Second Life Log

I came up with a model for how drive, goals, and motivation will help you start work on and complete a project. This thinking was generated from the book The Motivation Myth by Jeff Haden , with the section named "How to start when you're 0 percent motivated". As a quick aside, that book refers to motivation as a feeling you experience after doing work. To account for this, I call the feeling to accomplish something drive . The question I seek to answer is "what is the key to starting work toward a goal when you do not feel 'motivated' to do so?" Here is how the cycle of work happens. You start with a drive to accomplish a goal . You want the goal to happen. If you don't have strong enough drive for a goal, you are not likely to do all the work needed to get there. With the drive to accomplish a goal, there is something that starts you working on that goal. This will be unknown for now, but I will come back to it shortly. With that initial p...

One cause of procrastination is the fact that while you desire a result that requires work, you may feel a stronger pull towards more immediate rewards than the later reward of doing work toward that goal. To put it another way, you would be far more open to a tangible reward now than a nebulous reward at some unknown point in the future. While it is possible to have enough willpower to overcome this temptation, willpower is finite, and can often fall short of the needed level. The way to combat this is to combine an immediate reward with work towards a future reward, also referred to as "temptation bundling" by the book Finish What You Start by Peter Hollins. This appeases the immediate desire for a reward with work towards a future reward. This reward helps bridge the gap in required willpower to do the work. In fact, the less you have to rely on rewards, the better. If the rewards you use are finite in nature, such as watching your favorite tv series, then you will quickl...

In a normal 9-5 office setting, people work in an environment full of potential distraction. While many suspect that such distraction is detracting from their work quality, it's possible some don't know the extent to which it can degrade results. And in these modern times, distractions range from work-related to personal to social media. To reference my own personal experience, I cannot focus on a task if anyone within earshot is talking, and in particular, people have walked right up to my desk and started talking about something. There are only so many times you can politely ask them to wait until you are done, and in some cases, the person's position in the company and/or personality make it even less plausible to ask them to put the request on hold. You could make the point that urgent matters would be the exception to the rule, and I would agree. However, the definition of "urgent" can be abused to advance someone's agenda at the cost of your own mental r...