After I left my C-level role, I could not make a simple to-do list.
Not a strategy. Not a business plan. Not a five-year vision. A to-do list. The kind that takes ten minutes. I had managed teams across multiple countries, held P&L responsibility for a significant operation, sat in rooms where real decisions were made. And now I was sitting at my desk, staring at a blank Notion page, and doing absolutely nothing.
I would open the page. Think about what to write. Close the laptop. Make coffee. Open the laptop again. Check something. Close it again. Repeat. The day would pass. The list would stay blank.
I spent a long time assuming this was a character problem. That something had broken in me during the transition. That I had lost the ability to function without external structure. That I was, at some fundamental level, lazy — a word I had never associated with myself in twenty years of work.
Then I found a formula that explained it so precisely it was almost annoying.
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The formula comes from motivational psychology and it goes like this:
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MOTIVATION = (Expectancy × Value) ÷ (Pain × Delay) |
Every time you say "I'll do it later," your brain is silently running this calculation and comparing it against every other possible action available to you at that moment. The action with the highest motivation score wins. Not the most important action. Not the one you planned to do. The one with the highest score right now.
Look at how this plays out in practice:
| Task | Pain × Delay | Result |
| Start something meaningful | High effort + distant reward | Low motivation |
| Exercise consistently | Discomfort + medium delay | Low motivation |
| Learn something new | Effort + long delay | Low motivation |
| Scroll, watch, distract | Near zero + immediate | Maximum motivation |
Your brain is not broken. It is optimising. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do — find the action with the highest immediate reward efficiency. The problem is that this optimisation was built for a world of short feedback loops: hunting, eating, resting, surviving. Not for to-do lists or business plans or the slow, uncertain work of building something that matters.
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The brain releases dopamine when it anticipates reward. Not when it receives it — when it anticipates it. And the farther away the reward, the less dopamine gets released now. This is called temporal discounting. Starting something meaningful gives almost no immediate dopamine. Worse, thinking about it often triggers anxiety, which the brain registers as pain. So the equation collapses before you even begin.
Scrolling delivers a small dopamine hit every few seconds. No pain, no delay, maximum frequency. Your brain is not choosing distraction over your goals because it is lazy. It is choosing distraction because distraction is, by every neurological measure, the better offer.
For me, sitting at that empty Notion page, the calculation was stark. Writing a to-do list had unclear value, uncertain outcomes, moderate effort, and a distant payoff. Checking my phone had zero pain and immediate reward. My brain was not malfunctioning. It was running the numbers and making a rational — if self-defeating — choice.
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The formula has four variables. You can work on any of them.
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The Four Levers — For Yourself Raise Expectancy: Shrink the task until it feels doable. Not "write a newsletter" — "write one sentence." The minimum viable input that gets you started is the only input that matters at the beginning. Raise Value: Connect the task to something that actually matters to you — not the abstract goal, but the specific feeling or person it serves. The meaning has to be yours, not borrowed from someone else's definition of success. Reduce Pain: Remove decisions in advance. Same time, same place, same first step — every day. The trigger does the work so your willpower does not have to. Reduce Delay: Build in visible, immediate feedback. A small mark on a calendar. A line in a journal. Something that tells your dopamine system: something happened, before the outcome arrives. |
I eventually made the to-do list. Not by trying harder — by making it smaller. One item. Written by hand, not on a screen. Done first thing, before the phone was checked. The dopamine system got its signal. The task felt less threatening. The next item became easier.
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Here is where it gets interesting for anyone who manages people.
The same formula runs in your team. Every person on your team, every day, is unconsciously calculating whether the work you are asking them to do has a higher motivation score than the alternatives available to them — a meeting that feels pointless, a Slack thread, a task they understand and feel competent at. If the score is too low, you will not see overt resistance. You will see something much harder to address: quiet disengagement. People who are present but not fully there.
Most managers respond to low team motivation by adding pressure — tighter deadlines, more monitoring, stronger consequences. This is the equivalent of trying to make yourself do the to-do list by feeling more guilty about not doing it. It does not change the formula. It just makes the pain variable higher for everyone involved.
The managers who actually move teams apply the formula instead:
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The Four Levers — For Your Team Raise Expectancy: People disengage when they do not believe they can succeed. This is almost never about ability — it is about clarity. Vague goals, unclear success criteria, and moving targets destroy expectancy. The most motivating thing a manager can do is make the next step so specific and achievable that the person cannot reasonably doubt they can do it. Raise Value: People work harder when they understand why the work matters — not to the company, but to them personally. Career growth, skill development, recognition, autonomy. If someone cannot see how a task connects to something they care about, the value score is zero regardless of how important the task actually is. Your job as a manager is to make that connection visible and real. Reduce Pain: Bureaucracy, unnecessary process, unclear decision rights, and constant context-switching are all pain in the formula. Every time a talented person has to navigate pointless friction to do good work, you are lowering their motivation score. Removing obstacles is not a soft management skill. It is the highest-leverage thing a manager can do. Reduce Delay: Long feedback loops kill motivation. If someone works for three months before hearing whether what they did mattered, the dopamine signal never comes. Build in short cycles of feedback and recognition — not empty praise, but specific acknowledgement that the work landed. The signal has to be real and it has to be soon. |
In twenty years of managing teams across different countries and cultures, I never saw a motivation problem that was actually about the people. Every time I looked carefully, it was a formula problem. Low expectancy because the goal was unclear. Low value because the connection to purpose had never been made explicit. High pain because the process was broken. High delay because feedback was infrequent or generic.
The teams that moved were the ones where someone — usually not the most senior person in the room — took the time to adjust the variables instead of demanding better output from the same broken equation.
Whether you are sitting alone at a blank page or standing in front of a team that has gone quiet, the diagnosis is the same. The formula is running. The question is whether you are going to let it run on its defaults — or change the inputs.
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This week's insight Motivation is not a feeling to wait for. It is a ratio you can engineer. When you cannot start — or when your team has gone quiet — do not ask why people are lazy. Ask which variable in the formula is broken. Fix the variable. The motivation follows. This applies at your desk at 9am and in the boardroom at 3pm. The neuroscience does not change depending on the room you are sitting in. — Charlie Boluk |