Research shows that classic career advice—"find a way to get paid to do what you love"—may be way off the mark. The Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam reports that paychecks and pink slips aren't good long-term motivators:

Beliefs about the utility of rewards and punishments in motivating human behaviour are deeply ingrained, and most people don't know that more than 100 research studies have shown that motivating people in this manner can have the unintentional effect of undermining their internal drives.

Once you replace someone's internal motivation to do something with an external reward or punishment, their inner drive reduces, these studies show. I've turned a hobby into a job and vice versa, and my internal truth-o-meter hit a high note reading this.

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You don't need to plunk down $150 for a Wii Fit to track your progress toward a healthier body—even if that downhill skiing game looks mighty fun. If you're trying to curb unnecessary calories and stick to an exercise plan, there are tons of free applications that want to see you succeed. Whether you're facing a fast-food menu or polishing off a light entree, you can log, track, and make healthy decisions from your desktop, or just as easily from a phone. Take a look at a few suggestions for accomplishing your fitness goals, after the jump. Photo by angela7dreams.

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Windows only: iSnooze provides the same kind of iTunes-as-alarm-clock functionality as the Mac-only Alarm Clock 2, but lets you get a lot more specific about your wake-up parameters. Wake up to a certain playlist on certain days at particular times, have it pause as soon as you touch something on your computer, gradually increase the volume until you finally wake up—it's your best friend or worst enemy, depending on how important it is that you get up and going in the morning. iSnooze is a free download for Windows systems only.

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The Flying Solo blog offers up an interesting idea for letting solo workers tap into some of the social and motivational benefits of group working. Blogger Megan Tough says a fellow freelancer opened up their home to a small group of fellow soloists, for a one-off day of group work. The plan was to allow for solo work time as well as group discussion of a specific work issues facing each participant. She says it more than achieved their stated goals, which were:

1. To work on something that needed to get done. Perhaps we'd been putting it off, or hadn't allocated dedicated time to doing it.

2. To discuss and provide feedback to each other on one issue in our business.

3. The third objective, and ultimately the most important, was to have fun.

They also elected to stay in touch via project management software Basecamp, holding a quarterly online meeting to update the group on their progress.

Interesting idea and a nice reminder that getting together with others can really help give a different perspective on your work and give you a motivational 'push'.

Getting a Motivation Hit [Flying Solo via Tapping Man]

The Zen Habits weblog faces down the long, hard road we all take to break a habit, whether bad or just unproductive, and pulls out 13 reasons why they remain unbroken. Key among the counter-programming tools we have available are motivation, blogger Leo Babauta says, but one tip in particular helps keep your habit-breaking in league with projects and goals:

You have to write down your goal. Write a start date. Write an end date (30 days is a good time frame). Write down exactly what you're going to do. Write down how you're going to be accountable, what your rewards are, what the obstacles are, what your triggers are. More on these below. Main thing: put it on paper and stick to the plan (don't file the plan in your inbox, you piler you!

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The Dumb Little Man blog posts a condensed wealth of tips and tactics for getting yourself up and at 'em, including a tip that might make you reconsider that toast-and-coffee morning routine. Guest-poster Alex Shalman notes that eating a bigger breakfast gives you energy that burns off all day, while a lighter meal at night has its own benefits:

Eating like a pauper, meaning small light meals, in the evening allows us to go to sleep on an empty stomach. If your body is functioning normally, and you don't have stomach ulcers, going to sleep on a mostly empty stomach will allow you to sleep better. This nightly fast allows your body to take its focus away from digestion and put it towards repair and rejuvenation of the body's cells.

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The concept of the runner's high has been around forever, but the New York Times is reporting that, for the first time, scientists have validated the claimed euphoria that follows a run.

Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner's body pumps out, the greater the effect.

Of course, the real runner's high euphoria is more likely to come with more intense, longer workouts, but I can guarantee running a marathon should get you there. If you've been trying to motivate yourself to get out and run more, the idea of chasing that runner's high might help. If you've got firsthand experience with the runner's high, let's hear about it in the comments.

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Productivity guru Merlin Mann grabs a keen idea from an NPR story about weight loss techniques and applies it to the other things he (and most of us) need to mentally push ourselves into doing. The basic concept: Take something you'd normally consider a positive "earning" or "savings," and flip it into a loss you want to avoid. His example:

I wonder if a gym membership might be even more motivating if you received a daily email updating you on the wasted dollars you'd spent by not working out in the last n days.

Which is completely possible with future-mailing services or organisational tools like Sandy . How would you (or have you already) motivate yourself using loss avoidance instead of non-threatening positives? Share your theories and techniques in the comments.

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If your new year's resolutions tend to peter off after a month or so, you need to add "publicity and accountability" to turn them into goals, write Dan and Chip Heath at Fast Company. They say resolutions feel good when we make them, but goals feel good when we achieve them  - giving us an incentive to buckle down and do the work.

They describe the tactic of making and visualising concrete goals as a way to "outsmart your future self" and put yourself in the right frame of mind for putting your plans into action. And they use an interesting example from a psychology study to show how it works:

"The psychologists Peter Gollwitzer and Veronika Brandstätter studied college students who had to write a paper about how they spent Christmas Eve. The catch was that they were supposed to submit the paper by December 26. At this point, the paper is in resolution territory: It feels good to imagine yourself getting a good grade by writing the paper. But, as with January gym memberships, the outcome was not pretty. Only a third of the students got around to submitting a paper.

A second group of students were given the same assignment but were required to note exactly when and where they intended to write the report (i.e., "in my Dad's office on Christmas morning before everyone gets up"). A whopping 75% of these students wrote the report. The act of visualizing yourself in Dad's office, writing your paper, changes the way you respond to that environment when you encounter it. Now when you see Dad's office chair, an association springs to mind: Get to work. You've managed to outsmart your future self."

Reading this made me glad that my resolutions this year had concrete goals (I'm happy to report that I hit my target for January and that feeling of success is very motivating). If you've developed any other strategies or mind hacks for staying on target this year, please share them in comments.

Make goals not resolutions [Fast Company]

We're one month into the new year, and the first day of February seems like a good time to see how our new year's resolutions are proceeding.

If you've been wavering or having a hard time sticking to your resolution, now's the time to honestly evaluate what is making it hard to stick to your plan.

Here are some of the tools and tips which have helped me stay on track so far this year. One is that I set two different goal tracker gadgets on my iGoogle home page. One is Don't Break the Chain, which I've found to be a really helpful motivator. Getting to tick off each day has helped me stay motivated to achieve my exercise goal every day. The other is a simple weight loss tracker. I'd stress that the weight tracker is working is because I set myself very low and achievable weight loss goals of around 2kg a month. So far I'm ahead of schedule which is a great feeling.

So how are you tracking with your goals for 2008? If you have any tips on how to keep on track, please share in comments.