My intention with this blog was to try and post each weekday, and it seems I’ve failed. My previous post was on February 20th, and it is now the 26th. I missed three days of posts due to a severe case of motivational voodoo.
You know, it’s where you play mental tricks with yourself to try and get something done. What I call motivational voodoo is related to my previous blog post about procrastination. In that post I talked about about why I procrastinate, but not really how I go about pushing tasks through to completion.
The White Rabbit Voodoo
This one is obvious, you set a deadline and push to try and complete the task by the deadline. There are two types of
this motivation: imposed and self imposed.
The imposed is where a third party is imposing a deadline on you for the completion of a task. You know, your boss setting a deadline on completion a project/task etc. This almost always works, as you really don’t want to make your boss angry, now do you?
The self imposed deadline doesn’t always work. I mean come on, if there are no truly debilitating consequences to missing the self imposed deadline, slipping a bit won’t hurt, right? This, for me, is the crux of why a self imposed deadline doesn’t always work well for me.
The Bribery Voodoo
How many of you parents out there have done this to your kids? Come on, be honest. It works for them, and it also
works for yourself.
You might say to yourself:
Self? Get this task done, then you can go play an hour or two of video games.
Again, this type of motivational voodoo doesn’t always work. You can simply decide to play the games first, and perform the task later. Personally, I’m not sure that any particular reward value would make a difference in the effectiveness of motivational bribery.
The Punisher Voodoo
Obviously the next thing to try in order to motivate is punishing yourself. This is the inverse of the bribe, in that
you take away things if the task in question isn’t completed. I don’t believe that anyone reading this has not
done this at some point. (I’m looking at you parents out there!)
Lets be honest, we are talking not about motivating others, as much as we are talking about motivating ourselves. Does anyone, deep down, believe that this type of motivation voodoo is effective? I mean punishing yourself, just isn’t a good thing to do in my opinion.
Motivational Realities
Lets be honest, much like voodoo, these mind tricks we play on ourselves to try and induce self motivation generally don’t work all of the time. Motivation to complete an arduous task can only come from within. As I see it, the real motivators come down to:
- Desire - Motivation is driven by the fact that you truly enjoy doing the task.
- Discipline - This is simply you knowing that the task must be done, and you just do it. Doing the dishes and laundry are great examples, does anyone really take pleasure in doing them?
- Habit - Plain and simple, you start doing something, and over time the more you do it regularly the more it becomes a habit.
Finding that motivational spark, and fanning it into a flame is no easy task.
It just requires a little motivation.