It’s been a cloudy and rainy week in Seattle. Before I moved here I would have thought that’s a normal sentence, but it’s really not. Seattle is a wonderfully sunny place. Even when the day starts out crazy cloudy it’s sunny with a clear blue sky by the afternoon. This week has not been like that. We have been experiencing downpours this past week, which have kept the skies grey. It being January the fact that the sun rises at 8am and sets around 4pm has not been helping.
Most of this week I struggled with motivation to do my work. I could make myself crank out whatever was due that day and complete easy check-mark type tasks, but if something involved deep thought I avoided it all costs. I had no motivation. I saught advice from my partner and my Mom. Unfortunately they didn’t help too much. My Mom mentioned that during her 30 year career she very rarely had motivation so she would get to work early, force herself to complete her tasks in the serenity of a quiet, empty office and fill the rest of the day with any pleasures she could, such as meeting with her team or going to lunch. I’m sure she’s exaggerating a bit 🙂 – I’ve seen her work very hard, but it’s an interesting concept. Get it all done in the beginning and then relax. Unfortunately that didn’t work for me.
My partner is a programmer and has read a few blog posts about “flow” which is a state where you’re almost oblivious to the world and just completely immersed in your project. I’ve had that happen to me a few times over the years: when you’re cranking so hard on something that you look up and hours have passed. That’s actually my favorite 🙂 . It’s like I awaken from a trance and my work is done with only a few hours of my life given as trade. My partner talks about not feeling guilty when you’re working through a hard problem and distracting yourself with something else like video games or the internet – your brain is still working on the problem. I wasn’t sure this was the case with me, but I couldn’t make myself work on it so days passed without progress.
Then this morning I realized something: I was motivated! I was ready to work and I even had a plan for how to tackle that deep thought project! I started working an hour earlier than normal and by 9am had finished everything I wanted to do. It was amazing! This experience has helped me come to terms with a little of what my partner was saying. My brain was working on the problem while I was doing other things and when I was ready the motivation came. Hopefully this will help me be less hard on myself going forward if I don’t have that deep thought motivation for a few days.
I read an article the other day from the NY Times that talked about how the standard work day (9am-5pm) was created for physical labor – not mental. It went on to talk about how it’s unnatural to expect a human being to mentally work hard for 8 hours in a row and most of us can actually only do maybe 3-4 hours of deep thinking work. This was a bit of a revelation. I shouldn’t be ragging on myself because I don’t feel motivated – even though I’m meeting all my deadlines and receiving great performance reviews. This is how humans work. I need to let the motivation come.