I certainly do. I’m a slow writer, so it usually takes about two hours until I get to hit Publish. But I seem to become more productive when I leave the “office” and work somewhere else. The surroundings just have this magical effect on me. In fact, I’m now writing this post on the living room sofa—resting against a pile of cushions. Sometimes I go out to the porch and work there.

It feels liberating to work on your stuff someplace else once in a while, especially if you’re used to working in the office. It frees from the confines of your workroom. You don’t want to keep glancing at the same paintings and walls every time you try to gather inspiration.

You don’t have to attempt anything extreme. Of course it would be fantastic to leave your post, book a one-way ticket to the Bahamas, and just write blog posts while relishing an ice-cold beverage under a curving palm tree. But that might turn out to be destructive, as you might be tempted to toss away your laptop and jump into the water.

A simple change is what works best. If you have a backyard, take a reclining chair with you and start working under the sky. Or go to a nearby forest, and bring a tarp to spread over a flat piece of rock, which will serve as your temporary office. And don’t forget to bring a bottle of water with you to avoid having to go back inside to quench your thirst. You will want to minimize distractions. Only take with you what you need for completing your task.

What I’ve noticed is that changing your posture can also have a significant effect on your productivity. Whenever I feel uninspired while sitting in an ordinary upright position, I try to see if lying on my back helps me to draw inspiration. Also, suspending your legs above your torso affects your circulation, which can also boost your creative faculties. (I’m not medically certified, but this is just something that I’ve personally noticed.)

So, break free from your habits. Let yourself go crazy with ideas. Experiment with different locations. Go back to those places that yield success. Have fun.

Do you have any further tips? I would be happy to hear about them in the comments.

Last Wednesday I talked about how time limits can reduce procrastination, but this time I’d like to emphasize an important practice that has at least had a huge effect on my productivity, and more than that—motivation.

Really, it’s quite simple. It’s already written up there in the title… “Work first, then play.” Pure wisdom, and very practical for a change.

As you probably know, I dedicate a portion of my daily life to entertainment. And I must admit that sometimes it’s really hard to stick with a schedule. Weekends are the hardest. When I wake up on a Saturday morning, more often than not, I have these impulses to immerse myself in the world of entertainment, mainly video games and books, especially if I’ve been there the previous night.

The problem with that is that if you start your day with entertainment, you often need to make much greater an effort to transition from that mindset to a mindset of productivity. Even if you set time limits, it’s easy to be fooled by the abundance of time you have in the morning. Two hours can easily become three hours, four, and so on when you are tricked by the clock.

When you’re having fun, it almost pains you to let go of it. When you’re in the middle of an exciting Civ IV campaign or doing a Lost marathon, you just want to continue. One game leads to another, and a couple of Lost episodes easily keep you snared until the end of the season. It’s a vicious cycle.

The counter-technique is simple but works like magic. It’s so effective it’s ridiculous. (Or maybe I’m a slow learner and just simply didn’t get it before.) It doesn’t really require any practice or conditioning. You only need to fight the initial temptation of taking the easier entrance to your day. When you start with work in the morning and end it by 5 o’clock, the rest is all up to you. You no longer have to stress over what you still have to do in the evening or at night. So start with the important stuff first. It works. I only wish I had realized this when I was in school.

Studying at school and studying by yourself are like the yin and yang of education (terrible cliché, I know). The government takes you to school, and makes you learn a bunch of things, mostly related to subjects that are of no interest to you. But this raises a huge problem. Many of us didn’t like studying in school, especially in junior high school, and that impression about education has developed into a mess of negative emotions that flare up whenever we face the need to learn something new.

Your boss might tell you to get an additional certificate, and for this, you need to invest your free time in studying the materials for the exam. Or you might be thinking about going to college because it will bring you more job opportunities, but a bachelor’s degree is quite difficult to earn without studying. When we are forced to study, it naturally makes us resent studying.

Have you ever felt resentment when you were playing a roleplaying game on the Xbox, and you were enthusiastically looking for guides that tell you how to get the Chrysamere sword with enchanted powers? Or did it ever bother you that you had to read up on Paris Hilton or Wentworth Miller because you wanted to know more about them? These are both examples of the kind of voluntary studying that you would do on your own initiative. No one is forcing you to do it; you do it because it provides value to you.

The truth is that there really isn’t any difference in studying the lives of celebrities or studying Spanish philology. In one case, we’re learning why Paris Hilton decided to dabble in music; and in the other, we’re looking at why the Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands is sometimes closer to the Spanish used in distant Latin America than it is to the Spanish spoken in mainland Spain—which, in comparison, is just 600 miles off the Spanish coast. The questions follow the same, simple pattern, but only the subjects are different. Neither subject is intrinsically any better than the other. The one who decides its value is the person learning it.

