Motivation is a strange thing for most of us. Today a good friend over at Flexbandit forwarded me a video that captures the spirit of our motivation as people. It also captures something that I feel is wrong with many businesses today.

Below are a few highlights from the video, which I hope you will take a moment to watch and think about, whether you’re a writer, animator, programmer, martial artist, or just a person interacting with this world of commerce and business.

We are not as endlessly manipulable and predictable as you might think.

Money is a motivator. If you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated.

But once they are paid enough, money is taken off the table. There are three factors that lead to better performance:  Autonomy, the desire to direct our own lives; mastery, the urge to get better at stuff and achieve; and, a sense of purpose.

Companies that are flourishing are animated by [a transcendent purpose]

The video begins a bit abstract and vague, but then really gets into some interesting details. You should take a few minutes and watch this video now. And, for more detail, the one on TED.

Since brainstorming and outlining are such important activities for writers, I am cross-posting this article about Mind Mapping Tools from my tech blog.

Give it a peek.

I’ve stuck with my month of Dvorak, doing the tutorials for one week and completely switching for the next three weeks. I’m happy to stay that I’ll be sticking with the new layout.

I learned quite a bit that should be helpful to others considering a switch, and I’d like to share some of that here.

Read more… »

Alright all you Critique Circle and gamer addicts. Finally a tool for you.

Slife records not only which applications you use on your computer, but how long you spend on specific websites and emails. It can give you a good marker for how much time you are spending writing vs. browsing forums, twittering vs. nano-ing.

It also allows you to put a limit on how long you spend in an app or web site on a given day.

So why chart how you spend your time? Just like budgeting your money and tracking your expenses, it encourages you to use it more wisely. It’s easy not to think about how much time or money we spend on a certain distraction, but when it’s in front of you, and you can see that it’s taking up a third of your time and money, it’s hard to ignore.

And by nature, we’re competitive creatures. We like to achieve things. If you can just get that “writing bar” to top 100…

It’s completely private and customizable in what it records. It’s also free.

I recently noted that I’d tested out BlogJet to some success. After using it for a few weeks, and seeing a reply from Alec Satin, who has an excellent blog on Project Management and being a generally pleasant human being, I wanted to post a couple updates.

BlogJet has worked well, though I find that I have to jump on the web and make edits occasionally after posting. It lacks a couple key elements that would make it a real times saver:

• No way to insert symbols—though this dash, which I use constantly, shows up automagically, and you can add auto-replace rules for some things.
• It occasionally inserts formatting using span tags over the entire post, overriding the blog’s default styles, which is oddly annoying and unnecessary.
• Tags don’t work. It has an option to use ‘native tags’ instead of technorati, but that never works. They always show up as links at the bottom of the post instead of actual tags in WordPress.

Blog Jet is nice in that I don’t have to visit the site, log in, and click on post. So generally, when I have an idea I want to jot down and develop later, I write it in BlogJet and save it as draft on the site.

But if I’m going to post all the way through, I don’t see a point, since I have to log into the site and edit the tags anyways : (  I’ve put in a request to BlogJet to fix this feature; hopefully they’ll have an ear for my feedback.