do or do not, or: just do it!
There’s a time of the year for us students (and I imagine some professors, too) that I like to call the Anti-Motivation. It starts immediately after your last final, and generally stays a few weeks. It is exactly what it sounds like – a period of time with an almost negative capacity for usefulness.
I don’t know about you, but when it comes to school, I’m all-in. For eight months out of the year my brain is in hyper-drive, and I’m doing whatever it takes to get my work done. It feels great to be productive, but the flip side is that when the A-M comes, it hits hard. All of a sudden, I find myself with an abundance of time and no deadlines in sight. It’s amazing how quickly I can go from spending an entire day writing a paper to spending an entire day watching reruns of Real Housewives of Wherever. It feels good to relax, to unwind, to decompress from the stress of constant pressure. But there’s some danger in it, too.
If you let it, the A-M can last indefinitely. It will suck you in just as quickly as you can say “CSI marathon,” and it will refuse to let go. For some, I’m sure a summer-long period of Nothing is exactly what you need. For me, it sounds like torture. I’m at my best when I’ve got a lot going on. I’m a productivity junky, y’all. And so although I do need a good few weeks of A-M to shift my mindset out of academia, anything longer than that feels, well, yucky. The funny part is, as yucky as I know it feels, the allure to stay there is often strong. I really, really like HGTV. And since it’s a whole damn channel, it’s on all the time. But, unfortunately, watching other people remodel their bathrooms does not actually translate to a remodeled bathroom of my own.
All this is just to say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox* that I’m climbing my way out of this year’s A-M as we speak. Summer productivity has meant something different every year. Last year, I spent four months researching, buying, moving into, and setting up my first home. The year before that was filled with bike rides and camping trips and good books. This year, blogging. And bike riding, camping, reading, and home improving, too. Oh, and Daria. Because watching a whole series of cartoons in one sitting totally counts as productive when it’s Daria. That wasn’t sarcasm, y’all, it’s just plain fact.
Awesome 90′s television aside, I have found that the best way to combat the Anti-Motivation is to just do. It’s a common misconception, with myself at least, that motivation is a feeling. “I don’t feel motivated,” she said. Hogwash! The root of the word motivation is motive, which is the thing behind the action. It’s the reason we do what we do. Sometimes, I do what I do because I feel like doing it. But often, it’s something else. My house, for instance, does not clean itself. And although that’s a cliché most often identified with parents yelling at their kids, it’s also sadly true. I am motivated to clean my house not because I always want to spend time cleaning, but because I really like having a clean home.
And so I must remind myself, when I’m fighting to get out from underneath another year’s wicked A-M, that feelings just aren’t facts. That as much as I like couching, I like writing more. That the pay-off from blogging (or biking, or cleaning), is about a billion times more satisfying than whatever drama the ladies of Orange County or New York have going on this week. That doing feels better than not doing.
That Yoda and Nike were totally on to something.
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* Fifty Internet Points for catching the reference!
Posted by erin | 1 comments
