Work motivation

The back story

I always had problems of putting my 100% on the job. I do enough plus a little bit more to complete and impress the customers and nothing else and life has been like that for a while. The nine to five job doesn’t motivate me nor teach me and I come home everyday exhausted from the effort to keep up.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the skill I have to keep up with, it’s the sheer number of distraction that is wearing me out and a lack of a clear defined goal. Ever since my investment returns have come close to the limit where I can be self sufficient without needing a paying job I have started to wonder (no tempted even) about what it will be like if I work for myself? I took a day off to find out.

The good

First and foremost, motivation and focus. I was able to wake up at 8AM, get to work right away and stop at 6PM. I literally had to tear myself away from my desk to eat lunch because there were so much I wanted to do.

The bad

Like a new kid on the block, I was not used to the freedom and am still influenced by my current job’s need to multitask. As a consequence my mind wandered and I spent a significant amount of time trying to stay on one task at a time.

The ugly

There’s nothing that I wanted do that can be completed within a day. So by the end of it, I had to do swap all the effort into a pagefile. Another fragmented effort. The awesome day, also gave me a huge adrenaline rush which lead to insomnia.

The conclusion

Because of motivation and the interest in the work I was doing, I became a super worker able to give 120% of my time without complaint and feeling fufilled at the end. It made me feel better because I’ve started feeling like a slacker. I also proved that a long chunk of uninterrupted time is more productive than 1.5 times the same amount of time spread out or interrupted over several days. At least for me.