Self-limiting is the next motivation regulation strategy from Wolters (2003). I will mention that this strategy is called something else, and I prefer to use the term self-limiting for this strategy.
Self-limiting is when students purposefully insert challenges while doing a task to make a task more difficult (Wolters, 2003).
Now you may be thinking, why would I want to add another challenge to getting work done when grad school is already hard enough?
I agree that this strategy is a bit counter-intuitive, but I can tell you that this strategy is probably one of the strategies you have already been using for a long time but didn’t know it.
I think that self-limiting is connected to procrastination. We often think of procrastination as a bad thing (listen to our podcast season 1 episode 4 to hear us talk more about this), but in reality, sometimes using procrastination can be strategic. Or in other words, if you have a bunch of things that you’re working on at once, you may decide to postpone working on a less important task to focus on the other tasks. You leave yourself two hours before a deadline to finish this task. And you know what? You probably got it done!
So, self-limiting can be strategically using time (aka leaving something until the last minute) to kind of force yourself to get it done.
For example, when I had competing tasks during grad school, I had to complete them during their allocated time otherwise I just wouldn’t have been able to get anything done. I remember this one time I was writing a conference proposal with Lizz. We had a short period of time to write about 2-3 pages. I said that I would write the first draft of the proposal and then she could edit and make changes and then we could submit it later that day. Because I had only left myself 90 minutes to write the proposal, that is the length of time I used to write it.
Lizz edited the proposal, and we had a brief conversation about adding certain things and formatting it correctly, and then we were able to submit it. Spoiler alert – this proposal got accepted! By using the self-limiting strategy of only leaving myself a small amount of time, I was able to get it done.
I should say that at this point, I had written many proposals so my self-efficacy in doing this was high. But, by putting limits around my work in grad school, I was able to get a task done without sacrificing time on other tasks.
But self-limiting can be a great motivation regulation strategy for you to use if you do feel like your plate is quite full and you don’t know how to get it all done. By using time as one of the ways you can limit yourself, you may surprise yourself with how you can increase your motivation to check one more thing off your list.
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