Keep on moving

I've never really thought before about how my motivation slips and slides around the different areas of my life. It's not quite a zero sum game, but it's close. I guess that's not surprising - after all no matter how much you might want to get tonnes of things done there's only so much time and energy available in my life. Still, I've been really noticing it recently. Over the Christmas break, I was working through a pretty dull task for SPOCC (writing a load of government reports) and my motivation was really really low. I'd do one and then think "Right, can't cope with any more of that - time for a break" and hit the net for an hour. In contrast, my support motivation was really high. There seemed to be loads of interesting requests out there to play with and I did a ton of answer writing over that period.

So far, so ordinary - dull bit of work diverts motivation elsewhere. What surprised me this time was that my motivation changed without anything in the situation changing really. I was still working on the reports - about 1/3 of the way through after about a week and a bit of actual work days. The deadline hadn't changed - wasn't really looming even. Yet for some reason I suddenly got worried about it. There were some more pieces of work which were also going to have to be completed before the distant deadline and I guess my brain did some mental arithmetic and gave my motivation a kick, shifting it overnight. Suddenly I was able to focus on the task I was supposed to be doing and give it what it needed. I made much faster progress and was rewarded by discovering that I could re-use a load of stuff, which made the second half go much quicker than the first. And that spurt of motivation has carried over into the next couple of tasks I've been working on.

While this is unquestionably a good thing, it does mean that my motivation to work the board for support has declined a little. I'm mostly focusing on syn at the moment because that's where I want to get privs next. I also show my face in styles periodically to make a few simple approvals and I am hatching plans for my manatee which is fun. And this is all swings and roundabouts. I doubt I'll experience such an extreme swing as I did over Christmas for a while but I'm not back at my equilibrium yet.

What I really wish is that I could control that swing thing. It would be so useful to be able to look at my list of things to-do on Life Balance and say "Yes, I'm going to focus on that today and give it my all, and then tomorrow I can move on to that". It just doesn't work like that though - instead I have to do my best, adjusting the effort scale for my various tasks, to balance things out with whatever kick I'm on at any given time.

Of course, today, I have motivation for nothing at all. This is because my cold has suddenly made a resurgence and this has of course meant that my sleep is really broken again so my energy levels are at about zero. What I *want* to do is just go back to sleep, but somewhere I must find the motivation for my day. I think I will reward myself for going to the gym with a caramel slice.

(no subject)

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