Rewarding yourself after achieving a goal works very well as a motivational booster. Why? Reward gives you feeling you work on something you want to do. Achieving a goal is like going from point A to point B and you place your reward in B. You strongly desire to enjoy the state of mind connected with your reward and this desire works like a force that pushes you into direction of B.

Of course, in many cases reaching a goal is a reward itself. Then it’s great, but sometimes we really need additional way to motivate ourselves. Remember to reward yourself wisely.

What does it mean?

When I talk with different people (friends, family and co-workers) about rewarding yourself, they usually come with one idea. Spend a lot of money in a really bad way, most times it is unnecessary shopping and/or unhealthy, expensive food.

What is wrong with that?

Well, on the long run it can really hurts your budget. Keep tracking your expenses and after a year you can find yourself shocked how much money you spend rewarding yourself splurging.

Quite often such rewards are against your goals. If your goal is to save/earn some amount of money, it is stupid to spend any part of them just to reward yourself. If your goal is to lose weight, don’t reward hard training at gym with dessert. That is really awful.

Reward yourself wisely.

I don’t mean that you shouldn’t spend any penny on a reward. Spend money, but do this wisely.

First of all, set the reward proportionate to the difficulty of your goal.

Don’t change the rules during the game. A lot of people don’t obey that. They increase reward while moving from A to B or right after finishing their goal. It is not the way to go. You set your reward when you are in A and when you reach B, you get exactly what you put here, while you was in A.

Look for rewards that will help you in achieving further goals. It is like reinvesting. For example, I earn some money thanks to good investing picks, then I can buy myself book about investing that will increase my skills and knowledge. After losing certain amount of weight, you can reward yourself with new clothes, which will give you a very important feeling of comfort and will always remind you about your success. Find such situtations when reward push you ever further, beyond your initial goal.

Of course the reward must be somehow important for you. Otherwise it won’t motivate you enough. It must be something meaningful and those things vary among people. You must find what works well for you.

For interesting, frugal ideas I’m recommending a short post written by Leo of Zen Habits on how to reward yourself without spending a lot.

Finally, remember it is wrong when you focus only on how to get your reward. It should help you to increase your motivation; it definitely shouldn’t replace your main goal.

I hope since now you will reward yourself in more conscious, wiser way.

If you have any favorite rewards that you use to motivate yourself, write about it in comments. I will really appreciate it.

photo credit: jillclardy

You have a lot of tasks on your to do list planned for today and you need some strategy how to handle them. Here we go!

Quite common advice is to start the day with the toughest task and since there everything is going downhill. All your next tasks are easier, simpler and more pleasurable to execute.

If above approach works well for you, then it is great. You probably don’t need to read this article farther, just go back to your work. Thank you for your attention.

However, I know a lot of people (including myself), that sometimes get stuck in front of this unfriendly task and simply can’t move forward with their work.

Have you ever experienced such a deadlock? You start feeling bad emotions about this task. You try to switch for a while to a different one, and then you return still being unable to push it forward. You are getting more exposed to different distractions: food, chat, senseless surfing on web, checking inbox and other timewasters. System halt.

Looking for solution I decided to try opposite strategy. I queued my tasks in reverse order, starting with the easiest one and putting the toughest task on the end of the list.

How does it work for me? First tasks are quite simple so it is not difficult to engage into work and finish them. This gives momentum to work on next tasks and as a bonus there is a feeling that at least something has been done.

Quite important point is to keep in mind that one last task. Knowing that there is something difficult and less enjoyable at the end of the list causes that all preceding tasks looks relatively easier. To make this hack works better, think that today you have to do only your last task and then, just distract yourself with other planned tasks in order to avoid executing the last one. I bet you experienced this pattern in past, but you could be unconscious how exactly it worked.

