Self-Motivation 101
March 7th 2010 19:22
Self Motivation 101
Motivating yourself as a freelance writer or any other work at home person can be very difficult. You wake up, sit in your PJ's until Noon doing nothing, and before you know it, the entire day has been wasted and you've made jack squat.
Remember the goal when working at home? A lot of us forget after a few months or years. The goal is to make at least a part-time income if not more. I'm still hovering around the $2000/month mark which is acceptable for where I live but I have to admit I'm a lazy ass and I'm really working hard to implement motivators into my work schedule.
If you find yourself just sitting around watching TV, snacking, and playing games all day, hopefully you learn something from this post.
1. Schedule, Schedule, Schedule!!
If you treat your work at home job like a real job, you'll do better than a lot of people right away. This is one of the hard parts to grasp. If you wake up at 7AM, get a shower and some breakfast and actually get dressed, you'll feel ready to go. If you wake up at 10AM, haven't shaved for 4 days and just plop down with Facebook, you're doing it wrong (and a lot of us are!).
The easiest thing to do is tape a big piece of hard paper right to your monitor with a schedule you think you can handle. Here is a good sample schedule for what I might do:
7AM-wake up, get ready for work, get kids to school
9AM-Should be good and warmed up. Big money time. Whip out a few DS articles, Mahalo tasks, Associated content articles, or get work done for a private client.
10AM-same as above
11AM-Break time. I told you I'm lazy. Time to level my Priest in WOW, Play some Xbox, eat lunch.
1PM-(this is my peak time of day) Get as much work done as possible before 3pm when kids get home. I can usually do 6 DS articles in this time which amounts to $90.
3PM- My schedule is useless with so many kids around.
I know I've put up a schedule before but I can't stress the importance of it. There are alternatives that might work better for you.
2. Motivators
What this boils down to is rewarding yourself for a job well done. Let's say I'm dying to play the new Final Fantasy game but dang it, I have bills to pay! Should I do the bare minimum for extra game time? No, that's tempting but not practical. What I like to do is something like this:
Goal-I want to play Final Fantasy for 2 hours.
Requirement-I MUST complete $60 worth of work.
This setup does very well for me as a gamer. Any gamer knows certain days of the week are better than others for writing or web work. If you play WOW, Tuesday morning is maintenance until Noon. That gives you a lot of time to get plenty of work done as long as you don't spend that time on Facebook or something.
3. De-motivators
I'm going to blame Facebook for this one. That's because it appeals to people of all ages. I can't assume all my readers are desperately trying to unlock the best sniper rifle in Call of Duty:MW2 right? Facebook is like alcohol, a little bit each day is just fine but when you start to overdo it, the rest of your life is going to suffer. "You sit in that dirty diaper! I'm tryin to harvest my rice dammit!!". See, that's just not cool. Checking Facebook after each task you do seems perfectly ok but not if "checking" ends up being 20 minutes. Use your judgement.
Kids can be huge in this area. If you have little ones, you will lose the motivation to get work done quite often. You can only take so many crappy diapers, banshee screeches or "he hit me"'s before you throw your hands up and storm away from the computer. Even if you have a spouse at home, you know they are worthless and probably don't help in that area do they? Daycare is an option but then you are basically burning your money.
4. The Ultimate Goal
A friend of mine uses the "Ultimate Goal" motivator to get more work done each week than I do in a month. What they do is have a list of bills on a legal pad next to their mouse pad. As they work, they subtract what they make from each bill until they get to 0, then move on to the next bill. Once all the monthly bills are done, they add money to a section called "Bahamas". Last I checked they were at about $800 (they use 2 paypal accounts) in their Bahamas fund.
I envy that a lot but once my bills are paid, the rest is absorbed into "diapers" or "laundry soap".
5. Just Do What Works For You
I realize not everyone who reads this works at home full time. Maybe your spouse has a good job and you just work for fun money. Maybe you are a single Mother and if you don't find a way to make $1000/month you're screwed. Everyone has different goals but motivation should remain the same.
Once you figure out how to motivate yourself, you WILL succeed working at home no matter what you do. If one method doesn't work, try another one.
I still recommend Action Machine Pro (too lazy to link) if the price has dropped. It helps keep me on task when I actually turn it on!
Good Luck!
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