CrazyMotive.com

1. Read romantic poems with your partner. It provides intimacy and does not require poem writing skills.
2. Write a short poem. After all, a good poem is words that come from your heart. If you have a heart, you can squeeze these few words out with some effort.
3. Write a romantic letter. You can even do it every day. If you do, use different words each time.
4. Dance in the rain. Move to rhythm of the raindrops.
5. Speak of your affection in public.
6. Create a photo gallery of your relationship. Add notes and descriptions to every prominent moment.
7. Go on a date once a week.
8. Slow dance to your partner’s favorite slow song.
9. Feed each other strawberries.
10. Cook a pie together.

I run a web design company. Like most service companies, we are selling hours of our employees. The more hours are billed to the client, the better well off we are. The problem with graphic design and programming is that it is not always easy to assess the ratio of quality vs. speed and thus to say if a person is performing poorly, adequately or superbly this month.

At first, when the company was very young, there was a lot of motivation that drove everyone forward. However, with time everyone started to get more experience and demonstrate less enthusiasm for the job itself.

The question of motivation at work has been around for a couple of months. I thought of various employee motivation programs that would connect the quality with speed. However, these techniques turned to be a bit too complex to manage and to explain. One more problem is that we do not have a lot of money to pay out as bonuses.

As the result, the work of each person in our 11-man team was evaluated subjectively and did not always help the person chart their professional progress.

Last month an old University friend of mine who now works for a consulting company in the US came back to Belarus. In his company they introduced time utilization principle. It is all very simple. To find time utilization of your employees you have to divide the hours of their work that were billed to clients by the total hours they worked that month. For example, if your clients paid for 100 hours of the project work and the project took 200 hours, time utilization is 100/200=50%.

We calculated utilization for older projects and the figures were not so good for many employees. One of the reasons for that was not only poor work, but also poor time estimation, i.e. for how many hours the client was charged initially.

Time Utilization and Employee Motivation at Work

A week ago we had a discussion with everyone about time utilization and how the efficiency of work is going to be evaluated. It concerns not only the actual hours, but also the accuracy of estimates that go into invoices.

All employees are going to know their time utilization percentage. For each employee we are setting a realistic goal for improving the result. We can measure the progress in percentage points, which quite easy to understand and is very convenient and should help employee motivation as well.

No monetary incentives are planned for the first couple of months as we would like to receive initial feedback from everybody and take care of possible problem areas. For the future, I would like to have 80% time utilization for all employees. Money and other bonuses are going to be used to boost motivation at work to achieve this figure.

Certainly, time utilization principle is not a cure-all pill for improving intrinsic motivation of employees. What I like about it is simplicity and close ties of each person’s time utilization to the company’s bottom line.

Need to learn to stay away from chocolate? Would like to burn a few pounds? Oh, come on. You need some motivation.

When you are fat, you start getting into problems: health, making new friends, finding a girlfriend or just the motivation to exercise. There is no easy way out of it. However, if you set realistic measurable goals, you can see your life change in a couple of months.

Option 1: Add some action.

You do not have to go to Iraq or Afghanistan. If your life is pretty much the same routine, add something with physical activity into it. It could be sex, of course. It could be ice skating or jogging or even taking a walk to the bus stop instead of using your car.

Option 2: Set a measurable goal.

It helps if you know exactly how much you must do and why you do it. Besides, measuring progress can be very motivating. Tell yourself how much weight you would live to lose and over what period of time. Make sure it’s realistic. Losing 50 pounds in one week is a hell of a problem. Check progress regulary and praise yourself on good results with … no, not chocolate. With more exercise

Option 3: Ask a friend to help.

We perform better when someone is watching. Pick a friend and ask them to help you with your motivation. You could go to gym together. Working out together is fun and you have fewer reasons to skip training.

Option 4: Stay big and happy

It is hard to imagine our life without motivation. A person who does not have any motivation would not do anything. Psychologists believe that there is a mechanism inside our heads and bodies that takes care of our motivation.

Basic Instincts

Why do some birds fly south? Because that is a part of their biological program. They cannot change their behavior, it is instinctive. Our instincts are the result of evolution. Some models of human behavior allowed for better adaptation. People who had them were more successful in life and had more children. In this way this instincts have become integrated into our genes.

Instincts lead to automated, inborn behavior. They are also a part of our motivation as we cannot avoid doing things that are instinctive.

James McDougal created a system to classify basic instincts. Instinctive behavior usually has a clear goal. Take survival, for example. So we can classify instincts on the basis of goals they attempt to reach. Mcdougal distinguished a number of instincts: parenting, reproduction, looking for food and a number of others.

Scientists often use animals to study instincts. Each instinctive action is associated with a specifc stimulus. Key stimuli are usually come from the surroundings.

Instincts are important for motivation. However, there is certainly more to human motivation then mere instincts.