Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation
medium.com
medium.com
No chance of choosing focus areas and ignoring a sick child and sleepless nights, family emergencies and soul-sapping homework assistance.
Family is my productivity enemy. But I love my family so I don’t sweat lack of productivity that much. Anymore.
But yeah, motivation is not the answer. Fully agreed.
Have you had any luck with early morning productivity?
Or, if you expand your definition of productivity to include raising happy children then it sounds like you're extremely productive.
Haven't millions of people -- and lots of famous productive writers, and such, done exactly that?
If you are working on a hard problem and you dog comes with the leash on her mouth, you can do what the dog wants or do what you need to do. Your dog will have to wait. Non negotiable. if you negotiate and are not consistent, you are in trouble.
Your dog needs to know that she is going to go outside, but when you say so. Dogs understand it very well. If it is a rigid schedule it works much better, it is not arbitrary.
If you are working on a hard problem and your son or daughter interrupts you, it is your job to make it clear to them that they can't interrupt you unless it is important.
They need to know you will spend time with them, on a consistent basis.
People understand it very well if you are an adult capable of saying "no". Rigid schedules work much better.
I believe you are confused. You can be disciplined and love your family. Sick child? Not the end of the world, it looks like it for first time parents. Homework assistance? You are not loving your children if you do their homework for them.
Counterpoint: I too fail to maintain a concentrated, productive habit for longer than ~a week. I do not have kids (yet) now, and I've also been failing at it when living alone. I was good at cutting out the distracting presence of other people, too, and it didn't help. I conclude that, at least for me, it's not about other people. There's something within me that prevents me from sticking to a habit I try to force on myself.
If you cannot maintain schedules/habits that may be related to the presence of a family
Also, I'm missing a golden thread in this post. It reads like a few half-baked thoughts to promote his company.
I do agree with his recap though.
I do it because working out every day improves my physical and mental health. My cognition is better. Starting each day off doing something I don't really want to do (getting up early), sets the tone of the day to one of getting the things done that need to get done.
> You have to learn how to connect the desire for some end state (getting the project completed, getting a faster mile time, etc) with the present.
IME, this is useful when deciding you want to make a change, but not something that is front and center when the alarm goes off early in the morning ;)
Breaking down any task into small steps has always helped me get going on things that seem to be a little tough to start. This has been way more productive than telling myself to do something for just 5 minutes, and often see myself continue.
Discipline is learning to do what needs to be done regardless of how we feel. This creates more results than chasing motivation.
Anything we perceive we are motivated or passionate about always has things we don't want to do attached to it.
If anything, motivation might be like taking a shower every day. Forget to shower and any effect quickly dissipates. Motivation is finite like our attention and willpower.
This 100x. Discipline is the goal. To paraphrase Jocko Wilink's podcast and book, "discipline equals freedom". Want to get up early, set an alarm and get up. Want to get in shape, go to the gym starting right now.
When I recognize I'm procrastinating on something that needs to get done, I immediately attack it and get it done.
It's strange though, we are raised to think discipline is bad, but everyone with financial, physical, dietary, academic, professional discipline often ends up being successful in many cases.
. . . RFripp
"Better to cultivate discipline than to rely on motivation. force yourself to do things. force yourself to get up out of bed and practice. Force yourself to work. Motivation is fleeting and it’s easy to rely on because it requires no concentrated effort to get. Motivation comes to you, and you don’t have to chase after it."
"Discipline is reliable, motivation is fleeting. The question isn’t how to keep yourself motivated. It’s how to train yourself to work without it."
—Theangryviolinist (probably)
I wrote some more about this recently here [0]
[0] https://www.codementor.io/garethdwyer/enter-the-zone-fight-i...
But that's not how most people use the term motivation, or whine about "not having motivation" mean.
The whole point of the distinction in the post is between waiting to feel motivated (as in "to positively look forward/like/inspired to do the thing") vs just doing it, not giving a shit for how you feel.
As a crude example: a writer could wait until they feel "motivated" to sit down and write. Another could just set a schedule that has him sitting down every weekday 9-5, and writing something, anything, whether they feel motivated or not.
The second we usually don't call "motivation", just discipline.
I doubt that's a good thing, net, unless you really truly don't have any options.