2nd June 2008 | No Comments »
How Jerry Seinfeld Keeps Me Blogging & Jogging
Been a little quiet around here lately hasn’t it? Plus the design could do with a bit of an overhaul, as there’s a danger the site could fall apart if I don’t get round to looking at it soon.
The reason for the lack of updates? Most of my online time now gets spent either on my personal finance blog, Money Watch, or tweeting for said blog when Twitter isn’t down. (That reminds me, I must cream off the personal tweets to my original account, and leave the money entries to my MoneyWatch account - also, check out new microblogging service, Plurk.).
Anyhow, with 2 kids running around the house, it’s often difficult to find the time or motivation for blogging or developing the sites in the way in which I’d like to. But over the past few months, I’ve been using a method of motivation apparently used by comedian Jerry Seinfeld to motivate him to write. All you need is a calendar and a pen - each day you achieve a certain goal, which in my case is either writing a new blog post for Money Watch, or going for a jog, then you colour in that day on the calendar. The idea is that you don’t want to break the chain - as consecutive days get coloured in and you build up the chain, it should become more and more difficult to miss a day.
It’s a funny little psychological battle over something that is essentially meaningless, but for the last few months it has managed to keep me motivated to write, and I’ve now started applying it to my physical exercise.
Of course, there are plenty of other things it can motivate you to do, such as losing weight or getting out of debt.
And for those of us who’d rather keep track of these things online there’s a useful tool called Don’t Break The Chain which will help you manage multiple chains, plus if you have a website, you can display your chains on there, adding an extra level of motivation if you know others can see how you’re getting on. Here is an example of how it can look.
If you’re logged in, you simply have to click on a day to mark it as complete.
Whilst it might not work for everyone, if you’re looking for a simple motivational technique, it’s worth a shot. Read more about the origins of this technique at Lifehacker.
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WV4 is the online home of Rob Lewis, featuring a blog covering a variety of subjects, mainly web design, CSS and PHP, as well as featuring useful links to other websites.
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