You may have started your week pumped up with energy and enthusiasm.
But the last few days before the weekend kicks in, everything seems to be going wrong.
You've lost all those positive vibes.
You're asking yourself: "What can I do to push through this hump day?"
So, how do you stay productive and focused for a few more days?
To help you beat the midweek slump, read on for the top tips for hump day motivation.
As a bonus, you can also read 150 motivation quotes to boost your mid-week inspiration!
Top 7 Tips to Power Through Your Mid-Week Slump
1. Review Your Schedule
With all your hard work after two whole days, it should come as no surprise some of us start to lose some energy by Wednesday.
It's oh so easy to get into a downward spiral of unproductivity and a distinct lack of motivation. Re-evaluate your goals. Make a list of all the time-consuming tasks you have in your work schedule, and then rearrange them according to their priority.
Sometimes, we have a mental block because we are worried about going to some meeting which would require us to be out of the office.
2. Break the Old Routine
Doing something new could be just the extra motivation you need to snap out of your mid-week slump.
It could be a change of scenery, like walking to work in the morning, instead of taking the car or public transport. Or try adding variation into your working week. For instance, phone calls, meetings or even team building events.
Switching up your daily routine could make all the difference to your productivity as well as your health and well-being.
3. Reward Yourself
If you find yourself feeling unmotivated by mid-week, reward yourself for staying on track. For example, have an indulgent breakfast before work or dinner at your favorite restaurant after a hard day's work.
Do fun stuff that gives yourself something to look forward to. An evening out with friends. A walk in the park. Whatever rocks your boat.
Commit to do at least three things outside of work, so you have a little bit of fun and keep your mind off work.
4. Get Rid of Your Distractions
It's good to have distractions, but they should not be keeping you from doing work. If you're feeling distracted or unfocused for any reason, get rid of the things that are not helpful and try to find things that will help you reach your goals!
Turn off the phone and computer. A lot of people make the mistake of checking social media and email during this time. So don't be tempted by it! Instead, focus on your work and stay out of social emails for a few hours.
5. Slow Down
Take your time to do things the right way. Remember that it takes energy and time to do things the right way: planning, researching, preparing, testing. It's good to slow down and do things the right way.
Your work is going at a million miles an hour and you're feeling overwhelmed, stressed and want to give up. Remember that you're not really going to be able to impress anyone if you haven't even showed up. Showing up means showing up physically and showing up mentally!
6. Take Care of Yourself
While you're at it, be sure to take care of your body, and don't forget that you've got a brain! Keep hydrated by drinking water and keeping a healthy diet, get as much sleep as you can (preferably try to get 7-8 hours every night), so you have a clear head in the morning. If you're feeling agitated or stressed out, take a break and let yourself unwind for a few minutes.
7. Have the Right Mindset
Find Your Purpose in Life
We live in unprecedented times. Everyone seems to crave instant gratification. But how can you really, really be grateful for what you have?
Finding your purpose in life can be a motivator, but it can also be a way to motivate you for the rest of the week. Remembering that what you do now will impact your future can give you a bit of inspiration to get things done!
Do you want to live a meaningless life or have a burning desire or goal?
What do you feel passionate about? Is there something that keeps you up at night? A goal or dream that just keeps popping up in your mind and just doesn't seem to want to go away no matter how hard you try? This could be just the right motivation you need.
You can also make new goals by writing down the things you want to accomplish in the upcoming week that will give you something to aim towards each day. That way, if you don't achieve what you wanted one day, and want to give up, you still have the rest of the week to try again!
Be Grateful for What You Have in Life
Even if it seems that nothing is going your way, even if you're not as successful as you want to be, remember how much things have changed since you were a child. You can go to school, study and get degrees, find a fantastic job and earn money, or even if you're struggling, remember there are people who have much less than you. It's a great reminder to stay motivated.
Be thankful. Start your morning with determination. On your morning commute to work, listen to some positive motivation affirmations.
Take time to step away from your desk and shut your eyes. Then write down on a post-it notes something that happened in the last 24 hours that you're thankful for. Whenever you're feeling a little overwhelmed, or you think that things are not going right, or if you just need a little help to spark creativity, the note is there for a reminder and guidance.