It’s evident that people’s views on studying changes according to the context. For most people it’s easier and more fulfilling to read about holiday destinations than it is to study math. But once you get rid of the pre-conditioned beliefs and impressions about a school subject like math, learning can become equally or even more fulfilling than the “easy subjects”.

It’s ultimately the topic that matters at first. You need to be okay with it to willingly start learning. But even if you hate math, I strongly believe that you can transform the hate into attraction by approaching the subject with the right mindset. It’s enlightening when you finally understand that studying isn’t that bad after all—in fact, it’s pretty cool.

Some might argue that working every day on your personal projects can cause a burnout due to the constant strain you put on yourself. You don’t feel comfortable being shackled to a daily schedule, especially when you haven’t yet developed a habit out of it. But also, if you take a longer break you will, in turn, need a lot of acceleration to get back into orbit.

When you first start out, you are tempted to accomplish as much as you can in a short period of time. And when you are still “blessed” with this temporary passion and enthusiasm, you easily believe that nothing can stop you from working toward your goal. By all means, don’t trust your first emotions. This impulse is treacherous and should not be trusted. Working too hard in the beginning introduces an unrealistic routine to your life, which gradually becomes harder and harder to follow as you realize that life doesn’t revolve around a single project. The initial surge of excitement only keeps you going for so long. Then it slows down, and transforms into a drag. I guess most of us would be millionaires it if did last forever.

You have to find the sweet spot that lets you maintain excitement but doesn’t extinguish it. So how should you budget your time so that it doesn’t damage your passion?

A little bit every day

I used to follow my instincts and immerse myself in whatever I had gotten interested in, and the result I got was an incurable burnout. But all that changed when I learned something new from my mistakes. I learned that if spurts were the primary cause of burnouts I should start doing less but do it more consistently.

If you can control your impulses and limit your workload, you’ll notice that things don’t get easily burdensome. You can stay more committed to your project without having to sacrifice all other aspects of life. By following this path of doing less at a time, you are able to accelerate uniformly and gain momentum that flings you further into a productive habit.

Momentum = Habit

Momentum is ultimately what habits are about. We could say that the moon revolves around the earth due to a cosmic habit (caused by gravitation). Similarly, we might say that Andrew Carnegie’s success was the product of his habits—in other words, the deeds that led him to success because he never gave up.

Your Task

Now, if you think that you’re in need of changing your time-management habits because you have a tendency to lose momentum on your projects and tasks, I suggest that you try the following.

1. Stop working on your project until you complete this task.
2. Stop thinking about accomplishing a lot in a short time.
3. Think how much of your daily time you should invest in your project.
4. Break your tasks into smaller bits so you can reduce the amount of time you work on them daily.
5. If you’re unsure whether you should cut a single-day task in half, cut it in half anyway.
6. Schedule your tasks and set time limits. Example: Day 1 – Learn how to create a while loop in PHP (60 minutes); Day 2 – Learn how to create a for loop in PHP (60 minutes)
7. Don’t schedule too much for one day. I’ve noticed that allocating 60 minutes per day to learning a skill is enough in most cases.
8. If your time limit is too demanding, don’t be afraid to postpone the completion of the task. You’ve done plenty for the day, so you should be congratulating yourself.
9. Do allow yourself to have a day off (e.g. weekends).
10. Share your tips in the comments.

Studying is a subject a lot of us dread. We’ve all been through some form of schooling in our lives, and know how uninteresting and monotonous cramming information into our brain can be. I remember hating the home economics class back in junior high school because of all the cleaning we had to do. Plus, the food wasn’t good either. Studying can be a pain in the butt, but fortunately it can be turned into a passion.

We have to accept the fact that if we want to succeed in life, it usually takes a lot more than just filling out a lottery ticket. If we want to get a job as a sushi chef, we need to become experts in that field. Or, we might want to take up a new hobby, say, Tai Chi, which then calls for an action to start learning it.

The problem is that we tend to find excuses that prevent us from pursuing new goals.

“I’m too old to start doing sports.”
“I would need a lot of capital to start my own business.”
“I don’t have time to study world history.”

Eliminate negative emotions first

Excuses can be extinguished. We just need to eliminate all negative emotions, and find a way to encourage ourselves to learn something. If we harbor doubts about failure, we’re definitely not going to advance very far. Every conscious action is the result of a preceding thought.

