The Progress Principle

Here are articles discussing Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer's study on motivation at work, The Progress Principle.

It turns out that 95% of managers are wrong about what motivates people at work. It's not financial incentive or stress--rather, the most powerful motivator at work is the sense that you're making progress towards a meaningful goal.

Pablo Picasso on Inspiration

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

Picasso

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.” — Pablo Picasso

Hope inspiration, or at least some ice cream, finds you working today!

Tech/Life Balance is a Myth: The Best of the Internet

October 5, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Here’s the weekly round-up of the best of the blog & links we’ve shared on the interwebs! Happy Friday!

How to use iDoneThis to leverage The Progress Principle.

Tech/life balance is a myth.

3 ways to think deeply at work.

Introverts are awesome leaders too!

Love is the way to, um, conquer your competition.

(photo via fuckyeahdogsoncomputers)

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.

Leverage the Progress Principle with iDoneThis

October 1, 2012 by Ginni Chen 1 Comment

We’ve written before about the secret to happiness and motivation at work. Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer wrote a whole book about it called The Progress Principle. They found that the number one driver of a positive inner work life, the key to motivated, engaged, and productive employees, is making progress on meaningful work, even if that progress is a small win.

In a recent 99U conference talk, Professor Amabile shared the best way to achieve those small wins and leverage the progress principle in our daily lives: keeping a work diary. We’re so pleased that she suggested using iDoneThis as an online work diary tool, and we thought we could break down how iDoneThis contributes to the four benefits of keeping a work diary that she identifies:

Being Sorta Good At Something

September 5, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

suckin at something

A little Adventure Time encouragement to those of us who want to be sorta good at something. One step at a time.

On Moving Forward, Not Backward

August 15, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Here’s to moving forward day by day!

The Story Spine

August 14, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Teresa Norton writes at HBR about how a simple exercise called the story spine can help you get unstuck and make change while “living truthfully” at work.

The story spine is a narrative tool created by playwright, improviser, and theater educator Kenn Adams used to craft well-structured stories. As Norton’s post shows, the story spine can be used as a personal narrative tool to help you make sense of your situation, envision and then enact positive change, and make key self-discoveries.

The story spine structure goes like this: