A Model of Motivation

I have recently started working a new job. The major difference between this one and the last one is that it is no longer fully remote; I now have an office with colleagues in it within commuting distance from my home.

One of the primary motivations for making this change was to combat my executive dysfunction and the anxiety that goes along with it. When I was working fully remote, I found that my attention was almost impossible to direct; with no one to observe me, there was nothing to keep me at my desk when I couldn't find the motivation to work. The hope was, that by moving into an office environment, I would be able to focus better on my work.

However, I am finding instead that I am only minorly less dysfunctional but, rather than being able to dysfunction unobserved, I am forced to dysfunction in the panopticon that is the office environment. Experiencing dysfunction in this context is new to me, and is often completely overwhelming, causing severe anxiety and accute distress. Fortunately, I am able to work from home when I chose - I am now experimenting with finding the compromise between these two extremes that works for me.

Anyone who struggles with executive dysfunction and who has worked in an environment that requires you to primarily self-motivate and self-manage will know the feeling of the cycle of anxious procrastination and panicked last minute work that ensues. However, this pattern is not consistent: at particular times, in particular circumstances, some tasks are wonderfully easy to do.

It is this inconsistency that makes executive dysfunction so horrendous to experience; sometimes the motivation to complete tasks flows freely for days or even weeks and you start to doubt that you ever struggled with motivating yourself to do anything at all.

As someone with an engineering-orientated education, I have always been taught to understand the world by making models. This is a description of my current leading model for how to work out how motivated I will be to complete a particular task. Maybe it will help others describe it too.

For each task, I assign values along two scales: "Required Engagement," and "Interest."

The required engagement for a particular task is an intrinsic property of the task/type of task. Examples on a 1-5 scale are as follows (the exact size of the scale is unimportant).

1. Little to no engagement necessary to perform the task, e.g. breathing, sleeping, sitting down.
2. Low engagement required, e.g. making a cup of tea, walking to the next room
3. Medium engagement required, e.g. driving on an empty road that you know very well
4. High engagement required, e.g. driving in rush-hour traffic, writing a blog post
5. Maximum engagement required, e.g. performing surgery

The interest level of a task is similary graded, but it is entirely personal to the performer of the task. Furthermore, it is dependent on any number of contextual factors, such as how tired you are, how distracted by other tasks that you would rather be doing, etc.

The upshot of this is that you can plot any given task on a graph: required engagement on the x-axis and interest level on the y-axis. Finally, you can draw a boundary on the graph that divides "easy" and "hard" tasks (in terms of motivation). Different people will have a different gradient for their boundary or even a completely different shape. I call this boundary the "motivation boundary."

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People with more severe executive dysfunction would have a steeper gradient for their boundary - even low engagement tasks require a relatively high level of interest to become easy. People with less severe executive dysfunction would have a shallower one - being able to do even high engagement tasks without any huge amount of interest.

Tasks above this boundary are easy to do - for the lowest engagement tasks, even a very low interest level will do; for the highest engagement tasks, a very high level of interest is required before the task becomes easy to do.

The interest scale wraps up all contextual factors, including things used in other models for task motivation like perceived risk/reward of doing/not doing the task. This means it also includes things like "proximity to deadlines" - as such, the interest in a task will change over time. The "engagement" scale does not vary with time; the only way to move the task over the boundary is to change your relation to it.

To illustrate is more clearly, I have arranged the tasks that I needed to do today according to the two scales and plotted them out.

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I find that my sense of self-worth is very strongly tied to how well I perform tasks that I feel obliged to perform. For a lot of tasks, that perceived obligation comes from within myself. For others, they come from an external source such my employer and, by extension, economic pressures. These are the tasks that are often the hardest to deal with, from an executive dysfunction perspective.

An interesting point is that different forms of employment come with different distributions of tasks in terms of the engagement scale. Many (but importantly not all) menial tasks fall near the lower end of the scale, so are doable even when experiencing low-mood and depression. As the work becomes more complicated, the tasks become more frequently those that require high levels of engagement.

In this way, my model explains in very broad terms why executive dysfunction can be more or less problematic for different people in different situations. Someone with a very steep motivation boundary may suddenly find themselves in a situation in which the tasks they feel obliged to do are less interesting than previously, crossing that boundary more often from easy to hard. This person now starts to visibly struggle to perform what is required of them where they may never have struggled before - to an outside observer, this person has "suddenly" developed the symptoms of executive dysfunction, seemingly out of nowhere. In actual fact, that person has always had that steep motivation boundary but it is only recently that the tasks required of them have moved over it.

This is a deliberately simple way of looking at what is a deeply complicated issue. However, it is often helpful to have a picture to paint in your mind - maybe this helps you make sense of it like it helps me.