“Pop psychology” articles on motivation appear all the time and seem a dime-a-dozen to me. Often they’re pretty simple and straightforward, which seems like a good thing right? Making “motivation” as a concept as accessible as possible to as many people as possible seems like it would be helpful. These types of articles tend to focus on specific and behaviorally-focused things a reader can do to maintain or increase motivation for certain tasks or work that has become “boring” and a lot of articles focused on procrastination (my favorite “enemy” – ha!).
In making the conversation around motivation accessible though, these types of articles always leave me feeling disappointed because, although simple behavior modification techniques can be helpful, the rest of the beautiful cognitive and emotional concepts involved in motivation are glossed over at best, ignored completely at worst. For example, how much more helpful might it be to provide at least a context for behavior modifications ideas to help interested readers make sense of achievement vs. performance motivation, extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivations, Maslow’s hierarchy (when you really want to get nerdy!) etc.
I think being able to explain a bit more about how and why certain techniques work might be helpful if not at least a little more interesting. No, I’m not advocating for dissertations on this topic every time out and I realize web content is meant to be bite-sized and digestible in a way the generates article and site hits sometimes.
In my very humble opinion anyway….
Would love to hear what you think!
Psych@Work 