Take the Time to Reflect on Your Accomplishments
As we get older, it's easy to lose track of all the things you've accomplished in recent years. Taking time mid - week to reflect on your goals and how much you've achieved to make your life meaningful, can give you extra motivation for the rest of the week.
Reflect on your previous failures. If something is not going the right way, take some time and analyze what went wrong. Was something missing in the planning stage? What did you do right before that didn't work? Did you plan your actions wrong? Try to reflect on what worked well, and what could be improved for the next time.
150 Positive Wednesday Motivational Quotes
These are some of my favorite stay-motivated quotes for Wednesday:
"In the midst of the darkest nights, there is always a new dawn." (W. E. B. Du Bois)
"You cannot fail to be successful if you always plan on succeeding." (Friedrich Nietzsche)
"There are no mistakes, only experiments." (Marie Curie)
"Let us not give up what we have well begun because we are not yet complete. Let us not fear what is ahead. Let us turn each day to one and another as we go, and so make our road brighter, our world better." (Eugene Field)
"The beginning of greatness is letting go of the past." (Arnold Schwarzenegger)
"Prepare, Present, Prove, Succeed. Always remember that you are your own biggest critic." (Anne Bradstreet)
"The beginning of a hundred years is as today; tomorrow is unknown." (Horace)
"To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die." (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2)
"Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful." (Albert Schweitzer)
"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward. " (Abraham Lincoln)
"Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." (Winston Churchill)
"Do not seek the sources of inspiration, inspiration seeks you." (François Duc de La Rochefoucauld)
"There are no mistakes, only lessons that must be learned". (Laurence J. Peter)
"Don't let yesterday use your tomorrow. " (Will Rogers)
"The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you." (Oscar Wilde)
"To be successful in anything you must be determined. The man who goes the furthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure way to succeed is to try just one more time." (William A. Ward)
"The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself." (Mark Twain)
"Hope has two beautiful daughters: their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to change them." (St. Augustine)
"Things turn out best for the people who make the best of how things turn out. " (J.R. Miller)
"Never fear being a failure when you try to do something that will make others happy." (Mary W. Tobin)
"The greatest mistake you can make in life is not to be true to the best you know." (Bob Marley)
"There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder." (Franklin D. Roosevelt)
"I have been impressed with the urgency of doing.
Every day that I do not prepare for my work is a wasted day." (William Feathers)
"Talk of the devil, and he is sure to appear. And all that stuff that we have heard about the devil and his works can be readily believed. The history of all former ages fully bears out this fact." (Pope Gregory XVI)
"Half effort is fatal. All energy must be devoted to a task if it is to be done well. The Achilles' heel of the doer lurks in a halfhearted performance. A man must want something so badly that his whole soul rebels at the thought of not doing it." (Harper's Bazar)
"You must push yourself, for without effort, there is no achievement." (Aristotle)
"I was in the midst of my first depression when an old professor at Oxford said to me, "Never give up." A light went on in my head. He was absolutely right. I started out with no money and not much education. There I was, with six months' experience of selling cloth and making drapes for a basement shop! I had learned the basic principles of my trade but nothing else. I had no experience in selling or managing, and yet I was 35,000 miles away with a wife and a two-year-old child. But I learned: Never give up." (Gordon Selfridge)
"Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve." (Napoleon Hill)
"Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. " (Unknown)
"Success is the mother of many miseries." (Oscar Wilde)
"If a man doesn't keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." (Henry David Thoreau)
"It is important to have goals. Without them life would be at best dull and at worst tragic." (Dorothy Parker)
"The secret of success is constancy to purpose. " (Benjamin Disraeli)
"Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason, mastery demands all of a person." (Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy)
"I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Every day passed brings the future one day nearer. Overhanging menace is ever present inefficiency. The road to worn-out days lies behind and before."
"There is only one good, one enemy, one duty - viz., to do your duty in that very hour." (Sir Winston Churchill)
"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. " (D. H. Lawrence)
"Take care of yourself first - leave the rest to me." (Charles M. Schulz)
"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All other questions follow from that." (Albert Camus)
"It behooves us all to put our shoulders into the wheel, for the time will come when we can all point with pride to the colored backdrop of our past."
