# motivation: i'm way too lazy.

some days i struggle to get myself to do anything at all. i wake up, do my daily routines but then i spend most of my time with work related stuff like reading and responding to emails. when i get home i play with family and afterwards i go to bed and sleep until tomorrow. i do not spend time on hobby projects or on learning new stuff. weekends are not more productive either. when i was a kid, i found computer programming quite fun and exciting. i enjoyed solving project euler puzzles, acm style programming competition problems and writing small tools here and there. in order to do those i needed to learn about math, algorithms, programming languages and best practices, operating systems, english language and many other topics. but today? i feel like i am not learning new things. that would be fine as long as i would be working on something meaningful instead, harvesting all the knowledge. that is not happening either. it is like my time is flying by and i do not have anything to show up in exchange. i am not investing my time into anything.

there are a few differences in my current life compared to my kid life though. when i was a kid i had a lot more free time. i was much earlier home compared to my typical work day. when i was home, i had private room where people left me alone so i could do anything without disturbances. today i do not have any privacy. at work i am in an open plan office and at home i have my computer in the living room so that i do not isolate myself too much from others. this makes concentration harder especially if others are doing distracting activities. this somewhat explains why i feel i have little free time and the easier distractability but it does not explain the lack of motivation i am feeling.

to clarify this lack of motivation is not depression. i do not feel depressed. it is more like i feel that everything that is important already exists so i do not see the need to create more software. now that i grew up and got a broad enough overview about the software field, i feel like the software world hit a plateau in the late 1980s as people finished implementing all the obvious software and today's software and computing is just mostly fluff. i feel like we are over-softwarizing our environment where all we would need is just saner practices or solutions and then we would not need said software. it is probably better to leave this topic for a separate blog entry in the future for now as it is off topic.

it is not only software i am not that much interested though. achieving anything for me is a burden. let it be exercise, cooking, cleaning. to compensate i just avoid having bad habits and thus i do not have problems with health or messiness. i walk to the office, i keep a super clean desk, i do not smoke, i do not drink alcohol or sugary drinks, i do not buy crap i do not need, i do not even have money on me most of the time and so on.

yet i still function. i can still keep my job, i still occasionally make a tool for myself, clean the house, or just generally keep myself alive. how so? i am definitely not intrinsically motivated to do these things. the motivation comes from external sources. it is either something annoying me or somebody nagging me. if i am annoyed with a flaky or inflexible tool, i am somewhat inclined to write my own version of it. if somebody is pestering me about something, i am somewhat inclined to do what they want to stop them from pestering me. the latter has a quite a strong effect on me. if somebody sends me a message, i have this very strong urge to always have the last word. it is almost and ocd like tick. if that message has a simple request or a question, i have an urge to do whatever it asked me or come up with a very good reason why i cannot do it. these two things get me through my life these days. if the toilet is so dirty that i am annoyed then i clean it. if at work somebody assigns me a small bug to fix, i fix it.

on the other hand if the floor is only a little dirty, i will probably not do anything about it. i am not annoyed so it is fine as it is. as for the second case: if at work somebody assigns me a big project that needs a lot of consideration and coordination, i am at a loss. driving such work requires a lot of inner motivation which i lack. in such cases i rely on having management aiding me. talking through a project with another person, splitting it into smaller pieces and then having a manager pestering me about it really does help me. it is no wonder rubber duck debugging is a thing, it is just that a rubber duck is not as motivating as a human could be.

i recently came across the concept of "accountability partner". once you find a partner, both of you agree to a set of goals, you keep periodically reporting to each other about the progress of your goals and keep each other accountable for those goals. it is similar to coaching. i think the difference is that while a coach coaches you, you do not really give anything in return while you do provide value for your accountability partner. the latter does not feel too much of a one sided burden. if i were to stop adhering to my goals, that might make the partner also stop adhering which would make me feel guilty so i am personally incentivized to adhere to my goals. basically this is setting up the nagging feeling for myself. i have not really tried this. if i ever find myself wanting to do a small project, i would totally try this. now if only i had friends for this. maybe acquiring more friends should be one project. oh well, something to think about.

so to sum up: i am no longer motivated intrinsically about things like when i was a kid. i can get around this by having an environment that still motivates me extrinsically to do things that i really need to get done. however it does not really lead to working on original, novel things. for that i have no solution.

edit on 2023-08-05: i no longer feel this way. i have my own private room again and @/imtasks keeps me motivated thorough the day.

published on 2018-05-26, last modified on 2023-08-05

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