Ask HN: What are you doing to stay motivated at work?

26 points by tech_crawl_ 10 years ago | 11 comments

Just not feeling motivated here... might be time to leave.

darrelld 10 years ago |

Here is my personal advice:

Get a good solid 8 hours of sleep. Sometimes a lack of motivation is is simply fatigue. It makes my work day drastically different.

Don't try and cheat it either by sleeping less using caffeine to feel awake.

merrua 10 years ago | |

I'd amend this to whatever number of hours you need. For some people that's 10 for others 5. Beyond that this is very very true. Tiredness makes everything more stressful and difficult and suppressed creative thought (which good programming needs).

willhinsa 10 years ago | |

Yes!! Sleep is the bedrock of your life. Without sleep you are more stressed, eat worse, exercise less, and are less intelligent. It's not about some macho ability to go on less sleep. You're just a high functioning, chronically sleep deprived human. You have the performance of a drunk person, but you don't even get to enjoy fun drunken conversations. Sleep deprivation is insane.

P.S. I am saying this as I bring on another all nighter, doing work I don't really enjoy. ;) I bought a Mi Band to track my sleep, though! I highly recommend it. If you measure it, it will improve.

bonniemuffin 10 years ago |

For me, I can usually get myself going by putting on some good music, then making a list of a few things I need to accomplish today, and doing the easiest/fastest one first.

dontscale 10 years ago | |

this is great advice in general even if you're not feeling particularly burnt. doing the easiest one first gives you the momentum to do the rest.

avitzurel 10 years ago |

One of the best comments here by @darrelld.

I actually wrote a post 3 years ago about this, here's the gist of it

1. Get solid sleep time

2. Exercise

3. Stay Hydrated

4. Pomodoro

5. Block all distractions out, I use `get-shit-done`. basically `sudo get-shit-done work` will block all distracting websites.

Most of all though, if you get the chance to pick your own tasks, just move to something that's more interesting to you.

Since I switch a lot between operations (chef etc..), backend and frontend, sometimes just switching to another task helps.

Hope this helps, just my 2 cents

anon8764 10 years ago |

Life is too short. I'd spend a week with full rest, clean food and water, determine your happiness level there, then decide. Sounds like you are trying to mask the core/root of the problem, a bad environment for you.

tmaly 10 years ago |

find some issue that is wasting users time, either internal or external. Fix it as a side project and create some value with this project. Then let people know about it.

icedchai 10 years ago |

Browsing Reddit and HN?

crpatino 10 years ago | |

No, that's more like treating cancer with dope.

tech_crawl_ 10 years ago |

Ya, not sure if it is the best environment for me...