I find that a great way to self-motivate is to tie an action to intermittent, stimulating rewards. That’s how mice get addicted to pushing levers, right? That’s how people get addicted to WoW and similar games, right? But you can harness the power for good instead of evil.
Exercise. I keep an exercise log in a public forum. Every now and then, someone comes by with a comment like “Great workout!” The prospect of getting those intermittent, stimulating responses—which I only get if I post regularly—is great motivation to keep exercising.
Studying. I often find that my problem, when reading a technical book, is that I finish a chapter and don’t review and summarize it. I’m in too much of a hurry. Solution: now I post summaries on a blog. I get intermittent rewards in the form of blog hits and comments.
The general theme here is that publicizing your goals is an easy, effective way to get intermittent rewards.
It occurs to me that it might be very useful to have some sort of ‘hub’ for such blogs—something similar to the autism hub (which I don’t actually recommend; all the bloggers I’ve liked have left the hub in the last 6 months or so).
It seems to me that that would have the potential to increase the chance of getting positive feedback, and also the chance of getting feedback if you start to slip—if the blogs are sorted by the date of their most recent post, it’s fairly easy for someone to scroll down to the last few entries and post comments along the lines of “hey, are you still doing this?”. (Perhaps each participant could commit to making at least one comment of either type per month, or something.)
I took some time to play with some tools, and managed to turn out a simple version of this. (Thanks in part to evelynm who gave me a the idea to use google docs when I was stuck for an output method.)
The web page is here, currently using the most recent posts of the top 5 LW contributors as dummy data. It lists the most recent item from each RSS feed on its list, in chronological order.
If you have a blog that you’d like to have added, email me.
Edit: Found a bug, not sure if it’s solvable. I’ll keep playing with this, but might give up without feedback.
on quality: it takes me about 40 minutes to write a summary of something that I’ve already read and understood. That’s about the level of detail and quality I need, for my own learning purposes. It might even be informative to other people. Summarizing is a modest goal, I think, and it shouldn’t take anything like “genius.”
I find that a great way to self-motivate is to tie an action to intermittent, stimulating rewards. That’s how mice get addicted to pushing levers, right? That’s how people get addicted to WoW and similar games, right? But you can harness the power for good instead of evil.
Exercise. I keep an exercise log in a public forum. Every now and then, someone comes by with a comment like “Great workout!” The prospect of getting those intermittent, stimulating responses—which I only get if I post regularly—is great motivation to keep exercising.
Studying. I often find that my problem, when reading a technical book, is that I finish a chapter and don’t review and summarize it. I’m in too much of a hurry. Solution: now I post summaries on a blog. I get intermittent rewards in the form of blog hits and comments.
The general theme here is that publicizing your goals is an easy, effective way to get intermittent rewards.
It occurs to me that it might be very useful to have some sort of ‘hub’ for such blogs—something similar to the autism hub (which I don’t actually recommend; all the bloggers I’ve liked have left the hub in the last 6 months or so).
It seems to me that that would have the potential to increase the chance of getting positive feedback, and also the chance of getting feedback if you start to slip—if the blogs are sorted by the date of their most recent post, it’s fairly easy for someone to scroll down to the last few entries and post comments along the lines of “hey, are you still doing this?”. (Perhaps each participant could commit to making at least one comment of either type per month, or something.)
I took some time to play with some tools, and managed to turn out a simple version of this. (Thanks in part to evelynm who gave me a the idea to use google docs when I was stuck for an output method.)
The web page is here, currently using the most recent posts of the top 5 LW contributors as dummy data. It lists the most recent item from each RSS feed on its list, in chronological order.
If you have a blog that you’d like to have added, email me.
Edit: Found a bug, not sure if it’s solvable. I’ll keep playing with this, but might give up without feedback.
URL?
http://numberblog.wordpress.com
I’m all glad it works for you, but 1) does not work if you don’t start. 2) does not work if you care about quality (except if you’re a genius).
on quality: it takes me about 40 minutes to write a summary of something that I’ve already read and understood. That’s about the level of detail and quality I need, for my own learning purposes. It might even be informative to other people. Summarizing is a modest goal, I think, and it shouldn’t take anything like “genius.”
Quality matters if you have a community that’s interested in your work; you’ll get more “nice job” comments if it IS a nice job.