Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Motivation or Lack Thereof

How does a person manage to waste 64 hours of his time doing nothing except blink at a screen? Productivity is something to value for. I start feeling guilty when I'm not productive, but oftentimes guilt isn't enough of a motivator to get something done. Oftentimes, it's that adrenaline rush you get when you're racing for something. When you know you're going up against the rest of the world, or when you know there's there's excitement to be had when a certain stage gets reached.

I recall a particular instances about about two months ago, when I was banging my head on my keyboard whining about a rounding algorithm I needed to write. My procedural logic didn't want to work properly on screen @_@! The fact that it was due later that week, and that I knew there wouldn't be enough time to finish it later was also a motivator. It was a race to beat the I'm-about-to-fall-asleep clock. Finally, I simply laid on my bed with my eyes closed and tried to run through the sequence with my eyes shut. It works - having a mental display of the algorithm you're trying to program. But what if you're not in a race? What if you know you have a year long time table. There's no adrenaline, and thus the excitement that comes along with it ceases to exist during a long-time endure. Beyond that, perhaps an adequate motivator would be what some call, the "purpose" motivator.

Last a week a couple pals and I spent three hours inside a Del Taco talking about a variety of crazy stuff. Something we went over was the motivator factor. It seems that some physiologists ran a few incentive experiments to try and determine a way to maximize work productivity within a team. They offered a monetary incentive to some test subjects and told them to do a simple physical task. The results were as expected. They did the same thing another time, but instead this time, the task was something that required innovation and a sense of creativity. The outcome was not as expected.

The end results of these experiments were that the monetary incentive modeled worked for grunt related work, where the solution is obvious. However, when people are already making enough to sustain themselves and the task required to do required ingenuity such a model ceases to be valid. The reason was, "purpose". People who agree with the purpose in something, do much better at it.

Take open source software for example. People contribute to something, without getting paid for it. Or take, Wikipedia as another. People contribute information to it without getting paid for it. I believe people go about contributing for these sorts of projects because they see some sort of purpose in it, even if it isn't direct. A purpose can also be a benefit, and a benefit can also be self-improvement. Notice how I'm broadening these definitions here.

A lot of the inspiration for this thought process here comes from a TED speech I came across. View this. Dan Pink kicks ass. So as you'll be able to see soon, this thought process has been around for quite a while. But in recent history you'll you might be surprised to know that it also has a business application to team management. Google and FaceBook take this sort of approach to generate innovation within their ranks. Employees with space are happy employees. A lot of the nice apps offered be either of those companies are direct products of this.

It's interesting stuff.