Teresa Amabile's research shows progress on meaningful work is the strongest daily motivator. Most people get little external feedback on their advancement, so you need to create your own. Spend 60 seconds at day's end writing three specific accomplishments to see your forward movement.
What motivates us at work? It's a bunch of things, but at a day-to-day level, it turns out there's a very specific source of motivation. Teresa Amabile at Harvard Business School has done some remarkable research where she discovered that the single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is this: making progress in meaningful work. To make progress, to know whether you're making progress, you can't wait for someone else to deliver you that information. Then you gotta go out and do it yourself. And the best way to do that is to establish a progress ritual. It's really simple. At the end of every day, take literally 60 seconds to reflect and memorialize your progress. It could be something as simple as opening up a file on your computer and every day writing down 3 things that you accomplished. The key point here is this: we know day to day, the single biggest motivator is making progress. The world is not going to give you information on your progress, so you have to do it yourself. The most effective way to do that is with a progress ritual.
