Shankar: Set Week-Long Goals to Minimize Predictable Mid-Project Motivation Slumps
Maya Shankar · Maya Shankar: The Toolkit to Accomplish Your Hardest Goals · Jul 9, 2024 · at 42:02
Cognitive scientist Maya Shankar shares behavioral strategies for sustaining motivation over long-term goals.
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“So what Ayelet recommends is to actually just make the middle periods of time as short as physically possible. So rather than setting a year long goal, which we might feel an instinct to do because we want to set a really ambitious goal. And so we're like, let's make it a year long goal because then I can really achieve the best version of this thing that I have my sights set on. Instead, You set week-long goals. So that way the middle period is not a multi-month period. It's actually just a few days in the middle of the week, right? And you can get away with a day or two of not working very hard, right? And then climbing your way back out on say that final day of low motivation. And so I really like this idea of trying to, from a temporal perspective, kind of like bound your motivational cycles so that you can experience this dip in a more constrained space.”
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