How do you motivate yourself to work (I mean real work, not checking forums or talking to webmasters on MSN)?
I give myself small targets (ones I can reach within a day) and give myself rewards based upon those targets, for instance today I bought myself an album from iTunes for spending 3 hours adding content...
Anna Gorbachev.
I work better if I can see an end to what I'm working on. If I have days of work to do, I feel less enthralled with it, if you know what I mean.
My work ethic is somewhat wanting most of the time, I have to admit
Stepping On Wires - the new blog
i need no motivation
Going to my day job is one motivation.
Making money with doing something I like is another.
Saving for that once in a lifetime car is probably one of the biggest (shht)
a super car?
Motivation is something I lack and need badly! My main motivation though, is to never have a job working for someone else.
My motivation is knowing I want to take care of my soon to be fiance.
Last edited by Shawn Weeks; 02-22-2005 at 11:35 AM.
congratulations
Knowing that for years to come, something I finish will rack in the cash with very little if any work being needed, aka Residual Income.
It's really hard to get motivated if you earn nothing. Very very very hard indeed! However, once you see your first dollar then keep increasing, you can get motivated exponentially. I agree with Nintendo, residual income is very powerful.
Money and achieving things.
New website released. ya rly!
I think there is long term motivation and short term motivation. Long term being the most powerful at the beginning of a project (when its a nice fluffy dream) and at the end (when the dream is being realized). The big motivators such as monitary gain and achievement are long term.
The problem occurs with how to motivate in the middle stages of developement, where your intial "dream" is a mess of complete and incomplete and the end looks like a big blur. This is where you need short term motivation, and by short I mean it could only be a day long, or it could be a week. The trick is goal setting theory (google it, i'm not going to explain the whole thing) where a person can obtain smaller amounts of achievement from smaller more managable goals.
So what do I do? I set goals for a project. First, some long term ones to put the project into perspective, and organize my short term ones from there. So a long term goal may be writing forum software. The short term goal would be: "Today I going to write a database abstraction layer". This may take me an hour or a couple, the idea isnt to organize your objectives around timeframes but to let timeframes evolve from the objectives. Timeframes make tasks more difficult because they add pressure which hurts the goal setting process.
Some keys:
Goal must be clear -> Timeframes are vague, make clear objectives
Goal must be challenging -> Challenge makes the reward more gratifing, however if it is to challenging you won't do it.
Goal must have feedback -> Since your the loan worker your going to have to do this yourself. Write down all your goals and check off the completed ones as you go along, it will help keep you on track and motivated.
Thats about it. As for practical tools, I code with something call php designer 2005 which has a nice todo list which I use and is right infront of me while I code. Very nice tool.
Last edited by The New Guy; 02-22-2005 at 07:19 AM.
TNG, I agree, have a target and then break it down into little chunks. Otherwise the end just seems too remote
Great post, newguy. I try to do something similar to this both in my web publishing work and my day job. I use a markerboard in both my home office and my "office-office" to list my long term goals and the steps needed to complete them. That way they're staring me in the face all day every day and I'm less inclined to waste time.
Motivation? A nice house with a huge garden. Learning to fly and owning a high performance airplane
I got over halfway there not so long ago, and then Google hits and it feels like I have to start all over again. Motivation to do that is hard to build up especially knowing how fragile it all is now.
But it's motivating to know that it IS possible. I've seen it first hand and I'm better placed now to avoid mistakes I made the first time around.
Now all I need is an idea that satisfies all the criteria I have in my head. That will motivate me to work my guts out. I feel less inclined to work hard on something that's more risky.
In the end, my main motivation is money (!) and some day providing a useful service to thousands of people that they wouldn't want to be without.
BTW, Shawn, Congrats!
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