What is your motivation?

How do you fight procrastination? Do you need motivation to perform your tasks?

I believe that there are some developers that answer: I just like coding and solve problems. I forget to eat and even sleep while performing my tasks. News can wait, and I also easily say no to a family member or a friend that require my work time. OK, you are fantastic at managing your work tasks! What about other life tasks and chores? Don’t you easily forget what you wanted or were asked to do? Or you write everything down but rarely even look through your writings? What motivates you to write posts here? :smirk:

As for me, I want to have a system to stay motivated. What helps me is gamification. Have you heard about Habitica? It’s a game, but to progress there you need to do your real life tasks. Recently, they celebrated their 10th anniversary. And before they started, and I discovered them, I had to invent my own primitive motivation games in spreadsheets to keep different topics of my life covered. And I granted myself time to play a computer game, for example.

That is what motivated me: I wanted to make a move in a turn-based strategy, and I made myself do anything really useful for that. For example, I had a topic Contribution, so I had to help someone. I translated pages from OpenOffice Wiki into Russian to help a Russian company with their own Pro fork. They even met with me and presented their book with CD. So, what motivated me to contribute? Sudden presents I never used? A gratitude? No, thank you, it doesn’t motivate me. But gamification does.

Now with the help of Habitica, Org Mode and my buggish layer between them org-habitica written in Emacs Lisp, I motivate myself to do my daily routine and other tasks. :golf:

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