All over the Internet you'll find great motivational systems for people who want to diet, exercise, fix their finances, turn their lives around, or accomplish some other perfectly normal thing to accomplish. Motivation! Psychology Today says, "It's the difference between waking up before dawn to pound the pavement and lazing around the house all day." But many of us try different motivational techniques and then get disappointed when we can't live up to them. Because being motivated is hard.
Bare Minimum Motivation
Never Zero is a motivational method that I picked up on Reddit, I think, at some point, somewhere. It's not something I invented, but it works for me.
The idea is really simple: you make a list of things that you want to do every day, and then every single day you make sure that you do "never zero" of that thing. My list looks like this:
- Writing
- Exercise
- Cleaning
- Meditation
That means that every day, I have to do at least the minimal amount of each. For writing, that means a sentence – and not a sentence of writing for work, but writing for my own stuff. For exercise, that means at least a 2km walk or a set of 20 push-ups. For cleaning, I am not sure what the minimum is yet but I've sure been trying. Meditation for me is a broad category of stuff, from silent sitting to full on ritual.
This method has been working for me pretty well. For instance, I wrote this short piece using the Never Zero method and it took me about three days and I'm totally okay with that. I mean, at least I wrote. That is a pretty good start, right?
And that's Never Zero. It's not complicated and it's not hard. I've set the bar low so I have something to congratulate myself for every day. There's no space for feeling bad about myself – only for feeling like I'm accomplishing stuff!
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