A blogger I follow through their RSS feed at 82Mhz posited a recent question to their readers and fellow bloggers. I found the question interesting and recently had a conversation with my mom about our different organizational styles and how we get through necessary but possibly unfun tasks.
Andreas' prompt:
Write about how you manage to do your personal projects. How do you organize yourself, how do you manage to finish things and when do you decide it’s time to stop working on something for good?
As I mention in my little bio section I hop from hobby to hobby often. Obsessions with certain tech or new challenges tend to carry me forward quite a lot. I'm neurotypical, as far as I know, but I definitely will just obsess over one thing for like two weeks then hop onto the next shiny thing.
<<<I promise one day I'll be motivated to keep adding albums to //music but it's so manual because of the way I have it set up I lost motivation after adding the ones you see. >>>
So that brings me to the first and most obvious way I get my projects going and done. Desire and motivation. It is so so so easy for me to get something completed when I have this puppy eyed interest or desire to see something new come to life. It was like this with my minecraft server or with the YAMS Media Server which I still need to post about. I literally got off work, booted up my terminal window and the install guide on another monitor, and suddenly it was midnight and I was excitedly celebrating being able to instantly download and tag my completely legal linux ISOs.
The big downside to having these giant bursts of motivation, I've found, is that I truly struggle to do tasks that I simply do not want to do anymore.
I have several projects that I've dropped without really intending to:
- Vlog of all the footage I recorded during my Japan trip earlier this year
- Otome game my girlfriend and I were working on last year
- Like 3 books I meant to finish reading
I didn't stop making the game or editing the vlog because I encountered some unsurmountable issue, I just ran out of steam to solve the small, mundane roadblocks one encounters during any task. So my motivation and passion-driven nature are double-edged swords. If I don't want to do something it simply might not get done, to be honest. The main exceptions of course are things like work, where the pressure to stay alive and have a place to sleep are more than sufficient motivators for me to get tasks done, and bodily needs like eating. Part of the reason I learned to cook well was because I like good food.
So I've had to find ways to get things done that I don't want to do, and I've learned that momentum is a crucial factor for me when motivation is missing.
After all these years I've learned that if I make something part of my routine, It's very easy for me to get up every day do it. It's easy for me to shower every morning because it just feels like what I do and my days would feel odd and truncated if I didn't do those things. A few years ago, the gym was such a core part of my routine that I was in the best shape of my life because, like clockwork, I would get out of my last lecture of the day, change, go to the gym for 2 hours, go home, shower, eat, play video games/do homework, sleep. If my day didn't align in some way shape or form with that schedule, it felt off.
The downside? If I break that routine in some big way those momentum-based tasks can get completely derailed. Those years of working out daily got completely wasted because when I got a summer job as a janitor, getting up at 5:30am and home at 4pm meant I often felt too tired to go lift for an hour. So eventually I stopped going altogether.
All of this is to say that there are so many non-desired and non-routine tasks that feel like pulling teeth for me to get accomplished. I needed to repaint the roof of my car because it was rusting and it literally felt like a gargantuan task even with help from my brother. I ended up sanding and priming it one day, then actually painting it a whole month later. Now I'm procrastinating putting the clear coat on it.
I've had clothes for donation in a box in my closet for literal months because it's just not a routine task for me to drive to a clothing donation center.
One other example is job applications. By god job applications suck so much and I hate doing them. I hate updating linkedIn, I hate the black hole of getting ghosted, I hate tracking them. So there's my momentum again. When I'm not making job apps part of my daily routine just thinking about them stresses me out and I won't start doing it, but with a big enough push - like feeling insecure in my current job last year - I started applying to jobs every day from 5:30-6:30pm. No matter how many or few got sent out, that one hour was simply for looking at job boards and sending out resumes and contacting recruiters. As soon as my alarm dinged for 6:30pm, everything was dropped and it was free time again. This helped, and once I had the momentum after 3-4 days, it just became mechanical. I applied to over 150 jobs that year.
But job apps are fairly serious, right? I don't think I've found a neat solution to my resting inertia when it comes to doing non-existential tasks like my hobbies. After all these are my hobbies, so it's totally fine to pick them up and drop them as I desire.
When speaking to my mother, she told me the way she gets through tasks she doesn't have desire to get done is to deny herself a reward until she gets it done. It can be something small, like a chocolate or getting to lay down and just scroll through her phone for an hour. But she sometimes rewards herself with new clothes or something she's been on the fence about getting, if it's a huge task.
My girlfriend also says that she loves making checklists and to-do lists, as checking them off or erasing a task from her phone feels good.
I've never truly tried this 'gamification' of tasks very seriously. I played around with it during the covid lockdown but I just don't have the discipline to deny myself things I want or to always write down every single thing I need to do somewhere. Maybe I should give it another try if I find a suggestion for some program that would make it easy to do so.
So I pass on this question to you, reader. How do you get shit done?
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kagumail.uselessly535@passinbox.com
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