- by Tim
Somehow I might not have noticed that I was lacking motivation.
My job was hard the last few month, when I had some hard problems to sit and learn over, and that made me feel I wasn’t making any progress anymore. And my job motivated me most of the last year, so this was a big hit. Then I also made some mistakes, costing my company some money – made me feel even worse. Then I didn’t see my friends in a loooong time. I used up all the nice content in form of videogames and movies. Then my girlfriend tends to work a lot – also on weekends. And some few time ago, one of my cats died.
That was when I felt a big depression overcoming me. I seemed to have some kind of mid-life-crisis. Since then I made some corrections in my life, that all should help my motivation.
1.) ToDo lists: I need those to feel that I make progress and to not loose track of what I was doing. It also makes me feel good when I can check something off.
2.) Music. The iPhone 3G originally made me listen to music again after me having lost interest in it before. Sadly, synching with iTunes isn’t perfect and took a long time and when I more often heard songs I didn’t like while riding my bike to work, I switched to podcasts instead. Those podcasts are fine, but they’re all information and no emotion. After getting the iPhone4, I realized that through the clicker headphones you could easily get rid of songs you didn’t want and through the bigger capacity, I could have overall more songs on the device, giving more food to the genius lists. This also made me rediscover all the good old stuff and keeps my emotions slightly more packed with power.
3.) Friends. I visited an old friend of mine living 5 hours away from here – and it really pushed me. Then through the iPhone4 and Meebo, I’m back online on ICQ, which I dropped when beginning to work one year ago. Through this, I got back to being contacted for sit-ins and usual silly conversation, which made me feel better.
4.) Project: I try write more on the blog – it somehow frees my mind. I also try to work a bit on the ToDo Tool I wanted to do a while back – one should have some cool project instead of sad SOA stuff. You should have a project that you like – even if ou don’t have too much time to put in that.
5.) Job: The job always threatens my peace of mind. If there’s a big problem piling up or something that’s really hard to grasp, I’m feeling bad. But there problems are solved now, god bless it.
Somehow this post is incomplete, butI guess the crisis is over. Thanks to everyone including you dear reader who leaves a comment from time to time ;-)
photo credit: anomalous4
Glad to hear it’s getting better. Todo-lists is a good tool for such a situation (and others). However, for myself, I’m looking forward to make changes once I got that stupid phd kolloq behind me, till then it’s no use anyway ;).
Good to hear it’s getting better.
I can not say how much to do lists help me getting all the stuff done I need to do, daily, weekly or monthly + a good calendar is tracking my private life (days off, holidays) as well job life (meetings, travels, timelines) all nicely for me in one device, always just a “click” away.
Sorry to hear about the difficulties you have been going through. It sounds like you have been able to evaluate the situation and take positive steps with those things that will help motivate you. Reconnecting with your friends is a great way to motivate yourself. I also use music and podcasts to motivate and provide focus. Take care.