Pressure motivates productivity

I need pressure to be motivated, I’m hypothesizing we all do. I’m fantastically productive when I’m under pressure. I might even say it’s mandatory, or a prerequisite to entering the zone. But being under too much or too little pressure – productivity is stifled. There is a sweet spot of course, but the hard part is finding it, and then holding it.

The source of life’s pressure

Allow me to set the stage by elaborating on the source and conditions of being under pressure in life. As Bill Nye would say, “consider the following.”

As a side note, I sometimes imagine what it’d be like if everything I did was accompanied by sound effects like on Bill Nye’s show.

Scenario #1: When life gets tough, I’m more apt to keep up and stay productive. Much like putting your thumb over the end of a yard hose, increasing the pressure makes it easier to spray bird crap off the roof of your car. But when life gets too tough, we risk falling apart. Continuing the analogy, it’s the equivalent to pressing our thumb all the way down on the hose nozzle, spraying water everywhere in a useless manner.

Scenario #2: When life is good, and if I don’t have anything to look forward to, it’s easier for me to get behind and let my productivity stagnate. This is the negative effect of being on Easy Street, and under too little pressure. If allowed to continue, boredom creeps in, and soon I’m infected with complacency. Knowing the looks of it from personal experience, I’m honestly more on guard when I’m not feeling any sense of pressure from life than when I’m under too much.

Weakness: internal pressure

Internal pressure is inherently weak because we must have self-control and self-discipline to harness it. Contrasted to the pressure from external sources (namely: authority), I feel more motivated by them than I do by my own self-imposed deadlines or constraints. From what I’ve gathered, this is normal. Though internal pressure is not a strong force until we’ve nurtured it, so I’ve acknowledged it as a weakness.

Strength: external pressure

Meet our friend external pressure. Hiya! It comes in the form of authority, which we’ve been under in one way or another since we’ve been born. But external pressure is inconsistent, and so we can’t rely on it. My mom & dad, a great source of motivation and pressure in my youth, frequently told me,

“I’m not going to be there with you when you…” (insert job)

…or something to that effect. Warning that I shouldn’t rely on their presence as motivation to do the right thing. And it’s true, your boss or landlord isn’t going to be as forgiving with deadlines. We can’t rely on the pressure of others to motivate us. So the best kind of pressure must come from within ourselves. Now that I’ve isolated the right kind of pressure, I can consider how to generate the same feeling of external pressure, but from within myself.

Self-control, self-discipline & motivation

The focus shifts to our self-control and self-discipline, the generator of internal pressure. These virtues are important. With them, we can generate and rely on our own internal pressure instead of relying on inconsistent external pressure. Increasing motivation from internal pressure is an ongoing process. It doesn’t happen over night. It builds gradually, and that’s normal.

Threat levels & authority

I want to illustrate another point about motivating productivity. I’d rather fail myself before failing someone in authority. This is a good thing, because in a professional setting my authorities priorities are more important than my own. The drawbacks to letting them down out weight failing myself. After all, It’s easier for me to forgive myself than regain the trust and forgiveness of someone in authority. The general possibility of failure is threatening, and more so from failing authority than myself. Although I’d like to have the threat levels evenly matched. Respecting my own goals, and the goals of my authority. Here’s why…

Figure 1 shows the perceived threat level based on the source of the pressure. External pressure from authority is capable of producing the optimal threat level, thus it’s capable of generating the most motivation to be productive. Internal pressure, generated from within myself, doesn’t quite reach the 100% threat threshold, and therefore, it’s incapable of producing as much motivating pressure as external pressure. These are important to note, because they create boundaries to my productivity.

Figure 2 shows the optimal level of productivity motivated by external pressure, compared to the maximum level of productivity motivated by internal pressure. This shows that internal pressure can produce a maximum productivity that is less than optimal. And thus, the limited affect of internal pressure is revealed.

Conclusions

Since external pressure is inconsistent and unreliable, we should learn to harness and increase our dependency on internal pressure. It’s always better to motivate yourself with internal pressure because it’s under your control. But that takes: self-discipline, self-control, and a consistent source of motivation to drive you.

The key to the correlation between productivity and pressure is being motivated by authority and motivating yourself. It’s easier to be motivated by external pressure, but better to be motivated by internal pressure.

That’s all folks. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here!