I got stuck at work today. I was supposed to have a meeting lasting the whole morning but, unprecedentedly, it was all done and dusted in about an hour. Now usually a meeting finishing early would be a cause for celebration, providing a whole chunk of unexpected bonus time in which to do something useful. But alas, today I just couldn’t get started on any of the multitude of tasks that were waiting for my attention – marking projects, filling out my Performance Development Review form, revising some degree course web-pages to name the three most urgent.
I do tend to suffer from difficulty getting started at times, experiencing a complete lack of motivation despite having limited time and unlimited tasks, and it can be a real problem. I have tried to analyse why my motivation gets stuck sometimes but there is no real pattern to when things go wrong – it just appears out of nowhere. But a significant part of the problem is that the tasks awaiting me are just somewhat boring and have little direct value for me personally. They are just tedious tasks that need to be done that I don’t really want to do and so sometimes, I simply don’t.
In the end, after a period of frustration, I did get going, and partly this was because I told myself that I would have to do the tasks sometime so it might as well be now. The answers to problems of this type are invariably obvious and simple but it helps to remind yourself of them sometimes, which us why I grabbed a post-it-note, scribbled a few words on it and stuck it on my phone as a constant visible reminder for future times I feel myself getting stuck.
Tim O'Hare 