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Positive Perspectives on Progress

November 6, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

[A]fter a year of practice in my parents garage I came to suck a lot less, and by the time I gave up the instrument I had risen to the ranks of the “Merely OK.” But I didn’t feel “Merely OK.” I felt like a king, because I knew from whence I came. I knew that great distance (and it is great) between “Utter Suckage” and “Merely OK.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates, comparing learning the djembe as a child to learning French and the awesome that comes from “becoming good at something which you kind of naturally sucked at.”

Check out our post about breaking down your perspective on progress by recognizing the small triumphs that happen every day and tracking that great distance on the road to feeling like a king.

Filed Under: The Progress Principle Tagged With: Intrinsic Motivation, Productivity, Progress

Stop Worrying, Start Living

October 29, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

I’ve gotten better at the drudgery of real life, but I still suffer from bad habits. I put off difficult tasks, and then I feel guilty about putting off these tasks, and I blow that guilt out of proportion, and then I rub all these bad feelings around my insides like broken glass. I become a worry machine. It is not an overstatement to say that the despair of these tiny, accumulated failures keeps me from truly living, because it creates in me a need to hide from the world. I needed to figure out a way to get right with the world—not because I was going to die soon, but because I probably wasn’t.

Sarah Hepola, on the weight of to-do lists.

Filed Under: Done List Tagged With: Intrinsic Motivation, Productivity, To-Do List

Just Keep Swimming!

October 24, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Just Keep

Here’s a little sunny and fish encouragement. Keep making tiny, wonderful triumphs happen!

Filed Under: The Progress Principle Tagged With: Intrinsic Motivation, Progress

Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Trick to Feeling Marvelously Efficient

October 23, 2012 by I Done This Support 5 Comments

I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon among productive people: they often overlook their own productivity.  The more productive you are, the more likely you are to get down on yourself and think at the end of the day, “I wasn’t very productive today.”

Because ambitious people measure themselves by their progress towards achieving audacious goals, they often can’t appreciate a single day’s worth of tiny, incremental advancements that they’ve made.  Plus, the fuller your day is with activity, the harder it seems to pinpoint what exactly it is that you did at all.

image

Between starting Netscape, Opsware, Ning, and Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen has done monumental work in his career and seems particularly at risk to fall into this trap.  To arm himself against the daunting imperative of making meaningful progress toward his big objectives, Marc came up with a system: the Anti-Todo List.  It’s his way to stop and recognize his own accomplishments, measured not by a project’s impressive success, but in increments, to fuel his motivation for getting stuff done day after day.

Continue Reading

Filed Under: Done List Tagged With: Intrinsic Motivation, Progress, Self-Reflection

Start Small, Think Big!

October 22, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.

Paul Graham‘s advice for startups, which applies to tackling challenges in general.

Start small, and then onward and forward to big things!

Filed Under: The Progress Principle Tagged With: Intrinsic Motivation

Dealing With Office Anger

October 18, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Not Cranky

Don’t get all inner-Angrybot at work. Eilene Zimmerman wrote recently in the NYT about how to deal with office anger. Tips on how to deal include writing it down:

It might help to vent by writing down your feelings and thoughts, says Deborah Grayson Riegel, founder of Elevated Training in Hewlett, N.Y. The writing process may help you resolve your feelings — and you may want to share what you’ve written with friend, a spouse or someone at work you trust. “That person can read it and tell you if they see something in the situation you aren’t seeing,” Ms. Riegel says.

Don’t suppress strong emotions; this gets in the way of creativity, thinking clearly, and good judgment. Head over to Buffer to read our post about how emotion affects work and motivation!

Filed Under: Lifehacks Tagged With: Intrinsic Motivation

Felicia Day: Just Do It!

October 9, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Stop planning to do that thing you want to do and just do it!

Felicia Day, Lifehacker, I’m Felicia Day, and This is How I Work

Favorite

Filed Under: Lifehacks Tagged With: Intrinsic Motivation

Ray Bradbury says Action is Hope

October 3, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.

Ray Bradbury, in an interview with the Paris Review.

Maybe we should make an iDoneThis theme song out of these words, they’re so apt.

Filed Under: The Progress Principle Tagged With: Intrinsic Motivation

Intrigued by the Power of Kawaii? Us too!

October 2, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Thanks to a study by Japanese scientists at Hiroshima University’s Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, titled “The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus”, you can be guilt-free when looking at photos of ridiculously cute animals at work.

Published in the journal, PLOS ONE, the study found that viewing photos of cute animals — which induces positive emotions — results in improved “subsequent performance in tasks that require behavioral carefulness, possibly by narrowing the breadth of attentional focus.”

Well then! Here are a few cuties to focus you at work today:

kawaii: african pygmy hedgehog

kawaii: dogs

kawaii: rodent

puppies

Filed Under: The Science of Productivity Tagged With: Focus on Work, Intrinsic Motivation, Productivity

Exercising Towards Happiness

September 11, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

It’s how [exercise] make me feel: more energized, less stressed, more productive, more engaged and, yes, happier — better able to smell the roses and cope with the inevitable frustrations of daily life.

Jane E. Brody, NYT Well, “Changing Our Tune on Exercise”

Brody writes about how reframing the message of why we should exercise as improving current happiness and well-being is more motivating than using hard-to-see long-term goals like losing weight and prevented disease.

Filed Under: The Science of Productivity Tagged With: Intrinsic Motivation, Productivity

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