How Having a Goal and a Time Limit Can Make You Work Harder

Did you know that set­ting a goal and time limit for your­self will help you work harder? Allow me to explain.

I was work­ing at a fac­tory one day. Doing the same repet­i­tive thing I would do almost every day. We were mak­ing lint screens for dry­ers. I was so good at run­ning this press that I could prac­ti­cally do it in my sleep. Sim­ply because I’ve done it so much

Which in turn made me quite bored. I can’t stand doing the same thing over and over all day, every­day. It really gets on me after awhile.

Any­ways, I was pretty unmo­ti­vated as you can guess. On aver­age we run about 60 to 70 shots an hour on this machine. We were run­ning about 50, sim­ply because I wasn’t moti­vated to run the press as fast as I should be.

Now we run these lint screens on the press and then assem­ble the han­dles on them (the part you grab to pull the screen out of your dryer when you clean it). We would usu­ally do a cer­tain amount of a par­tic­u­lar han­dle then switch to putting a dif­fer­ent kind of han­dle on. We usu­ally would do 2 or 3 dif­fer­ent han­dles over the course of the shift.

Well we were get­ting close to the end of the shift and we were get­ting close to being done with cer­tain han­dle. So we decided to try and fin­ish those han­dles before the night was over.

Now all this may not be entirely clear but the point is this: When we decided to try and fin­ish off those han­dles, I sped up. I became motivated!

Now I wasn’t doing any­thing dif­fer­ent. I was still run­ning the press, mak­ing screens and putting the han­dles on. But now I had some­thing to strive for. And we ran the machine like a bat out of hell.

There have been plenty of other times when I have done this very same thing. I didn’t feel like work­ing that hard until I made a goal for myself within a cer­tain time limit.

So here’s a tip. If your hav­ing trou­bles keep­ing moti­vated, make a goal for your­self. A short term goal that has to do with what­ever you are work­ing on.

Con­cen­trate on just get­ting to that goal for the night. Set your­self a time limit and get to it! Between hav­ing some­thing to strive for and hav­ing cer­tain amount time to do it in, it should get you nice and moti­vated. You will prob­a­bly meet your goal, if not sur­pass it.

Try it, you may be sur­prised at the moti­va­tion you get.

~Chris

Sim­i­lar Posts:

• A Lit­tle Story About Procrastination
• Don’t For­get to Use Your Freedom
• How Does Cof­fee Effect Your Productivity?

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