No matter how much I love what I do, sooner or later my motivation drains to zero. There are myriad of materials on the topic already, sure. But why not add my own drop to the ocean :D.

My way of keeping it going is nothing new or original. As it seems, humans are tend to forget basic things. So listing my rules here:

• No rewards in advance: How nice to have a paycheck before even doing anything, ha. Though that leads to titanic mental efforts to actually do something, as reward is here already, why bother?
• Minimize distructions: Managers and colleagues love to chat/email/meet/… all day long. Socialization is good, but who will work? Just mute all the notifications and pop-ups, including phone (especially phone) every once in a while.
• Track tasks and progress: Who doesn’t like some graphics and reports? And even for CLI nerds there are a few task tracking tools, my preffered one is taskwarrior.
• Define smaller tasks: Break big and intimidating tasks into smaller ones. It’s hard to start a 1000 page book, but easy enough to read the intro chapter. Aiming low helps to warm up.
• Rest regularly: Don’t overheat. It’s conterproductive to be sucked into a problem for a long time. I preffer to have a break every 20-30mins for about 5mins. Just enough to stand up, walk around, do eye exercises, and change mental focus. That helps to change approach and have a fresh look on the task at hands.
• Rewards?: They don’t work for me really, but if needed can be applied, just don’t forget to finish the task before rewarding yourself.

Tricks not helping? Probably this the time to call it a day and have a nice walk outside or even some intensive physical activity like biking/running/… ;)

Thu Jun 8, 2023 / 298 words / Motivation Flow