(Frederick Douglass)
"Success in anything you do needs a fair amount of determination. It requires that you never give up. It requires that you start with a goal, reach it, and work towards your next goal. What is in front of you might be difficult, but it needs to be done for your future." (My Personal Motivational Characteristic)
"I cannot find any pleasure in ease and safety; I must have action, and danger. Give me the ladder of Lebanon, and I will climb into the heaven of invention."
(Samuel F. B. Morse)
"No man ever won a battle on the first day, but on the sixth lie twice as much." (Charles W. Chesterton)
"Business is war without bloodshed and paperwork." (Henry Ford)
"You have to keep trying. If you don't try none of your dreams will ever come true." (Anonymous)
"Do what you love, and the money will follow. " (Tony Hsieh)
"Luck is the residue of design." (Louis Pasteur)
"You just can't win if you're crossing to succeed, but if you keep pushing and pushing, someday you will make it over. We have to understand that it's not always going to be easy." (Oprah Winfrey)
"Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do. " (Pele)
"If you're not in over your head, how do you know how tall you are? " (T. S. Eliot)
"All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming. " (Helen Keller)
"Always continue the climb... In business and in life, the man or woman who keeps gaining new perspectives has the greatest chance of success." (Beth Comstock)
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now." (Chinese Proverb)
"The grandest disappointment in life comes from a sudden change, and the greatest loss is due to our own carelessness, and not to other people. " (Norman Vincent Peale)
"Success begins with a positive attitude and a burning desire to succeed. " (Marc Rich)
"There's no substitute for hard work. Everything else is just waiting around. " (Christopher Reeve)
"The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain. " (Dolly Parton)
"The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. It's got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can't blow an uncertain trumpet." (Theodore Hesburgh)
"Love what you do and do it well." (Maya Angelou)
"Change your thoughts and you change your world. " (Norman Vincent Peale)
"Pleasure of the moment is the only good; all the rest is compromise." (Graham Greene)
"One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have." (Albert Einstein)
"In life, sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. "
(Patrick Henry)
"He who optimates his time, and uses it well, never travels far for want of it." (Aristotle)
"All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming." (Helen Keller)
"Success is a matter of getting up and going at 8:30 in the morning every day for years on end. " (J. Paul Getty)
"The only way to outdo the competition is to work harder than they do." (Henry Ford)
"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." (Confucius)
"The best revenge is massive success. " (Frank Sinatra)
"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream." (C.S. Lewis)
"Lose knowledge and you lose all. The more you learn, the less others can use against you." (Sun Tzu)
"Dream no small dream for they have no power to move the hearts of men." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
"The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score." (Bill Copeland)
"If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it. " (W. Hauff)
"In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. " (Napoleon Hill)
"Gradually, I began to realize that my greatest strength lay in my weakness. " (J. R. Miller)
"Learn from yesterday if you can; but live for today, and tomorrow will take care of itself." (Abraham Lincoln)
"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. " (Steve Jobs)
"A man who does not know where he is going should not go at all." (Alexander the Great)
"The bigger they are, the harder they fall." (William Shakespeare)
"An incomplete success is better than a perfect failure." (Anonymous)
"I have never failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." (Thomas Watson Sr.)
"A blockhead learns from his mistakes, but a wise man learns from other people's mistakes. " (Voltaire)
"All that you go through in life prepares you for the next part." (J. B. Priestly)
"The secret to success, and to happiness, is being fully engaged in life -- while you're alive. That's it. It's not complicated." (Ellen Goodman)
"Everything will be OK in the end. If it's not OK, it's not the end." (Dane Cook)
"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure." (Benjamin Franklin)
"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." (Benjamin Franklin)
"An optimist must always remember that your supply of happiness is limited. " (Søren Kierkegaard)
"I didn't fail the test. I just found 10,000 ways that won't work." (Thomas A. Edison)
"You are never mistreated unless you give up yourself. " (Aristotle)
"I'm going to keep moving forward, all the way to the end, as long as I have breath in my body." (Frederick Douglass)
"There is no such thing as a failure. There are only results. Sometimes they are the best results possible. Sometimes they are not. If you do your best, and learn from your mistakes, you are always a success." (Dale Carnegie)
"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time. " (Leo Tolstoy)
"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." (Mark Twain)
"In a gentle way, you can shake the world." (Gandhi)
"Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts."
