinsic one.

Having a fairly strong - but less lasting - effect, extrinsic motivation can provide a motivational boost. However, a downturn follows if the leader doesn't use other ways to increase engagement. So, if you want to know how to be motivated in the long term, you need to change your mindset from ‘I want a bonus or a raise’ to ‘I want to deliver a project that can put the company at the top of the market’. This mindset shifts your brain from craving quick endorphins to deeper work.

Reasons Why Motivation Falls Away

Not appearing out of nowhere, the state of ‘no motivation to work’ can be explained by the following factors:

• You have not been given clear and understandable project goals. If you don't realise what you're doing and why, your brain will start to give up literally at any difficulty along the way.
• Overload. Engagement and motivation drop if you're doing too many tasks at once.
• Lack of (visible or real) progress. Unfortunately, if you don't see intermediate results, work motivation decreases dramatically.
• Unfavourable working environment. Business motivation can go down the drain if your employees are subjected to harsh criticism and suffer from strict micromanagement where the supervisor checks literally every step.

Unfortunately, the above factors underestimate the potential of many workers. However, by realising that you control far more than you think you do, you can bypass many of them.

Steps for Building a Clear Motivation System

If you think that just the ability to give inspirational speeches makes you a successful leader, motivating your subordinates to work effectively, you are mistaken. You need a system based on the following principles:

• Find an answer to the question of what motivates you at work. Take a piece of paper and write things down, such as career development or simply the satisfaction of results, to keep it always in front of your eyes.
• Know how to break down goals into small steps. As practice shows, it is often the big tasks that cause a lack of motivation and lead to burnout.
• Tracking progress. Ideally, keep a diary or use a task tracker to see the results of each step you take forward.
• Dilute your work routine with rituals. For example, you can set your brain to work by drinking a cup of coffee before work or listening to your favourite music.
• Clean up your work environment. Try to stay away from toxic co-workers and remove things like social media that distract you from your work.
• Know how to schedule work and rest. Working long hours without breaks, even a self motivated person burns out pretty quickly. Take a 10-minute break after every hour and a half to two hours of work to stay motivated.

According to James Clear, it will take you 66 days to make a new behaviour stick. That means you'll be building a motivational system for over two months to form a lasting habit of productivity in the workplace.

Overcoming Barriers

Intrinsic motivation can be affected by many things. But most commonly, you will be challenged by the following factors:

• Procrastination. Seeing a difficult task ahead, you hesitate to embark on it because you experience fear from the unknown. The best thing to do in this case is to break the task into micro-steps.
• Overload. If there are too many tasks, prioritise them, i.e, select tasks that cannot be put off for long and do them first. Delegate the rest or postpone them until you have more free time.
• A sense of routine. If it feels like you're bored with everything, add novelty by using a new approach to a routine task or even changing your workplace.

So, how to motivate yourself to study or work? Just start with small victories that can lead to really big results.

Fuelling Motivation for Productivity and Learning

Since the outcomes (i.e., when you'll be able to put what you've learnt into practice) seem distant, studying often feels boring, and the motivation for it is lost on many people. However, as skills can become irrelevant in just a couple of years in today's reality (especially due to or thanks to the introduction of AI taking jobs by the thousands), learning has become a necessity. There are a few things that can serve as motivational boosters for you if you want to learn a new skill:

• Tie your learning to a specific goal. For example, you are learning Python or JS to launch your IT startup.
• Juggle formats for variety. For example, alternate between articles, video tutorials and hands-on activities to get rid of the monotony that is the enemy of motivation.
• Create a reward system. Make yourself a coffee at the end of a lesson or watch humorous videos for 15 minutes to fuel your motivation to learn.
• Explore new things with others. With the ability to add social drive, groups and forums increase your motivation to learn and acquire new skills.

Although studying is an investment in your own brain, not all people stay motivated till the end of the learning process. Therefore, it is necessary to constantly feed your motivation and thus be one step ahead of others.

Motivation vs. Apathy

How Energy and Motivation Are Related

As the tasks assigned to employees become more challenging year after year, many people feel sluggish due to fatigue and lack of energy. To avoid feeling frustrated that you haven't done enough due to fatigue (and stay motivated), follow the simple tips below:

• Improve the quality of your sleep. You should get at least 7-8 hours of rest at night to maintain and even increase your cognitive clarity, which is good for your productivity.
• Eat right. Fill your diet with protein and complex carbohydrates instead of fast food to give your brain the nutrients it needs to perform at its best.
• Get some fresh air and exercise. For example, just 20 minutes of walking or yoga can reduce stress and give you a boost of motivation.
• Consider your biorhythm. So, if you are a lark, do the most difficult things in the morning when your brain works best.

Finally, don't forget to pause to recharge. For example, you can allocate 5-10 minutes for breathing exercises or just looking out the window after every 1-1.5 hours of concentrated work.

How the Type of Work Affects Motivation

According to over 75% of hybrid workers in the US, the ability to find the perfect work-life balance is the best feature of this format. However, this feeling is much stronger among fully remote workers. That is, the type of work - remote, office or hybrid - greatly affects your motivation and productivity, respectively.

Although working fully remotely gives you freedom, without proper self-discipline, you risk losing balance, failing deadlines and losing motivation. To stay focused, you must create a work zone for yourself and set a rigid schedule.

While the office ignites through socialising, noise and tight management control can lead to burnout in the workplace. However, you can keep motivated by negotiating quiet hours and by eliminating distractions.

 You can consider a hybrid approach as a golden mean when you need to visit the physical office occasionally. However, here you need to build clear rituals: deep work at home and meetings at the office. While the hybrid format will work for most, consider your personality. For example, if live interaction with your colleagues motivates you the most, favour the physical office to ensure the highest productivity.

Bottom Line

To build long-term motivation rather than short-term extrinsic ones driven by fleeting perks, you need to set clear goals, monitor progress regularly and add self-reward and self-compassion to keep you on track. Although routine, multitasking and unfavourable work environments will pull you back, self-motivation will come to your rescue if you develop it gradually and purposefully. By staying motivated not just to tick boxes, but to create out-of-the-box results, you will become someone who builds your future rather than just floating along.

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