If that preceding thought is negative and hinders productive actions, the resulting action will also be negative, or no action at all. Negative thoughts reproduce fast, so our first task is to eliminate the biggest negative thoughts that breed more excuses, and focus on positive thoughts. And though it may be hard to make a sudden change like this, we must understand and realize the fact that we will be stuck in this same deplorable situation unless we take action. Every individual being is in control of his or her own thoughts and actions—and no one else’s.

Find inspiration

Once we’ve made the decision to try to kill all negative thoughts about ourselves, we have to find a purpose, or multiple purposes if possible, for our new endeavor. We need to become active individuals who can get passionate about learning something new.

For me, inspiration has been the winning element in my own pursuits. The reason why I took up kung fu was Jet Li’s Shaolin Temple movies from the 80s. I was 15 years old, and I wanted to move as swiftly and as gracefully as he did in his fighting scenes. That is what inspired me to learn and keep continuing with kung fu. And I would occasionally go back to his movies to find more inspiration.

The world is full of inspiring people. Here’s a list of just a few of them.

• Athletes. Michael Jordan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ryoko Tani
• Comedians. Pablo Francisco, John Cleese, Charlie Chaplin, Eddie Izzard, Yoshio Kojima
• Political figures. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Tarja Halonen
• Religious figures. The Dalai Lama,Thich Nhat Hanh, Lao Tzu
• TV hosts. Oprah, Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart, Howard Stern
• Writers. Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, e.e. cummings, Mika Waltari, David DeAngelo, Dale Carnegie
• Actors and actresses. Gillian Anderson, Sean Connery, Sigourney Weaver, Christopher Walken, Toshiro Mifune
• Film directors. George Lucas, Quentin Tarantino, Sofia Coppola
• Magazines. Fortune, Playboy, The Economist
• Who do you get inspired by? Please share it in the comments. Thanks!

In the modern age, technology has blessed us with the gift of global communication. Such masterminds as Sir Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web) and Steve Chen (YouTube) have endowed us with the means to share information among millions of people. While the Internet can be seen as an electronic landfill that houses whole libraries of misleading information, it can be a priceless source of inspiration.

Going online and connecting with people is an effective way to get excited about things. Connecting with people doesn’t, however, necessarily mean that we have to engage them in conversation. I mean, it is unlikely for most of us to start an IM conversation with someone like Richard Dawking or Al Gore. We can instead passively draw inspiration by listening to them or reading their texts. They’re still talking to us through a channel, but we just can’t respond to them directly. It is enough if we can get positive influence from them, and convert it into actions that lead to success.

To get things started, we must put an end to our negative thoughts that hold us back, and learn to embrace the world in a positive and constructive way. The way to improve and develop ourselves is to learn more, so let’s get interested in things by gathering inspiring stimuli from some of the gifted people of this planet, and sail towards personal success.

I mentioned in my post on self-motivation techniques that doing less in the beginning is a good rule for staying motivated. I’ve found that this simple maxim is particularly effective when we want to be consistent at studying.

This tip is useful for self-learners specifically, because we are not studying within the confines of an institution, and are therefore not obligated to satisfy certain criteria within a set timelimit. But if you are confident to apply this approach in your scholastic pursuits, you are more than welcome to do so, and I would be happy to hear about it too.

If you have a burning desire to learn something new, a good way to keep the motivation aflame is simply to study less in the beginning. The thing with initial motivation is that it hasn’t transformed into passion yet. The signs I’ve collected from personal experience show that we just tend to madly fall in love with a fresh hobby or activity. Everything is so new that we are easily able to sustain motivation. There are so many things to explore in the beginning. But as we gain more knowledge and experience on the topic, we tend to lose much of the initial excitement. It’s natural. And it can’t be helped… But there is a way to convert the initial excitement into longer-lasting motivation.

When we are emotionally attached to an activity—say, skateboarding—we desire to do it all the time. We lose our sense of time because we’re so engaged in what we’re doing. We just don’t want to leave the precious skateboard alone. Skateboarding burns a lot of energy, so we also have to take occasional breaks to refuel. But what are we thinking about while nibbling at our sandwiches? Of course. Skateboarding. So if we want this emotion to last, what should we do? If indulgence causes exhaustion in the long run, we should see what the opposite action of doing less brings us.

Temptation.

We will be learning less in the beginning, but does it matter when we possess something far more valuable that we will definitely benefit from in the long run? Most of us aren’t going to morph into experts overnight anyway so why rush? Let temptation propel you to continue.

Patience.

We will learn through patience. Consistent learning in small doses lets the flame burn more fiercely. When we have something to look forward to, we are constantly feeding the fire. We are keeping ourselves on our toes. We don’t feel full, like our stomachs do after a generous Christmas feast. We should try to keep our stomachs half-full. And until we get the rhythm of learning a new skill, we should always leave plenty for tomorrow and not try to do as much as we can in one day. So rather than spending three hours building your Greek vocabulary, you should do 10 minutes.