(Winston Churchill)
"All great progress, and all great achievements, have been accomplished by men who have dared to be themselves." (Franklin D. Roosevelt)
"I always tell my kids, it's like this... you're driving down the road, and all of a sudden you hit an oil tanker. You can have so much stuff in your life, but you never get everything you want. " (Oprah Winfrey)
"The only real failure is to be indifferent to what is going on around you. " (Pablo Picasso)
"Don't think you can succeed by conforming to the opinions and ideas of others... or by being a follower. " (John D. Rockefeller)
"When you show deep integrity, the people around you will know that you are true to yourself. " (Maya Angelou)
"I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else." (Winston Churchill)
"We can do anything we suppose we can do. " (Robert Collier)
"I say that one must be patient with oneself, yes, even with one's own worst enemy. " (Igor Stravinsky)
"The man who does not know himself will never know what he can do." (Thomas Aquinas)
"The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary. " (Vince Lombardi)
"Every great deed requires a great want." (Norman Vincent Peale)
"Success is dependent on effort." (Benjamin Disraeli)
"The only thing I have learned in life is that I know nothing." (Albert Einstein)
"If you are going through hell, keep going. " (Winston Churchill)
"Nothing is impossible to a man who will try. " (Nelson Mandela)
"The difference between stupid and smart is that stupid people don't change their mind." (Dalai Lama)
"You say you want a revolution, but... Don't tell me you want a revolution? Do you know what a revolution is? It's when the mob, taking things into their own hands, bring in the new order. All right, I'll tell you what we want. We want a piece of the action. That's all. " (Michael Corleone)
"The only real failure is not to have tried." (James Allen)
"In the arts, it is almost always true that one spends more time with the negative than with the positive, but in life, by far most often it is far otherwise: one spends most of time with positive things and only a few rather rare moments with things that are negative. " (Pablo Picasso)
"I have learned that it is the duty of every individual to create a great soul in himself, and that a society's greatness is determined by the greatness of its individual members. " (Carl R. Rogers)
"The way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others." (Mahatma Gandhi)
"A large part of our life is spent... wishing we had time to do what we ought and have no time to do what we like. " (William Hazlitt)
"Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf." (Kahlil Gibran)
"I knew that success was not going to be a shortcut. That's what everybody wants to think, that there is an easier road to success. But I realized that probably more than 80 percent of being successful in anything will come from hard work. " (Oprah Winfrey)
"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." (Michael Jordan)
"When you see a good opportunity, act on it quickly. " (Benjamin Franklin)
"A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. " (Benjamin Franklin)
"The only way to get a cup of tea is to put tea into a cup." (Lao Tzu)
"In the end we all die, but not before our dreams come true." (Anita Roddick)
"Dreams are second only to death in importance." (Thomas Mann)
"We must not wait until we are too old to dream, or too tired to fight." (Adlai Stevenson)
"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly." (Thomas Henry Huxley)
"Yes, it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. " (John Erskine)
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few." (Shunryu Suzuki)
"The only thing that is worse than being blind is having sight but no vision." (Helen Keller)
"Worrying does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, it empties today of its strength." (Corrie Ten Boom)
"If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it. " (W. H. Auden)
"Failing to prepare is preparing to fail." (Benjamin Franklin)
"I have never failed. I've just found 10000 ways that won't work." (Thomas A. Edison)
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." (Lao Tzu)
"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." (Bill Joy)
"Humans are good at adapting, but they suck at innovating. " (John Seely Brown)
"If you have talent, use it. " (Nikolas Tesla)
"There is only one success in life, to have a happy wife and happy children. The rest is mere consolation." (Charles Dickens)
"There are two ways of being wise: the one is to learn by hearing; the other is to learn by observing." (Confucius)
"It's not important how many times you get knocked down. It's important that you get up every time. " (Vince Lombardi)
"Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom. " (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
"An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows." (William Feather)
Hopefully, you'll have enough inspirational quotes to keep you motivated!
Final Notes
With a few changes, you can stay motivated and focused for the rest of the work week. When you think about it, all these things can be done in your own time at home or when commuting to work. Reviewing your goals, breaking out of old routines, rewarding yourself for staying on track will help keep you motivated long enough to make it through the week!