Work

Like anyone, i suffer from boredom. However the difference between me and somebody else is that when i’m bored, i’ll create… i won’t read or play games or watch TV…

I’ve worked extremely hard to eliminate ‘wasted’ time from my day but by doing that i’ve wired myself to be active from morning to night which means i need to create even more to keep myself busy. Which is good. Some of the results can be seen first hand on this blog

Don’t get me wrong, i’ve tonnes of assignments and different things i could be doing, but the problem is they’re just not interesting. And that’s a big problem. College is becoming ‘work’ which kills motivation and enthusiasm…. i don’t have that problem at home because everything is just ‘play’ to me. Take this blog – it takes more energy and time to produce posts here daily than it does to complete one assignment, but given the choice i’ll always blog first even though it’s certainly not the easiest option.

photo credit: Kiwi-Lomo

I think the core problem is the fact that i know any assignment work i do will go virtually unnoticed. Putting in a huge amount of effort in to an assignment that will be looked at once, then dumped and forgotten about isn’t very ‘rewarding’. I’ll still do it and i’ll still pick up the marks, but my heart isn’t in it and that’s my problem, but it’s also the system’s problem. I’m sure there are a lot more like me…

With a blog post, i know that if i put in the effort, i get rewarded in the form of traffic, comments, retweets etc… plus the entire internet can see what i write and perhaps benefit from it…. so that ‘potential’ exposure definitely makes me up my game. The reward is more personal. The development and results are ‘real’, they can be seen by you, I or anyone who’s online.

If my exams or assignments were put up online for all to see and forever etched in to my online history, you can be sure i’d put a hell of a lot more effort in to everything because i’d know there’d be more at stake. What about attendance… if that could be accessed by future employers…. i’d attend more or at least be more conscious of my attendance.

Ethical? Legal? Probably not but overall there needs to be either more reward or more punishment, or both. As things stand, everything is offline, it’s old school, it’s unrewarding which lowers motivation.

I can see why grade inflation is being talked about these days… i do think (in general) we’re becoming smarter at getting results, not necessarily becoming smarter or working harder. If more reward for creativity was introduced, it might just force people in to not just working smarter, but working harder too.