Think back on the very first day you started your current job. What were you hoping to achieve? Maybe you wanted to build something helpful, learn as much as possible, or get to work on interesting problems with interesting people.
Now, think about how you’re measuring success on a day-to-day basis. For many people, it might look something like maintaining a clear inbox, tackling every item on their to-do list, being praised for giving a quarterly review presentation.
That gap between what used to get you out of bed and what drives you today is what I call “motivation drift”, and I think it plays a big role in the apparent sudden loss of meaning people experience one day at work.
Motivation drift happens so slowly, it can be hard to notice. It helps to stop and ask what you’re really optimizing for. What would you focus on if nobody was watching? What are you getting good at that you’d rather not keep doing? What are you doing because it’s useful versus because it’s visible?
If the answers make you wince a little, this is a signal you might want to pay attention to.
In the 1990s, psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot mapped this out in what they called the self-concordance model. Our ambitions, they found, sit somewhere on a line. Some grow out of our own interests and values. Others come from pressure or a reward someone has dangled in front of us.
Motivation drift is the slow slide from the first kind of ambition to the second. And it shows up in the brain, too. In one fMRI study, researchers took a task people already enjoyed and started paying them for it. Once money entered the picture, the reward response in the striatum and prefrontal cortex dropped instead of climbing. In effect, the brain “re-prices” the work and it matters a little less on its own terms.
The good news is that self-concordance isn’t fixed, and you can shift your motivation back to ambitions that are truly yours.
Step 1: Notice the drift. Write down the ambitions you’d say out loud if someone asked. Then write down what actually claims your attention in a normal week. The distance between the two is your motivation drift.
Step 2: Ask what each task is for. Go through your recurring work, and ask what it’s supposed to serve and whether it still serves it. Some tasks clearly connect to something you care about. Others turn out to be busywork, or even sometimes completely misaligned – those you can drop if your work allows that kind of flexibility.
Step 3: Reward what matters to you. Since what gets rewarded tends to become what you value, put the rewards on the ambitions you actually believe in. If there’s a project that matters to you, make it visible. If there’s something you’d like to happen, make it fun.
Of course, a clean inbox is useful and fast replies can keep things moving. The trouble starts only when the measure becomes the mission, and you don’t notice the slow drift between what you truly care about and what actually drives you.
Don’t wait until you find yourself in a job you don’t quite remember choosing. Instead, make sure to regularly ask yourself: what am I optimizing for, and is it still how I’m actually spending my time, energy, and attention? This can be a powerful metacognitive practice.
Tiny Experiment of the Week
Ready to put these ideas into practice? Try this week’s tiny experiment:
I will [work on a task I truly care about every day] for [5 days].
This experiment will help you avoid motivation drift by reconnecting to your true ambitions and focusing on the tasks that actually matter to you.
➤ Want to dig deeper? Get your copy of Tiny Experiments.