6 Steps to Stay Motivated While Learning
Almost everyone starts learning something new with enthusiasm, and almost everyone loses it within a few weeks.
Motivation is not a personality trait you either have or don't. It's mostly the result of how your learning is set up.
When I built Boterview, keeping people coming back was as important as teaching them well, so I spent a lot of time on the research behind it.
Here are the 6 steps that actually work, each backed by research.
1. Make Each Session Rewarding Right Now
"I'll be fluent in a year" won't get you to study tonight. Enjoying tonight's session will.
Choose formats you enjoy, end each session on something you got right, and keep sessions short enough to finish.
In research on New Year's resolutions and other long-term goals, Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach found that immediate rewards, like enjoying the activity, predicted persistence better than the delayed benefits people were aiming for.
That's why I made Boterview feel more like a game than a textbook: short lessons, varied challenges, and instant feedback on every answer:
Want to give boterview's active learning app a try? Check it out here:
2. Set a Goal You Can Hit Today
Big goals are great for direction, but terrible for daily motivation, because you can't feel progress toward them.
Break your big goal into a small one for each session: one lesson, ten flashcards, one chapter.
In a classic experiment, Bandura and Schunk (1981) found that children who set small, close goals in math developed more self-confidence and more interest in the subject than children who worked toward one distant goal.
In Boterview, every course is split into units and short lessons, so there is always a next small step:
3. Make Your Progress Visible
Motivation drops when you can't see that you're getting anywhere.
Keep a visible record: a checklist, a habit tracker, or an app that counts your streak.
In a meta-analysis of 138 studies with 19,951 participants, Harkin and colleagues (2016) found that monitoring progress helps people reach their goals, and works even better when progress is physically recorded or made public.
In Boterview, your daily streak is on the Quests page, with a badge for each milestone you reach:
4. Decide When You'll Study, in Advance
If you wait to feel motivated before you study, you'll study rarely, and procrastination takes over.
Instead, attach your session to a fixed moment: "After breakfast, I do one lesson."
These if-then plans are called implementation intentions, and a meta-analysis of 94 tests by Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006) found a medium-to-large effect on people actually reaching their goals.
In my experience, this removes the daily negotiation with yourself: the decision is already made.
It also helps when starting takes one click. In Boterview, your current course waits on the home screen with a Start Lesson button:
5. Learn Something You Actually Care About
Connect what you learn to something that matters to you: a trip, a project, a job you want.
When you can't choose the subject, choose the angle: learn statistics through sports data, or a language through the series you watch.
According to self-determination theory, Ryan and Deci (2000) argue that motivation lasts when an activity satisfies three needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness.
Because Boterview creates a course from any prompt, you can learn exactly the topic you care about, even practicing a language with the AI tutor:
6. Don't Trust the Feeling of Progress
Some days you'll feel you're not making progress when you are, and other days the opposite.
In Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 study, students who reread a text four times were more confident they would remember it, and found it less interesting, than students who tested themselves. A week later, they remembered 40% of it, against 61% for the self-testers.
So measure progress with questions you can answer, not with how you feel.
Getting a question wrong is not a sign you're failing: it's the most useful moment of the session, especially when you get an explanation:
