The Motivation Hacker

by Nick Winter

Delay Delay is how far off the reward seems to be. This is often hard to manipulate directly, but sometimes you can set yourself up to perceive Delay differently, thus scoring a big motivation win. • Break Goals Down. Granularize big goals until the next achievement is right in front of you. Subgoals and sub-subgoals defeat Delay. This is what Beeminder does automatically: you get a target for each day. • Plan Fallaciously. This isn’t so much a technique as a phenomenon, and its effects on motivation aren’t backed up by any research, either—just my experience with my startup and marathon training. The planning fallacy automatically gives you more courage to start by underestimating the time and effort required to achieve many unknown, hard goals. I think this is a good thing, as long as your goals are input-based and not output-based.