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Hack your motivation

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Re: Hack your motivation

#31

Post by ripter »

fohlin wrote: post #25
zeidrich wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been really focusing on my motivation and willpower lately. I used to have a very similar scenario to what you describe. What works for me is this: 1) Recognize that my willpower is limited, like a muscle it can be exhausted and needs rest. 2) Recognize that when I'm listless that it's not a moral failing, it's essentially my willpower being exhausted. 3) Never feel guilty for that feeling of listlessness, ins…

Everything in your comment really resonates with me—except I feel mostly powerless on getting to the second state. It either happens or it doesn't. I can easily recognize the down periods, but like segmondy, I can't (or won't) do anything about them. In a free work environment, it's easy to rationalize not working right now with "I'm listless, it's better in the long run to rest." But too many of those occasions poin…

Something that has helped me. I do it regardless if I want to work on it or not.

I stopped making a choice if I work on this project. I work on the project for an hour. Not because I want too (I might not) but because that is what I do.

When I hear those voices in my head that want to put it off, or I'm too tired, or let's just skip it today, we can make it up tomorrow. I (struggle sometimes to) ignore them. This isn't a question about wanting to spend that hour on the project. There isn't a question to have. I just do it.

Once you start the voice tends to go away because I'm too busy actually doing it.

I think this is why offices work the way they do. You are not given a choice. You show up to work and you have 8 hours to do it. Someone even does the planning for you! So you have nothing else to do, so it's not a choice. You just do.

As lame as it sounds, the Nike slogan in correct. (If you look you'll see all sorts of famous people with the same motto.) You just do it. Nothing else matters. That's the trick. It's incredibly hard and most people won't. But if you really want too succeed, then you will just do it.

And if not, then maybe you are beating yourself up over something that doesn't really matter to you. It's a valid question. Do you honestly want it? Or maybe something else is pushing you to want it, but you don't really care.

Re: Hack your motivation

#32

Post by teleclimber »

hanula wrote: post #4

One thing which I can highly recommend to anyone with motivation problems and help beat the procrastination is pomodoro technique [1]. When I'm stuck or can't make the first move to get into the work mood, I just hit the pomodoro timer. Somehow the ticking clock gives me boost and puts me into hours of productive work. Always! It's the only technique which works 100% in my case. Try it out for yourself. [1] http://ww…

Can't say enough about the pomodoro technique as well. I tried many things, this is what worked.

After training myself to work when the clock is ticking, I now find that clicking the "start" button on my timer triggers something in my brain that puts me to work. It's kind of trippy actually.

Re: Hack your motivation

#34

Post by jaggederest »

zeidrich wrote: post #24
segmondy wrote: post #22

Lack of sustained motivation has been the bane of my existence. The only true obstacle to everything I've ever wanted in life. The article is cool, but not enough, when I'm not motivated, I will not do anything in those articles, I will do other things that I shouldn't be doing. Does the hack call for just work for 30 seconds. I won't. I'm unmotivated, that's the problem. The question that is quite the un-scratchable…

I have been really focusing on my motivation and willpower lately. I used to have a very similar scenario to what you describe. What works for me is this: 1) Recognize that my willpower is limited, like a muscle it can be exhausted and needs rest. 2) Recognize that when I'm listless that it's not a moral failing, it's essentially my willpower being exhausted. 3) Never feel guilty for that feeling of listlessness, ins…

Ego depletion ('running out of willpower') is only partially a thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Challenges_and_al...

You can expand your willpower by doing more difficult things. It's not a fixed resource, and you don't 'run out'.

Re: Hack your motivation

#36

Post by ridicter »

minimax wrote: post #23

For me the most important thing is to start working on something first thing in the morning before I start poking around on the Internet. If I spend an hour checking up on Twitter, HN, Reddit, or whatever it totally kills my productivity for the day. If I can spend just 20-30 minutes working on work before I catch up on the day's news I have a much better time focusing on my work throughout the rest of the day.

This exactly the same for me. Just out of muscle memory, my reptilian brain starts typing Reddit or Hacker News into the URL field in my browser when I'm not paying attention. If I start my day wandering down the hacker news/reddit rabbit hole, I never really get out.

So when I wake up in the morning, literally before I do anything else on my computer, I turn on Self Control (http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/), which blocks sites that kill my productivity.

