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Starting something new can feel very motivating or even exciting.
You start with an ideal plan or an idea and a sense of the outcome and you imagine what the finished result would look like and your motivation runs high to make all this happen.
But soon the excitement and enthusiasm or even motivation drops and your drive or progress becomes slower and then problems start appearing. The job or the project is more effort than it’s worth and as you originally imagined and then you start losing interest or even thinking about starting another job or abandoning the whole thing that you started in the first place.
And then you call it off and then you get disappointed because you never finished it as usual. So the question is why does this malarkey happen to you.
One good reason is that by starting the project in the first place this gave you an immediate mental or psychological reward feeling which was part of the ingredients in the drive and motivation to move towards the end result.
Around the middle of the job it’s where most projects die or wane off and you lose interest or in other words the novelty disappears and the satisfaction of the completion which at the start was very close but now it’s even further away.
But now you’re putting in more effort without receiving much of the emotional reward that you made in the very first place around the time that cultivated your imagination to start it.
So instead of allowing the project to develop in less than the perfect way you wanted it, you may start to unconsciously drop the energy and decide that abandoning the whole idea is easier than moving forward and having to deal with the expectation and the reality of your situation. One versus the other on a weighing scale.
Also, according to psychology, fear can also hide underneath procrastination. Because finishing something can mean exposing it to others judgments while a project remains in its unfinished suspended state. You can still imagine that it could have been brilliant, but once it is completed people can actually evaluate it and even rip it to pieces with criticism.
There’s also another supple psychological trap which we sometimes mistake losing our enthusiasm for actually losing interest because they’re not the same.
Interest can remain high even when motivation drops if that makes sense.
So, what’s the answer?
The solution is actually to stop relying on the motivation to carry you through to the entire project’s end point and that you should break the work into smaller manageable stages or even incrementally in your thinking which will make the next step clearer that you don’t have to think about the whole amount or the mammoth task in front of you.
Try not to feel inspired too much every time you work on something new, but better management in smaller parts is the way to proceed.
Specifically pay more attention to the middle area and as you approach this you may need concentrate on them parts longer and put them into more manageable areas to keep your motivation going and also be aware that it’s around the middle area of your project that this sort of thing starts to happen at.
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