I am not sure how many people know this but some times when people are trying to motivate themselves to do something it can be really hard. It could be exercising, or studying or in my case getting work done on a game. The reason why is because the human brain is all messed up because we are wired for living lives that we simply don’t live anymore in the modern world. So regardless of whatever you plan or want to do, you need to factor in your subconscious mind having other thoughts and getting in the way. This is what causes things like procrastination or writer’s block.

So people who know about this sort of thing knows that once you get started doing something, it is a lot easier to keep doing whatever you are doing. The hard part is getting started because your subconscious mind will come up with all sort of excuses to distract you. So your brain thinks something like, “I don’t want to wash the dishes that is too much work, I will just watch youtube instead.” However, if you stand in front of the sink and wash two dishes, then your brain thinks “Well I am already here washing the dishes, might as well finish.” So a common way to trick yourself into doing stuff when your subconscious is being a pain is to make a very small goal for yourself then once you are doing it, you just keep on doing it.

Anyway, I have known all this for a long time and I do that some times to help me get stuff done because I procrastinate on a lot of things and always have. However, I notice it doesn’t work as well on games some times. If I say, I want to just write one or two scenes I still feel unmotivated at times and can’t start. However, I was thinking about this today and then I realized, that one of the reasons why I subconsciously am resisting doing the work, might be because in some games I have a lot of different paths, so deciding which path to work on at any given time is ‘hard’ to my subconscious mind.

So that gave me a new idea on how to get motivated. And this seems kind of silly but I tried it and it did work(will have to try it in the future to see if it continues to work). This is what I did though. I numbered all the branches and then I just rolled a die to determine which I was going to work on. Because I am rolling dice to decide, it completely remove any choice involved in which branch I am going to work on. In doing that my brain isn’t struggling with the ‘hard’ choice to deciding, and removes that obstacle to getting things done. It sounds silly but when you are trying to trick your subconscious to stop being lazy stuff like that really works.