I am someone who quite likes work… strange I know. It gives me something to do for the bulk of my day, I enjoy what I do (most of the time) and I get paid to do it. But there comes the odd day when I just want to stay in bed, watch Friends and drink so much tea that my body contains more tea than blood. But no. Up I get, and off I go.
During Christmas and early January I was finding it extremely difficult to peel myself off of my pillow in the mornings, not even my favorite cereal was tempting me. And I bloody love that cereal. Shit got real. Until I realised there’s something I love more than my cereal – gingerbread lattes. So as an incentive to get the bleep out of my pit and go to work I’d make a cheeky stop at Costa on the way to my second call (I do home care, so about 10:15am), and it actually worked! Obviously I can’t do that every single day as it’d be way too expensive, but it certainly did a good job of giving me a bit of a kick up the bum!
Something else I find that has been helping me to keep going is to focus on my next day off. I work six days a week and Friday is always my day off so I always look forward to that beautiful lie in… that I don’t end up having because my body insists that we get up at 7am. Obviously if I’m still feeling unmotivated on a Saturday it doesn’t do much good to focus on the following Friday as I’ve still got six days to go – so instead I focus on little breaks (a 3 til 5 maybe) or welcome changes to my schedule. I usually finish at 9pm, but if one day I finish at 8:30pm instead I’ll focus on that extra half hour of unclaimed time.
It’s all very well looking forward to my next day off, but some days I don’t know how I’m going to make it through one day, let alone six of them. All I want to do is get into bed and not emerge for about a fortnight. When I have days like this I find it helps to break the day down into chunks. I have the morning calls to get through and then I can go home and have some fruit, a cup of tea and catch up on YouTube or on blogs. Then I have the lunches chunk and when that’s over I can come home and do some exercise, then have a nice relaxing shower etc etc. This trick has come in quite handy lately!
What do you do to keep yourself motivated? Let me know!
