Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Don't Reward Yourself for Doing NaNo, Make NaNo a Reward

You hear a lot of advice on how to motivate yourself to write, especially during NaNo season. It is often recommended that you punish yourself if you don't meet your goals or reward yourself if you do. However, have you ever tried making the writing the reward?

Before I continue, it would probably be beneficial to you to know that this method probably works best when you're ahead or more toward the end of the month when there are certain things you can't put off any longer.

It's really a pretty simple idea.

Say you've got some giant assignment that's worth thirty percent of your grade or you need to clean your whole house before the fam comes over for Thanksgiving or you need to do something for work (sorry for no specifics, teenager who's never had a job here). Basically, you have something that has to be done, but you'd rather be working on NaNo instead.

You break up that thing into smaller parts. At the completion of each part, you get to write so many words. Get is the key word here. Not have to write so many words. Get to.  This makes your NaNo something desirable as well as helping you complete tasks you may not necessarily want to complete. It's a win-win.

What are your NaNoing tips?

4 comments:

  1. Very interesting. Turn "the work" into "the dessert" kind of methodology. And you can kill two birds with one stone by taking care of something while still clocking word count.

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    1. Yes, exactly, Angela. ^^ Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to comment. I know you're busy.

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  2. You just blew my mind. xD I'm definitely going to have to try this, though! I'll use writing as a reward for the more painful things.

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    1. Let me know how it goes. I'm about to try it out myself with reading my Biology textbook. What do you consider to be painful?

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