Using “Challenges” to Motivate

A slightly later post this week because I wanted to be able to post up a bit more progress on my Imperial Knight armour.  My challenge last week was to get all of the metallic colours down on the armour plates which I actually managed to achieve before the weekend.  Since then (I was away the whole weekend) I’ve managed to get all of the layers of Angron Red down – nine in total!  The result is fantastic and was well worth the effort.

This coming weekend is the Horus Heresy Weekender so I’m not going to be able to get much done as there is only a couple of evenings left and I’ve mundane things like the washing to do.  I’ll suffice with:

Start spraying Corax Black

Take lots of pictures at the weekender

Although I’m only doing challenges a week at a time, the next challenge will be to mask off the guns so that I can get the red onto those, after that I’ve a mountain of Plaguebearers to undercoat for my brother which I really need to crack out sooner rather than later.

Now rather than finish the post off at that, I’ll waffle on a little bit about motivation. I’ve covered this once before, but this is a topic that I feel needs revisiting every now and again just to keep things fresh.

Not sure if this is just me, but I find that my “keen” level for hobbies goes up and down throughout the year. Generally I’ll summon up a load of enthusiasm and have a really big purge on a particular hobby, but after a couple of weeks real life will have reasserted itself and in the following months the keen for that hobby dies back to more normal level (or stops). Often something like going away, being ill or some unforseen problem will instigate the start of this. It’s also a bit of a balance as if you have keen for more than one hobby at the same point you’ll likely implode due to lack of time 🙂

Now that I’ve outlined how I flip flop from being really fired up to can’t be arsed, I’m really happy to say that despite having a pretty major project on at work and being away for all of the past weekend I’ve managed to maintain my level of keen for my Imperial Knights and the 52 week challenge. Big projects at work generally knacker me out so when I get home in the evening I’ve very little energy left to do hobbies or anything enjoyable. Going away also has a habit of stopping my momentum or worse still transfering my enthusiasm to another hobby.

Now I’m not going to sit back and become complacent, although week four’s challenge has been completed there are another 48 weeks left so anything could happen! What I would say is, as somebody who does struggle to keep enthusiasm up the past month has shown me something that (currently) works for me:

• Setting an achievable short-term target based on free time over the next week
• Focusing on one or two projects based on enjoyment levels
• Not overdoing it. There’s no point in working until the early hours one night if it means you spend the next three days so tired you can’t function
• Not being annoyed if your hobby time gets used doing mundane bits and bobs, providing you don’t loose all of your hobby time, overrunning into next week isn’t a failure