As an example I can tell you how it worked when I was writing my master thesis. Somehow I didn’t like working on it. Almost everyday I planned to push forward my thesis; I always did a lot of other jobs only to move away my main task. As you can suppose, I did a lot of things that normally I wouldn’t do. At first I wasn’t so conscious about this exploit and I did a lot of senseless, timewasting activities. Later I started to use it wisely by putting some other important tasks, before working on my master thesis.

This is less or more how it works for me. I can’t guarantee you would be successful with this method. Try it. Hack your mind by distracting work on toughest task with other, relatively easier tasks. As simple as this.

Ok, but what about the last task?

I don’t say this is perfect hack for solving all your tasks. It has both advantages and disadvantages. Among most important advantages is that it should engage you into work and allow finishing most of your tasks.

The disadvantage is that you finally have to face this last task. If you have enough momentum, finish him like you beat the super boss on the very last level of your favorite platform game. You have already done so much; you don’t want to leave something unfinished.

If above doesn’t work, postpone it. Of course, only if today is not the deadline for this task. But remember that you can’t do this infinitely. Finally, you have to close this task.

If it is really so hard, than you can’t even bite it in any possible way, then….well this is actually a good topic for another post.

Evernote is an on-line note taking application allowing you to capture data on the web, on your Windows, Mac and on your phone. All input is synchronized, no matter where you send it from. What you can collect with Evernote? To-do lists, text, reminders, screenshots, links and many more.

Registration

You can create free account or go premium (compare free and premium accounts). I decided to use free account as it seems to be more than enough for my needs. Registration is simple and fast. I successfully passed recapcha in my second try and immediately got e-mail with confirmation link.

First step – take a tour

Definitely a good starting point is to take a short tour. Video takes only 4 minutes and explains basics how to use Evernote. You will learn how to take notes and how search, indexing and tagging are working. Publishing and sharing is only mentioned there. Of course, you have also access from your phone or PDA to all gathered data. No more movies explaining other features were available at that moment, so my next step was trying Evernote on-line.

Notebooks

First of all, you can create multiple notebooks for taking notes. This means that all your notes are not mixed together in one sack, but you can group them. For example, you create separate notebook for each of your projects where you keep related notes.

Creating notes

Creating notes is very easy. Having selected one of your notebooks, you can simply click “New” button to create a new note. You enter name and tags and you can type data like in text editor. Of course you can use Copy and Paste. Save when you finish.

When you use desktop clients, you can also simply drag-n-drop things you want to keep in your notebook. I like this feature very much.

Search

Search works exactly as it should. When you have selected one notebook, you search within it. To search in all your notes, select “All notebooks” on your sidebar. Search also looks for text on images. Finally, you can save your favorite searches. Great.

Tags and attributes

As I have already mentioned, you can tag your notes. It helps in search and you can also open a view with notes for selected tag. Similar with attributes; you can open view with notes that have certain created or modified date, selected type of content (image, audio, list…) and selected source of notes (email, web, mobile…). All these make access and search through your notes fast and easy.

Knowing most important things that Evernote is capable of, it is time to ask fundamental question…

Do you need it?

…and it is you who has to give the answer. My advice – try it. It won’t cost you too much. After 15 minutes you will know if Evernote is for you. Remember that it should help you to stay organized. Don’t use it if it is only another cool app that will bring mess and distraction.

I’m taking one week holiday from my regular work. Of course I will be posting during that period, so keep visiting my blog (or even better subscribe to my RSS feed).

If you want your post or article listed in my next roundup, send a link to me via contact page.

No time to waste, enjoy following posts that have impressed me recently.

Is Net Worth the most important number in personal finance? Read what J.D. of GetRichSlowly thinks about it.

Investment Property or Dividend Yielding Stocks? David of MoneyNing will help you with this question.

Trent explains why allocations make a big difference.

Amy of MomAdvice presents 35 Ways to Save on Your Grocery Budget.

Are you too shy to succeed? This post on FreelanceFolder will help you to overcome shyness.

Be memorable by breaking people’s patterns. That is what advises Lifehack. Brian presents 3 ways how to do this and I really like his tips.

See you next week.