不能单靠动机来驱动自己

学会使用执行意图原理高效完成目标

不能单靠动机来驱动自己去学习、完成某件事情。而应该指定“时间、地点、条件”来计划。

这样的完成或许会比较机械，不会有帮助。

比如，计划一个月读完一本书，于是指定计划时平均注明每天读15页。可是总有那么几天，不想读，想看电视，于是在计划完成条件中就可以写上“不想读时，就少读点，允许减少阅读页数，但还是要读的。”

又或许，今天跟朋友约了外出就餐，回家都十点了，你又在读与不读中纠结，那你的条件中就又可以注明“晚上10点以后回家的，可以不阅读，明天阅读页数增加3页”。这里其实更多的是在生活中让自己养成良好的习惯，不要让惰性消耗我们的时间。

长期坚持下去，我相信会看到效果的。

I’m sure you’ve experienced this phenomenon before. It was later in the evening, and something clicked in your head. You might have had a breakdown or you might have had an epiphany. Either way, you had this realization that you need to make some sort of a change in you life. Suddenly you knew what you need to do and you even had the motivation to do it. You realized that you should learn a new tangible skill. You become aware that you need to start exercising more often and you even made the decision that you would stop being late to appointments and that you were going to complete projects on time. But sine it was late and you had to go to bed, you told yourself you were going to start this new journey tomorrow. However, when you woke up the next morning, you didn’t wake up as the new person. You felt like you were the night before. You woke up as the same old you, with no motivation to make the changes you planned to make. And in the following days and weeks, no additional exercise was done. There was no progress in your learning and you still didn’t get things done on time. You have again, fallen back into your set ways and failed to do what you said you were going to do. But don’t worry, you’re not alone in this. People set intentions and fail at them all the time. Just look at New Year’s resolutions. And I’m no exception here. I don’t manage to do everything. I tell myself I’m going to do , either. But I have found the way to substantially increase my odds of following through on my desired behavior. Instead of relying on motivation, which comes and goes, I started applying what psychologists call “implementation intentions”. Also known as “if-then’ plan”.

Normally when we have a goal, we think about it this way.

I WANT TO ACHIEVE X

For example, “I want to exercise 3 times per week”

The implementation intention is just a small adjustment to this. It transforms into:

IF SITUATION Y HAPPENS, THEN I WILL DO X

So for example, ”if it’s 5pm on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday, then I will drive to the gym and work out for 1 hour”

The objective stays exactly the same. The goal is still exercise 3 times per week, but notice how it got a lot more practical. And that is the basic idea behind implementation intentions.

It takes just a few minutes to write down, but it increases your chances of doing what you want to do exponentially. And the reason why it’s so effective id because you take out all the guess work in advance. When we’re not completely sure how to do something or when to do it, we tend to lean towards the easier option which is usually simply not to do it. Let’s say you come home from an exhausting day at work, but you promised yourself you were going to exercise more. Now you have two options: go to the gym or watch some TV shows. Since you didn’t specifically when you were actually going to go to the gym, you tell yourself you’re going to do it tomorrow or some other time when it’s more convenient. Therefore you go for the easier option which is to watch TV. The gym workout gets skipped again and this sort of rationalization is used to postpone behaviors indefinitely. But when you committed it in advance.