Motivation and Discipline: which way to go? (Productivity)

There’s two prominent perspectives on productivity. One suggests that motivation is the key to productivity. Motivation gives you the drive to keep working, and that keeps you working, making you more productive. Another perspective puts discipline at the heart of productivity. Disciplined productivity is the idea that if you have work, and you are scheduled to do it, you should do it, regardless of the circumstance. If you schedule work right, then naturally you will do work at the right time and be more productive. So, which one is better? I would like to take a different route and compare the two with two people’s lives.

Person A is a student. His road to productivity is motivation. He’s an aspiring engineer, so naturally, he has an interest in STEM subjects. His schedule, however, does not have all desirable classes. He has a mandatory Art 1 class, a health elective and a speech elective thrown in to meet graduation requirements. He is highly motivated about the calc pulls class and the Physics class and does his homework and assignments on time and scores excellent grades on the tests.  His speech elective has just a bunch of completion grades so he’s fine in that. However, it’s not the same case with the other classes.  Although it’s not appalling, his Art grade isn’t exactly as good as it could be. His health elective is roughly the same and the difference is not due to a lack of resources or time but a lack of motivation. As I mentioned earlier, person A relies on motivation to be productive, and Art and a Health just isn’t fascinating to him. So, is discipline the right path? 

Although I wanted to carry on, the addition of another example would practically make this an article so I’m going to leave you hanging here and finish off tomorrow. Until then, Bye.