Daniel Pink

So one thing people can do that I encourage people to do is a do-it-yourself performance review, where at the beginning of a month you set out your goals, and at the end of the month you call yourself into the office and ask yourself how you're faring.

Are you making progress?

Are you falling behind?

Do you need other information?

Some people are doing these kind of peer-to-peer performance reviews where I set out my goals and what I want to accomplish in the month.

You set out yours.

Fred sets out his.

Maria sets out hers.

And then at the end of the month, we get together, have coffee for an hour, talk about our performance, hold each other accountable.

I think that's one way for individuals to take motivation back and not rely on companies to do it.

One of the people I write about, a scholar named Edward Deasy, says that we've got to get past this notion that motivation is something somebody does to you.

It's something that you do for yourself.

Yeah, I think that most companies can actually do the FedEx day, the 24 hours, but you can also do things in a more modest version.

I mean, you could say,

For this month, one afternoon a week, you can work on whatever you want.

Who among us has not squandered one afternoon at work?

I think people could surprise you.

The other thing about this is that the dark cloud of the recession might have a silver lining on motivation for a couple of reasons.

Number one is that recessions are often inflection points for people where their life has gone a direction they didn't expect and they have to think about where it's going to go next.

What you see in recessions is