One of tips that Katy Piotrowski shared in Career Coward’s Guide to Job Searching was a great idea for motivating yourself to complete unpleasant, scary, or just plain boring tasks. Her idea, set up a system to reward yourself. Actually, she talked about two systems. For somethings a reward for doing, others a punishment for not doing. To each their own, but I’m more of a carrot than a stick.
For a reward system, say there is a task you know you need to do, but don’t particularly want to. Just this week, that was working over-time. I wanted to sleep in this weekend…at least one of the two days. But I also wanted the hours, or at least the over-time pay. So, I volunteered to come in for a weekend of shoveling gravel. And as a reward, I bought myself a steak for my dinner.
That was just a fun little example, but it works just as well for bigger things. I’ve used rewards for setting up informational interviews, studying, and even the act of job searching itself. Sometimes motivation lags, and I need to give myself a reward, even if the reward is just watching some TV that I planned on watching anyway. Maybe that qualifies as a punishment; I won’t let myself watch a program I wanted to see until the work is done.