Law Students

I Am A Kindergartener

By Pete

I’m always on the look-out for ways to motivate me to do things that I want to do regularly but don’t have to do and aren’t particularly fun. Or things I want to do regularly, are fun, but sometimes I just forget.

Like blogging, for example. Lots of the big gaps in posting over the years have been days when I wanted to write but just couldn’t find the perfect thing to write about. I think that’s silly, though, for a lot of reasons. The most prevalent of which is this: you don’t become a better writer by waiting around for the perfect topic. You get better by actually writing, but I get lazy and boring sometimes and I just feel like there’s nothing interesting to say.

I’m currently experimenting with a new way to keep me on track. The idea is this: once you’ve got a streak going, it should be easier to motivate you to keep doing something just so you don’t break up the awesome run you have going. This is a good idea, but unless I actually keep track, it doesn’t seem important.

Enter: Don’t Break The Chain

It takes those things that you want to do daily and gives you an easy visual representation of your success or failure. So when I’ve been doing something three days in a row, when I might otherwise just blow something off, I don’t want to leave a little gap in the calendar, so I do whatever it is that I need to do.

This, apparently, reminds certain people of motivating kindergarteners with gold star stickers.

Yeah, maybe, but it’s been working. This will be the 10th consecutive day of blog posting, and why am I here writing? To get my stupid gold star.

And I did. HA!

Full post as published by PeteHoliday.com on February 17, 2009 (boomark / email).