Think of it as a flask of water in the Gobi. Sipping on it will keep you going. The difference, of course, being the fact that you’d die in the dunes if you didn’t have access to refills. In our case, however, we have a magic flask that’s equipped with auto-refills.

I work most effectively when I have a clear goal in mind. But sometimes it’s hard to come up with a plausible goal that boosts my motivation to study something. Having too vague or too broad goals is bad too. What if I told myself that my next goal is to learn HTML and CSS? I’d say that’s a pretty vague goal. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that’s a bad goal—quite the contrary—but it’s too ambiguous to spark motivation. You see, motivation is an emotion that has a will of its own. We can’t just switch it on and off whenever we need to use it. It’s hard to reason with motivation. We need to create a setting for it that will rouse it from its slumber.

Motivation is like attraction. It’s not a choice. (I’m paraphrasing David DeAngelo). No matter how hard you try to get a girl to like you, you’re not going to succeed if your only goal is to get her. Why? Because she’ll only see you as a needy guy who is only communicating to her how desperate he really is. That’s beside the point though. Let me get back to our topic.

So instead of setting a broad goal like “learn HTML and CSS”—or even better—”learn web design”, why not go for a certification? “Get certified by W3Schools.” If your goal is to learn HTML and CSS because you want to work as a web developer, you can sign up to get an official certificate from a variety of authorities on the topic. Not only will it drive you to learn the skills, it will also be a handsome asset on your resumé.

Getting certified means that you have to work towards a clear goal with a deadline. You have to pass the exam. And you have to prepare for doing so before crossing the deadline. Having a clear goal and a deadline lets you know what needs to be done. Many certificates are reasonably priced, but if you slack off and blow the exam, you know that you’re only wasting your money. This situation stimulates the senses, and it can be a powerful source of motivation.

Signing up for certification provides you with motivation, a plan, a deadline, credentials (if you pass the exam), and the resulting skills. Use these qualities to your own advantage by getting, or being sponsored to get a certificate.

How many times have we started a project with a lot of exciting ideas, burning enthusiasm, and high hopes, only to later find it scrapped and buried in the bin? It’s a great feeling to harness such energy in the beginning, but it’s sad how easy it is to lose it after the first few weeks or months.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could hold on to that feeling of motivation? If we could continue working without losing excitement. Do we need to obtain online psychology degrees or meditate daily in order to have better control over our thought process and feelings? Motivation and momentum can be fleeting, but without it a project is near impossible to complete. Is there a way to achieve great things, and maintain constant enthusiasm even though setbacks? It is possible, and it requires some practice, but we can start by making a habit out of the following techniques.

1. Do less in the beginning. If you have a new project (eg. your new blog) on your hands and work 10 hours on it during the first couple of days, you can easily suffer a burnout. It’s better to work an hour or two, leave the project alone, do something else, and come back the next day. This will keep your motivation up, because you’re not overworking.
2. Set short-term goals. Setting goals and scheduling them gives you a simple task list for your project. You can assign a task or two for each day that you work on the project, and feel comfortable working toward a visible goal. This way you can also work more effectively and without procrastinating, because you already know beforehand what you are supposed to complete each day.
3. Make an outline for your project. With bigger tasks it’s always convenient to have an outline that shows what the final product should roughly look like. You will also have a better idea of what you’re actually working on. If we just come up with an idea and mindlessly start working on it, we lose track easily and finally end up with little motivation.
4. Postpone working on the project. After making an outline, it’s good to sleep on it. You’ll not only get better ideas, but also fuel your motivation by stimulating anticipation. But you should frequently come back to the project by thinking of new ideas. It’s also bad to leave it untouched, because then you’ll just forget about it. I like to keep a journal for new projects.
5. Talk to someone about your project. When you talk to someone about your plans, it attaches you to the project. You’ll also have more incentive to work on it, now that someone else too knows about it.

Obstacles are inevitable in whatever we do, so we have to learn to accept them. And success often requires a lot of commitment, so we should be careful not to lose motivation at a critical moment. Sometimes it’s good to put off a project for a while and take a break, but at the same time we should do something to ensure that we’re not going to give up on it. For example, when I want to take a longer break from a project, I mark down the next step in my calendar to serve as a reminder.

Motivation is a critical factor in success, so we should take the right steps to learn how to maintain it. And it feels much better if we can take pleasure in doing something that we normally think of as boring (school projects come to my mind).

Next, I would be happy to hear your tips on sustaining motivation. Please share them in the comments below.