I've recently adopted org-mode for emacs, and it has helped immensely. Task #1 everyday: Turn on Self Control for a few hours. The last task everyday: Close all windows and make sure org-mode is greeting me when I wake up with Task #1 for the day.

Re: Hack your motivation

#38

Post by ha-ha-ha »

segmondy wrote: post #22

Lack of sustained motivation has been the bane of my existence. The only true obstacle to everything I've ever wanted in life. The article is cool, but not enough, when I'm not motivated, I will not do anything in those articles, I will do other things that I shouldn't be doing. Does the hack call for just work for 30 seconds. I won't. I'm unmotivated, that's the problem. The question that is quite the un-scratchable…

Very interesting. Maybe you're just in the wrong environment, where there's nothing to motivate you. I live in a small, 200 or so people, village. I know everybody here and not a single one has this kind of a problem.

This is probably a silly suggestion, but you can buy say a very expensive car on a loan. That way you'll have two choices:

a) work hard

b) be lazy now and have a ton of problems later - bankruptcy, no where to sleep, etc.

Your brain motivation circuitry will probably choose the easier option - a)

Re: Hack your motivation

#39

Post by minimax »

ridicter wrote: post #36
minimax wrote: post #23

For me the most important thing is to start working on something first thing in the morning before I start poking around on the Internet. If I spend an hour checking up on Twitter, HN, Reddit, or whatever it totally kills my productivity for the day. If I can spend just 20-30 minutes working on work before I catch up on the day's news I have a much better time focusing on my work throughout the rest of the day.

This exactly the same for me. Just out of muscle memory, my reptilian brain starts typing Reddit or Hacker News into the URL field in my browser when I'm not paying attention. If I start my day wandering down the hacker news/reddit rabbit hole, I never really get out. So when I wake up in the morning, literally before I do anything else on my computer, I turn on Self Control ( http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/…

We really are the same. I keep a journal in org-mode and in my .emacs I have cron-like periodic function that switches to my journal in the middle of the night so that it's the first thing I see when I unlock my computer in the morning. Something like:

  (run-at-time "23:59" 86400 (lambda ()
                              switch-to-buffer "journal.org")))

Re: Hack your motivation

#40

Post by s1mple »

segmondy wrote: post #22

Lack of sustained motivation has been the bane of my existence. The only true obstacle to everything I've ever wanted in life. The article is cool, but not enough, when I'm not motivated, I will not do anything in those articles, I will do other things that I shouldn't be doing. Does the hack call for just work for 30 seconds. I won't. I'm unmotivated, that's the problem. The question that is quite the un-scratchable…

segmondy,

I've struggled with exactly what you describe, the worst were the afternoons. I'm sure you know the feeling. I would finish lunch, and instead of being pumped up and ready to go on whatever it was, I would just stare at the screen and my mental performance/motivation would drop big time. It got so bad that I turned to Adderall XR (concentrated amphetamine salts prescribed by my doctor for what I explained as "post-lunch narcolepsy") to try to make things better. It was great because I could literally do anything I put my mind to, but over time, I noticed it would leave me feeling soul-less and hollow inside for lack of a better term. I was as if I was trading in my entire personality, just to be able to get work done. So I started experimenting with some other things less crazy things. I noticed coffee with lunch kind of helped, but it would get me too excited and it left me anxious because it didn't have any inhibitory neurotransmitters to calm me down/doesn't replenish what it took out of me. So I added a little bit of GABA (an inhibitory neurotransmitter) to prolong a more balanced effect. But then I still had that sugar spike that would make me tired, so I researched a whole bunch of other things that would aid in metabolism and energy production. I finally found a combination that actually worked, but the problem was that I had to take a bunch of pills and none of the supplements I found online were in the right doses/proportions, so I would literally have to spend hours each month packing powder from my milligram scale into tiny capsules that I could take with my lunch. That process sucked big time, so I started giving it to some of my friends to see if they wanted to do a larger production run, and they were all big fans so we all looked into getting the capsules manufactured with some of the nutraceutical companies in New York...long story short, we came up with a name (Alleradd) and a website (http://www.alleradd.com) and we're doing a limited launch to a few people right now. I'd love to send you a bottle and see if you like it. So far, the response has been overwhelmingly positive and people are coming up with all sorts of other interesting uses for it. As for me, I still just use it every day with lunch and it feels great/restores my motivation. Anyway, that's it for my rant.

Cheers,

s1mple

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