Regaining Your Focus and Motivation on a Bad Day
Restoring Focus and motivation, Making the Best of Tough Day, and Setting Yourself Up For Success
Photo courtesy of Narona Publishing.
What do you do when you’re struggling to focus and start finding yourself spiraling into an(other) unproductive day? Despite your best efforts to double down and get things done, you soon find yourself scrolling social media, jumping from task to task, and dozing off. You just can’t muster up the focus and motivation to do what you should do today.
Every once in a while, it’s common to have a bad day where you just struggle to be productive. This might happen at work, in your studies, in a creative endeavor, or anything else. While it’s good to develop the discipline to power through, willpower is a limited resource. So, when powering through doesn’t cut it, we can get creative and figure out ways to regain our focus and motivation.
Maintaining focus and motivation has been a struggle for me in my life more often than I care to admit. I’ve often found myself trying to power through workdays and failing to make meaningful progress. While my capacity to focus is a skill I’m continuing to refine and strengthen, I have found several impactful strategies on how to stay focused and motivated during difficult days. Let’s dive into actions that you can take to get your focus back, how you can salvage a bad day, and finally, what steps you can take to prevent future bad days.
Strategies to Get Your Focus and Motivation Back
Some days, it’s just a matter of a simple shift that can make all the difference in restoring your focus and motivation. The next time you find yourself with an unusually short attention span, try one of these quick fixes.
Go On a Walk
If you’re struggling to be productive, take a break and go for a walk. This can help for several reasons. You get outside and spend time in nature, which will help you relax and disconnect for a bit. Walking also gets your body moving, which has many benefits in and of itself. It sparks your creativity, boosts your mood, and allows your brain to solve problems in the background. As a general rule, walks are a good default to help with most problems.
Get Dressed Up – But with a Twist
Sometimes we’re just not feeling very good about ourselves – and that can end up impacting how well we can focus or complete certain tasks. Most of us have already heard this advice, but taking the time to get dressed up can change how we feel.
However, I recommend taking it a step further. Try to get creative with the process. Pair items in your wardrobe you’ve never paired before and create a new outfit. Go for a look that you typically don’t try. It’s this small act of creativity and discovery that can sometimes completely shift your mindset.
Try creating a wispy, romantic look with a flowy dress and flowers in your hair. Maybe experiment with an edgy look with intense eye makeup and an all-black outfit. Reimagine how you can style clothing if you were in a different era. Maybe pair your pink sweater with a scrunchy and statement earrings to recreate an 80’s look. It sounds a little bizarre, but transforming how you look can put you into a different frame of mind. You can then channel that newfound energy into your work. This tactic has helped me personally get out of a funk several times.
Exercise
If you’re feeling sluggish, unable to focus, or just downright unmotivated, then do some high-intensity exercise. It doesn’t matter how short. If you can go out for a run and get some fresh air, great. If you can change into workout clothes and do a twenty-minute HIIT session on YouTube, perfect. Maybe all you can do is a 10-minute stretching session. Get up and move your body to help you find a renewed sense of energy and focus. Sometimes all it takes is the feeling of your muscles activating to change your day.
Change Your Workspace
Our work or study environment can have a major impact on our ability to focus or problem-solve. If you find that you’re having a rough time, try changing your scenery. I find that coffee shops offer the perfect change of scenery to get me through a slump, increase my focus, or boost my creativity.
Finding places with good lighting and an uplifting atmosphere can inspire you and help you channel your focus. But coffee shops aren’t the only option. Go to your local library. Set up a space in a park. Move to a different seating area in your office building.
I find this practice to be so effective that I build it into my schedule regularly. Working from a coffee shop regularly offers change while still helping me maintain structure and routines. Because I typically walk or bike to my local coffee shop, I also get the added benefit of exercising outdoors.
Salvaging a Bad Day When You Can’t Regain Your Focus and Motivation
Some days, we may simply have to accept that we’re not going to be able to get our focus and motivation back no matter what steps we take. On those days, it’s time to go with Plan B: Salvage what’s left of a tough day. Don’t start beating yourself up since it’ll only make things worse. Instead, focus on what you can do and make the best of it.
Break it Down and Create Mini-Wins
When you start struggling with focus and motivation, the task at hand can begin to feel overwhelming. So, find ways to break down your project into more manageable tasks. You can usually break something down into sections, time increments, or even task types.
For example, if you’re working on an essay, instead of thinking “I need to sit and write this 6-page essay right now,” reframe the task. Break it down to the smallest component. Say, “For the next 15 minutes, I’ll write paragraph two of this essay. I’ll just write and won’t do any editing. Then I’ll take a break”.
There are multiple benefits here: 1) You focus on one section instead of 6 pages, 2) You only need to focus for 10 minutes instead of hours, and 3) You’ve limited your task to one task type: Writing. Not writing and editing and researching. This way your brain can focus on one type of activity and doesn’t have to continue switching modes.
Whenever you’re struggling, just keep setting mini-finish lines that you know you can complete. This will be more effective than trying to drag yourself through one long marathon. Even if it seems embarrassingly small, give yourself a little task that you can accomplish. Celebrate each little win. If you don’t think you can focus for 25 minutes, then do it for 15, or five minutes. You’ll start to build a sense of accomplishment with each win, and your ability to handle harder tasks will grow.
