How to keep yourself motivated

Recently, I started learning things regularly, like everyday after work. So I’ve gotten a simple question from few people.

“How did you motivate yourself? Even after work?”

Here’s a simple trick.

Controller of self

When you get back to your home, you probably grab remote controller of your TV. Power it on and change the channel to what you want to watch.

Yes. It’s quite similar to this process. I started using a simple app called, “a Time Logger”. It looks like the picture below.

What it does is quite simple. When you choose one of those activities in the screen, it starts the timer. And when you finish that activity, it tells you how long you have spent on that activity.

In this picture, it’s showing that I was in the middle of working, and it had been around 3 hours and a half.

Why this is a controller of self? Let’s imagine.

When you get back to your home, you are opening this app, instead of grabbing TV controller, and asking yourself, “What would I like me to do?”, “It would be nice if what is done soon?”. Then you would have to choose one of those activities. Someone wants to choose “house work”, other person might choose “study”.

TIMER STARTED!!

So you have to start doing that immediately!!

This strategy worked quite well for me. I used to spend time on nothing because I couldn’t decide what to do when I’m idle since there are so many things to do.

One more good thing was, since it’s recording the time you spent on “that specific activity”, you can’t change what you are doing easily. Once you start studying with timer started, you don’t want to stretch your hand to magazines, video games or whatever. I realized that “multi-tasking” doesn’t work well for humans. Also, since you don’t want to record “Untracked time”, you have to decide what to do whenever you become idle.

At the end of the day, you will see this wonderful result.

I saw I had done what I wanted quite well!! In my case, “that” is “creation”.

Also, you will see this at the end of the week.

I’m happy to know that I’m working 40 hours per week!! …No, that’s not the point… anyways.

What I wanted to say was, it’s actually easier than I imagined to make up the time for some specific activity. Once you start doing that, you will enjoy doing that. Also, at the end of the day, you will be satisfied with that result.

Be efficient and let’s enjoy our life more!!