Examples of High Performers Motivating Themselves about comments HOT 1 OPEN

I've personally found a couple of things that have helped me with motivating myself. These haven't been foolproof, and I could always improve, but here they are

1. Paying attention to some kind of metric (aka setting a standard)
2. Adding time to a TODO list
3. Partition work according to motivation

For the first one, it's usually difficult for me to stay motivated if I don't have any information about how much progress I'm making. Sometimes it's very obvious that progress is being made, and I don't really need to put any effort into measuring anything, but sometimes it can be quite difficult to be disciplined and motivated. For instance, I used to complain endlessly about the quality of my sleep, but I seriously struggled to do anything about it until I got a watch that actually measured my sleep. While the accuracy of the watch's measurement is somewhat questionable, it is at least internally consistent with itself, and lets me see how I've been doing over time. Whenever my sleep hygiene has started to deteriorate, a quick look at my recent sleep times is enough to motivate me to put down whatever I'm doing and go to bed at the right time.

For the second one, I've often found myself writing lists of things that I need to accomplish, and come the end of the day I'd be lucky if I finished even 10% of them. What I found works for me is to literally schedule some time dedicated to knocking out one of the TODOs. Then when the time comes, I'm much more likely to sit down and do it -- even when I don't, it's almost always for a seriously compelling reason (i.e. something surprising and urgent came up). I wouldn't be surprised if this had something to do with reducing decision fatigue -- by preemptively making the decision of WHEN to work on things, and not just WHAT to work on, I save myself the trouble of having to make that decision in the moment, which can be an exhausting thing to do.

The last one is a steal from Jonathan Blow -- I once caught him on stream and he mentioned that the best time to do boring dredgework is when you're in a crappy mood. Your mood can't get much worse, your mood won't affect your productivity because the task is fairly mindless, and you'll be able to be productive. Additionally, this'll free up your more positively-mooded work sessions to be focused on interesting, challenging and creative work.

from comments.