What Motivates Me: At Work

I have done my fair part on procrastinating at work, even with the easiest tasks. It has always somewhat bothered me that why some easy tasks took so long to finish and why some much harder tasks I get huge enery boost and try to solve them even on my spare time. This time I'm going to talk about what motivates me.

Positive Feedback

Complements from the clients, customers, boss, co-workers and such. All that is a huge thing for me, eventhough it might feel small. Those little words in a daily "Juho helped me with this", "Juho solved this problem" and even the fact that people want to ask help from me or ask second opinion on things. As a finnish it's hard for me to take complements and positive feedback, it makes me to feel awkwardish, but still I do enjoy that.

Possibility to be a Hero

When there is an urge in the team to solve something. Even if I don't have an idea what would be the solution, this is something that gets me going! I like the feeling that I could be the one to solve problem and help the team, be the hero. In fact that gives me such a high motivation boost that I will learn a lot in a really short period of time.

This has happened multiple times during my career, but it's always hard to pinpoint what are the things and spesicif problems and tasks that actually motivate me and why.

Teaching others

When there is something I know better, I like to be the teacher in the team on that topic. This is rather new thing for me, before I was too uncertain and got too stressed about teaching others, because "what if I teach something wrong, or what if I don't have all the answers?!" - well, everyone will make errors and no one has all the answers. I know it now, and teaching gives me a lot of joy.

PANIC!!!

In the past there has been a lot of panic situations at work. Client has been raging to my boss because payments or something isn't working in their app and there is this huge urge to solve it. That's not really a gratefull task to do, but I like to be the one to solve this kind of problems. Or why production servers are down.

PREPANIC or Panic Prevention

I have always liked to figure out and plan how to prevent problems in production environment. How to make sure that website or application stays performing even if there is a huge peak on concurrent user amounts. In my first IT job I was already reading about using rental servers from cloud, how to scale horizontally based on server loads - and how to scale down so we wont pay too much extra when there are less activity. This was interesting angle for me to learn on tech, but unfortunately first years in IT almost every company had their own dedicated servers, no automatic horizontal scaling. Nowadays I'm lucky that I have the possibility to do this kind of planning at work and that work is actually valued.

Performance Tweaks

One thing is of course making sure that software is running on enough performance level to be able to serve all the users. It's not cost effective to always throw more money at the servers, RAM and CPU. Sometimes code just needs to be read, tested and optimized to get it running more smoothly.

Complex and "Boring" tasks

In some point on my career I thougth that integrations are kind cool. Mostly because everything needed some kind of integrations, especially if I was doing some of my hobby projects. At work it didn't take too long to find myself in a point where it had become an default option that I am the one in the team to do integration tasks. There never was any competition on that between co-workers. I think everyone was just happy that they didn't need to touch on those. Help would have been appreciated - but I learned a lot!

Here was my thoughts on what motivates me, I'm not sure if this was all, but to summarize it all. Problem solving and doing something that matters to me and others is the key. What motivates you - do you need motivation?