![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
Another quick observation about motivation:
I was lying in bed just now, tired and thinking of sleep. I picked up the book I’m currently reading (the 2008 Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror anthology, if anyone cares), thumbed to the next story, but barely made it to the end of the second paragraph before giving up.
I was about to get up and turn of the light, but for no apparent reason, I picked up a random paper that was sitting on the pile of books next to my bed. I didn’t intend to actually read it – after all, if high quality short fiction can’t hold my attention, dry academic writing certainly won’t do any better – but for some reason I ended up flicking my eyes through the abstract. I wasn’t taking much in, but for some reason I stuck with it long enough to encounter some survey results that were quite interesting, enough so that I felt like writing some quick notes about it in Evernote. So I did.
But then something interesting happened. The motivation I had for my original note-taking gave me a little momentum, and instead of turning the laptop off and going to bed like I originally intended, I suddenly felt like doing something useful, in this case, writing a paper review that I’ve been putting off for about a week, and then writing this.
Why’s this interesting? I’m intrigued by the idea of motivation having momentum. That by getting excited about some small, easy task, I can carry that over to feeling motivated about some larger task. Thinking back, this is definitely something that’s happened before, and that I think I sometimes take advantage of, but never explicitly. I should try to employ this more often.
Actually, thinking on it, this relates to some great advice I got once about writing. If you’ve got some big writing task that’s really hard to start on, just commit to sitting down in front of the computer, loading up the word processor, and looking at it. You don’t have to do anything more than that. More often than not, you’ll want to write a few words down, and sometimes, you’ll get sucked in. Here, like above, the momentum of defeating a small task carries you into defeating a larger one. I think I’ll have to write more about this in the context of writing some other time.
Oh, and by the way, the paper was about the sociology of strategy board games. You can bet I’ll write something about it some other time
| x-posted from [meme-hazard]. Comment here or there - up to you. |
2009-07-23 09:48 am (UTC)
2009-07-23 08:24 pm (UTC)
I got it from a 'Top 10' of academic papers on game design that was presented at GDC this year by Jane McGonigal, Ian Bogost, and Mia Consalvo. Google for 'Game Studies Download 4.0' and you'll find it. I saw it mentioned on someone's blog (might have been from Mark Chen's; he's a guy doing WoW sociology work here at UW).
I downloaded all the papers, and have set myself the task of reading and writing something about them all. I'd be interested in hearing your take on some of them - it's a pretty interesting bunch :)
2009-07-23 10:54 am (UTC)
Could it be a reward system? You feel good after a small achievement, and it propels you forward.
2009-07-23 08:29 pm (UTC)
But yeah, I think there's definitely a reward system thing going on there. A lot of my tricks for getting stuff done revolve around rewards of various sorts - the main one is that I always write task lists with check boxes, because I get immense satisfaction from checking things off the list.
To take this further, I've always wondered if there's some way you could take the reward and achievement based structures employed in games and apply them to getting things done in all sorts of non-game activities. I've been meaning to write something more in depth about this for ages, but it seems like a big topic I don't want to screw up, so I never get started. Which brings us back around to your initial point, so maybe I should take my own advice on this :)