In the aftermath of my recent move, I’ve been thinking a lot about motivation. I’ve written before on how to deal with a lack of motivation. It’s also something that is a constant issue for many people, myself included.

What is it that motivates us to do a task or start a project that we’re not all that enthusiastic about? We may be wholeheartedly in favor of the goal that is to be achieved, like organizing my new place, but it’s still a terrific struggle to get moving toward this goal. Those first little steps can be so difficult for some that they are literally never taken.

I’ve found this to be a factor in many areas of my life. While I can find the energy to get up and go to work every day, take care of my family, and take out the garbage, etc, getting beyond the basics almost takes an act of God. Why is it so hard to find time to put away boxes from the move, go to the gym, practice guitar, or write a few pages of a novel?

Thinking back on the last couple of months, the most progress we made in clearing out the boxes and organizing our home was when we had guests coming over to celebrate my daughter’s birthday. We worked our butts off for hours because we wanted to make a good impression on my wife’s parents. This is despite the fact that they are easy-going people who are not at all judgmental.

Regardless, we were able to make some great improvements in the time before our guests arrived. This underscores the importance of having some sort of outside influence as a motivator towards those projects that we’re having trouble starting. With this in mind, I have a few thoughts that may be helpful in kick-starting stalled progress towards our worthy, but rusty goals:

1. Find a motivator outside yourself. Whether it’s inviting guests over to impose a hard deadline on cleaning your apartment, or taking a creative writing class with weekly homework, sometimes it’s necessary to have someone hold you responsible for meeting your goals. Invite friends over to your place, then, or take a class in writing or guitar playing or pilates where there will be someone expecting you to deliver something tangible on a regular basis.

2. Multitask the simple stuff. If you have a box of papers sitting in the corner of your living room that needs to be sorted or shredded, grab a beer, pull up the box, and turn on that Breaking Bad or Californication that you’ve been waiting to watch on the DVR. OK, ladies, you’re allowed to watch Dancing with the Stars. While you’re watching, sort a few papers, you can shred during the commercials instead of fast-forwarding.

3. Focus on the built-in rewards. Having a clean, well-organized place makes you feel good. I don’t think anyone really likes living in a cluttered space. Similarly, it also feels good to work out, to burn away all the stresses that have been building up like clutter in your soul. This isn’t always the best motivator, obviously, because even though we know these things, we don’t always get started. This leads us to another step:

4. Make it fun. If you’re having trouble going to the gym, then it’s probably not fun enough for you to even want to begin. The answer to this is to mix it up. Do something different that will stimulate your motivation and build some excitement and interest. The treadmill is boring? Then join a hiking group or Krav Maga (brutal, but effective Israeli martial art) class. If the story you’ve been working on no longer gets your juices flowing, try writing about something completely different, a topic that you’ve never explored before.

5. Get a partner. I’m not saying that you should go sign up for e-harmony, but aligning yourself with a friend or family member who also needs a little encouragement toward a common goal can be an enormous benefit. Even if it’s someone from work whom you can trade updates with during lunch once a week, this can be the one thing that motivates you to do something before that next lunch date. Maybe you can talk your spouse or neighbor into trying out rock-climbing and then if you both like it, turn it into a regular exercise thing.

I hope that these ideas will prove useful for you. It’s the result of my reflecting on the issues affecting my own life and my own lack of progress toward certain goals. Living a successful and productive life means filling your days with positive activities that benefit you and the people around you. Feel free to leave a comment and tell me about your own experiences.

At the risk of belaboring the topic of clutter once again, I wanted to revisit my previous posts and expand on some ideas I’ve had since then. I started out talking about the way clutter keeps coming back in Revenge of the Clutter. Then I followed up with an Update on Clearing the Clutter.

Since I wrote that last post, we’ve been busy, busy, busy with work, school, family, and everything else that seems to happen these days. We’ve continued to put away a few things here and there, not always hitting our goal of emptying one box per day, but sometimes exceeding that.

One thing that I’m trying to conquer is that it’s really difficult to sustain that motivation from day to day. After working all day and fighting through 30 miles of traffic each way while answering emails and taking calls on the Blackberry, all I want to do when I get home is kick back and have a cold beer. Unfortunately, I’ll never make any progress on anything other than work if I let myself do that.

While it’s a good thing to be successful in your job, it’s also vitally important to spend time on your home life. Just as a healthy body is key to a healthy mind, a healthy home life is key to a healthy work life. Everything we do is connected in some way.

It’s important to keep motivating yourself in order to keep moving toward the goals you’ve set for yourself. I’m thinking about motivation a lot lately as there are areas in my life I’d like to improve, but I’m finding it hard to get started (like exercise!). I have a few ideas on this that I’m going to put together into a new post in the next few days.

In my last post, I talked about the trials of our recent move and attempts at getting things organized. Unfortunately, we weren’t as successful at clearing away the clutter as we had hoped to be. The family room got some needed attention, but due to a longer than expected trip to the store, we weren’t able to clear out the entire room. A line of boxes remains underneath the counter that is depressing to look at, to say the least!

The good thing is that we did make some noticeable progress. Our new place is definitely more organized than it was a week ago. It also looks a lot better than our last apartment looked a few weeks after moving in. I think we had to weave our way through mountains of stacked boxes and extra furniture for a couple of months. This was because of a merger between my wife’s stuff and my own, but thankfully, that only had to occur once.

This move was a refresher on some important lessons. I’m thinking of a few things that I’ll be posting about shortly. Thanks to those who left comments on my last post. I’ll be back!