On occasion I find the hardest thing to do is to get started, especially in regards to things I really don’t enjoy doing. In this case, I don’t want to grade. I don’t want to grade ever again if possible. Of course, that isn’t possible, so here I am blogging about what it takes to pick up the red pen and go to work.
I’m talking about the concept of activation energy. In scientific terms, this is the minimum amount of energy needed to start a reaction. In human terms, this is the minimum amount of energy needed to do something–often something you’d rather not do. It takes considerably less energy to climb the stairs, power up the ps4, and start playing Call of Duty than it does to do a single page of homework. It takes far less energy to turn a TV on than it does to shut it off. This is, of course, all mental gymnastics. The key is that start. How much does it take to just start doing the task you don’t (or even do) want to do?
For me the key factor isn’t even necessarily laziness as much as it is desire. There are just a ton of things I don’t want to do in life. I build schedules to ensnare the things I don’t want to do, locking myself into the tasks in the process. People smarter about these things than I am call what I am talking about discipline. I suppose I try to create discipline within my life (though often with little success). I suppose I could do that quite a bit more.
If I could just figure out the right amount of energy needed to activate, I believe I would be able to build a reward system that helped give me the needed push in order to activate faster, more regularly, and without the apparently requisite level of bitching that goes with performing mundane tasks.