Change Your Definition of Success for Today
Especially if you’ve been struggling with a string of bad days and find yourself in a rut, one counterintuitive practice that can help you get back on track is redefining success. What you might call a failure on most days, call it a success today. Move the finish line to meet you where you’re at today, not where you would like to be. This can be hard to do, but sometimes to build ourselves back up, we need to release our expectations. Maybe that means that you need to be ok with putting in less hours for a brief period. Or reducing the number of tasks for today. Or allowing your project to be less ‘perfect’ than you think it needs to be.
The reason for this is that you need to break the habit of failure – or perceived failure. Work your way back into a habit of success. You want to start creating a habit of following through with what you say you’re going to do, so that you can rebuild your discipline again. In the meantime, you’ll break the negative feedback loop of failure.
Changing the finish line and celebrating the small successes will create a new feedback loop. And when you start feeling good about your success, you’ll feel more energized to continue your work. Eventually, you’ll start hitting your previous success mark again – and even surpass it.
Pivot
Another strategy for dealing with an unproductive day is to simply pivot the work you’re doing. Some days, it’s better to accept that you’re not going to be effective no matter how much you struggle. This is especially true when we’re doing work that requires significant mental energy – such as problem-solving, planning, or any form of creative work. So, instead of grinding for hours and getting nothing done, pivot your work. Consider if there are other tasks that you can do that will be manageable in your current state.
For example, I try to start most of my days with writing. But on rare occasions, I’m simply not in the headspace to write. On these days, I’ll pivot to other business tasks like researching, designing graphics, or simple administrative tasks. By pivoting, I can still be productive, even when I hit a slump, or the day doesn’t go as planned.
Preventing Future Bad Days
Just as important as knowing how to work through a bad day is preventing them in the first place. That way you don’t have to spend as much of your energy trying to recover your focus and motivation. Here are some strategies to start setting yourself up for success from the get-go. That way, you can start having more good days than bad.
Know Your Triggers
When we have bad days, there’s often triggers that send us into that spiral in the first place. If you find that bad days become a pattern, figure out what’s causing them and take steps to prevent it.
Maybe scrolling social media first thing in the morning leaves you feeling frazzled and unable to focus by mid-morning. If so, create a morning routine where you don’t use your phone for the first 30 minutes. Maybe you’ve noticed that certain conversations leave you stressed and unable to focus for the rest of the day. Try scheduling those conversations for the evening instead so you can start your workday in a positive state.
Whenever you can, put guardrails around things that you know impact you. One great way to do this is by setting up a strong morning routine where you do things you love. This will create a positive mindset so you can start your days energized and maintain your focus and motivation throughout the day.
Get Clarity on What You Need to Do
In an AOM podcast episode called The Feel-Good Method of Productivity, Ali Abdaal shares that a common cause of procrastination is a lack of clarity. When we don’t know exactly what we need to do, and when we need to do it, we lose energy trying to figure it out instead of actually making meaningful progress. You may start your days with the best intentions but find your energy depleted as you jump around to random tasks without focus. So instead, make sure you have a clear idea about your goal. Then, break it down into small and actionable tasks, and set a time for each of them. By removing the decision fatigue around what to do, you’ll solve a good portion of your focus problems. You will be much more effective, and you’ll find you don’t have to recover from ‘bad days’ nearly as often.
Prop Up Other Areas of Your Life
If you find that you’re consistently struggling with one area of your life, one counterintuitive approach to improving is by focusing on other areas of your life. Sometimes, when you put too much pressure on a weaker area of your life and focus on what’s not working, you end up exacerbating the problem. But if you spread that pressure out across other areas of your life, then you indirectly strengthen the area you’re struggling with as well. The other ‘pillars’ in your life help bear the load.
Think about it this way. Let’s say that you have weak wrists but need to do planks and pushups every day. Because these exercises put a lot of pressure on your wrist, you start to experience a lot of pain in your wrist. Outside of giving up completely, you have two options. You can continue to apply the same pressure on your wrists and just deal with the pain. However, you risk over-exerting your wrists, and may even injure them.
The other option is to actively disperse the weight through your fingers and allow them to offload some of the direct pressure from your wrists. Not only will you find that you experience less pain, but your wrists will grow stronger over time as you continue to exercise.
This is the same for when we continually struggle with an area of our life – such as fulfillment at work, focusing on our studies, or making progress in a new skill. We can double down and risk burning out, or disperse the weight onto other pillars of our lives. While you continue to slowly build up your focus and improve your ability to work, make sure you’re building other areas of your life.
Stay active, invest your time in your relationships, develop your hobbies, and spend time outdoors. By exercising discipline and growing in these other areas, the benefits will carry over. Additionally, when you flourish in other dimensions of your life, you develop a positive mindset which will help you to approach your work with more resilience.
Resilience on Tough Days
In order to get things done and become effective in life, we must develop the capacity for resilience. One way we can do this is by becoming resourceful in the face of setbacks. If you find that you regularly struggle with focus, this is a skill you will need to work on developing over time.
In the meantime, these strategies can help you get back on track and help you restore your focus and motivation on those tougher days. As with most things, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. You’ll have to determine what is possible in your current situation and experiment to find what works for you. If some days you don’t succeed, don’t beat yourself up. Just brush it off and remember that tomorrow is a new day.