Motivation is a ruthless beast.
The last time I touched my code was late March. It just hit me: I haven’t coded in over a month. I feel rather embarrassed.
I don’t know where my motivation has gone! Truthfully, I know that motivation isn’t a good thing to rely on when trying to accomplish goals. Ask any gym rat, you’re not going to have motivation 24/7, you just keep going and going and going until it becomes a habit.
I don’t know what keeps me from thinking of my coding development as anything but an extra muscle/workout. It is tough for me to go more than a week without some kind of a workout. I don’t know why that habit has stuck, but coding hasn’t.
Reflecting on it, I find myself quite distracted these days. I still want those things, and I wish that that WANT was enough every day to keep me going. I don’t know what to do.
That’s not true, I know what to do: get up tomorrow and code for an hour. Then go to bed, wake up Thursday, and do it again. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until I have something beautiful and tangible that I can present as worthy of a developer job.
It’s all so easy, but the execution is elusive.
A quick search on Google will give you a million results on motivation: why it comes and goes, how to keep it going without it, and how to re-inspire it again.
A funny coincidence lies in my biggest obstacle. I am, more often than not, too tired to do anything after work. A quick fix for that would be caffeine, and drinking the iced coffees I love so much every day at 2PM in the afternoon, so that I can go go go until 7PM.
I don’t want quick fixes, nor want caffeine bursts. What I really want is long, sustained energy to go after this goal, every day, until I have it.
Here’s some numbers to consider:
I work from 8 AM – 5 PM every day.
1.5 hours every day must be used for workouts (for now, with me doing #75Hard until the end of June).
I perform my best with 9 hours of sleep.
That’s eight hours of work, with an hour extra for lunch, making nine hours. I need nine hours of sleep. That’s eighteen hours. My workouts added in are nineteen and a half hours. That leaves me 4.5 hours to spend time with Aaron, read, have recreational time, do chores, and the buffer space of showering and getting dressed. Let’s say I give myself a half hour for a morning routine (of brushing my teeth, washing my face and getting dressed) and an evening routine (of the same), that’s four hours to clean, read, have free time, dinner with Aaron, and code.
If each of those things gets an hour of my time, that’s an hour of each. I’m an hour over a given day, so one or two of those have to go. See what I’m up against?
And honestly, one of the biggest time sucks is that sometimes dinner isn’t ready until 6PM. So I have that awkward hour where I’m either waiting for dinner to be ready, or exhausted from the workday and then immediately jump into having dinner with Aaron.
Enter Tim Gunn: Designers, make it work.
Looking at it that way, I could say that I don’t need to do all of those things every single day. I just feel like my dishes pile up if I don’t do them!
I could do a workout at lunch, read at lunch, and clean at lunch.
Here’s what a weekday could look like:
6:45 – 8 AM: Workout/Morning Routine
8 AM – 12 PM: Workday
12 PM – 1 PM: Clean and read
1 PM – 5 PM: Work
5PM – 6:3o PM: Dinner with Aaron, and free time
6:30 – 8 PM: Coding
8 PM – 9 PM: Workout/Evening Routine
9 PM – 10 PM: Bedtime
If I go to sleep by 10 PM, and get up at 6:45, that’s eight hours and forty-five minutes of sleep. Truth be told, most nights if I’m in bed and my phone is off, I’m asleep within twenty minutes. That is doable.
More than that, on nights like tonight when I have other obligations, I can flip that schedule around and adjust as needed.
It feels like I’m a slave to hustle culture and a schedule by needing to plan every minute of my life. But as Tom Haverford once said: sometimes you have to work a little, so you can ball a lot.
That changed me.
Now, to chug some water, do some yoga, and get some sleep. Let’s see what tomorrow holds.
Let’s make it work.