Heather Allen

This post is 22 days in the making. My laundry was only folded this morning after being a pile on my bed for three days. Sometimes I forget to take the filter and coffee grinds out of the coffee maker for a week or longer. I bought a second bookcase eight months ago for my ever expanding book collection, and it still remains in its packaging. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy still needs to be read; I’ve been in the middle of it for seven months. I’m still half, whole, or multiple seasons behind on shows I started. What I want to convey here is that I have a lot of trouble self-motivating.

I would consider myself lazy and a #hardcore procrastinator (laundry being the most prominent example), and I needed some sort of motivation to continue even the most basic tasks, which is why have started telling myself “I’m an efficient person.” It’s surprisingly very motivating for me. It reminds me that I have accomplished much grander things (grad school thesis, moving to NYC) and this miniscule task is not going to ruin me.

Sometimes I fall asleep at 10pm with my computer in my lap and my dinner plate on my bed (a night nap?) and wake up at 2am to do my nighttime routine: brush teeth, wash face, take out contacts. This is not my ideal situation. I should be able to motivate myself out of bed at 10 and go to sleep like a regular person. I don’t want for that to become my normal routine.

And I think that’s also an important part of self-motivating, getting into a routine. For laundry, I don’t have much of a choice since I have to go to the laundromat every week in order to have clean gym clothes (and to be able to carry all my laundry out the door in the first place). Laundry on Monday, gym on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Today, a Sunday, is not a very efficient day because I decided not to go to the gym. But it feels efficient because I’m writing this post. It’s not a balanced trade-off. This is a problem I have run into when changing old habits and making new ones.

This post only covers the most basic forms of self-motivation. The easy stuff. The basic adult things every one should do, like making proper meals instead of microwave ones. It does not cover my work ethic and doing my absolute best in the office everyday; those types of things are a more ingrained sense of motivation–part of the larger picture. Some of my friends motivate themselves by not making themselves the enemy, having a basic sense of self-reliance, and being happy with who they see in the mirror. It’s interesting to see how motivation manifests itself in others. I see it as a continual process for being better. Could I use my work motivation in real life? I’m not sure. Maybe I use all my energy at work that I decline to turn that motivation on when I am at home. Maybe I need to listen to my friends and hear how they motivate themselves.  Either way, I’ll get there eventually. I am an efficient person, after all.