![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Lunch Note #009: Reminders
May. 13th, 2025 01:22 pm
My PhD advisor shared an imaginative exercise with us during class once: Imagine what you want writers you admire to say about your work. Write those words down. Put them up where you can see them and remind yourself of them.
I haven't quite done the last part of writing them down and then posting them in places where I can see them. There is some part of me that is a little skeptical about such reminders. I don't know if such simple acts are enough to get me to do the things I need to do in order to write what I want to write. It's a little silly, maybe, but there is some part of me that thinks that if I really want to write something, then I'll feel intrinsically motivated to do so.
Of course, I also know enough to know that motivation is hardly ever so clean. I know enough that intrinsic motivation is among the hardest things to do.
What I might try to do is to make such reminders into art that I can hang up. I recently had a minor disaster in my office: the felt pads that I've put up as a kind of bulletin board have started falling off because I kept repositioning them too much, so the sticky pads have stopped being sticky. It got so annoying to put them over and over that I took them down, and so now I have a blank wall. I'm planning on putting them back up soon, but in the meantime I'm thinking about what else to put on that board. What other reminders do I want? What other things do I want to highlight for myself? What will get me to do things, and not just sit around waiting for motivation?
I guess I'll see. The first step, is to figure out a way to get them to not fall off again.
I haven't quite done the last part of writing them down and then posting them in places where I can see them. There is some part of me that is a little skeptical about such reminders. I don't know if such simple acts are enough to get me to do the things I need to do in order to write what I want to write. It's a little silly, maybe, but there is some part of me that thinks that if I really want to write something, then I'll feel intrinsically motivated to do so.
Of course, I also know enough to know that motivation is hardly ever so clean. I know enough that intrinsic motivation is among the hardest things to do.
What I might try to do is to make such reminders into art that I can hang up. I recently had a minor disaster in my office: the felt pads that I've put up as a kind of bulletin board have started falling off because I kept repositioning them too much, so the sticky pads have stopped being sticky. It got so annoying to put them over and over that I took them down, and so now I have a blank wall. I'm planning on putting them back up soon, but in the meantime I'm thinking about what else to put on that board. What other reminders do I want? What other things do I want to highlight for myself? What will get me to do things, and not just sit around waiting for motivation?
I guess I'll see. The first step, is to figure out a way to get them to not fall off again.
