I tend to be a fairly motivated person. I'm pretty good at time management, I'm able to wake up early and go to bed, well, early-ish, and I almost always have assignments and things done ahead of time. As well as this, I tend to be pretty good at staying on top of personal things; I continue to read a couple books a week when swamped with homework and, even though I've got so many essays due, I'm still participating and on-track for NaNoWriMo this year.

Except... I'm starting to lose it.

The fun thing about motivation and being motivated is that it really comes in spurts. There will be a day where I finish everything I wanted to finish. I'll carry on getting up early without complaint for a week. I'll keep up on laundry and dishes and sometimes I'll even manage to make my bed every morning. I'll feel on top of everything, and then suddenly, I remember just how many essays I have and just how many things I've got to read and comprehend and it all sort of comes crashing down. Because motivation is easy when you've got a bearable work schedule. When you've maybe got a couple of papers due, but it's not really all that much as long as you start them early enough.

Then there's the fun thing of social lives ruining motivation. I'm a fairly motivated person, but I used to be even more on top of everything. Then I discovered that, surprise, I'm not actually an introvert, I'm just cripplingly shy and I'd actually like to be around people all the time, and decided to embrace that. So instead of getting things done, I'm seeing people I know and taking detours on the way back from work study to talk to them for a while rather than grabbing notebooks and my computer and holing up in a study room in the library. Once I do manage to get away from that and head to the library, I'll never opt for a study room - there's a table just outside the actual library that I like to claim, because maybe I'll see someone I know and then that can be a fun time. So actual becoming a social person? Also hurting my work ethic, but in turn, motivation, because all I'll be thinking about is people, all I'll want to do is be around people, and people and six papers do not mix.

But motivation is a mindset. It's not something that you can blame on wanting to be around people. It's getting everything ready to do something and then actually doing it instead of looking at it and deciding to just... listen to the radio for fifteen minutes. It's opening up word documents and spreading out research and then... deciding that maybe checking Facebook or YouTube would maybe be a little bit more fun. It's not even procrastinating by doing something productive, like doing a different kind of homework, or even not completely unproductive, like reading a book or working on personal writing or going and talking to friends. It's procrastinating by doing mind-numbing things like scrolling down comments on Facebook or watching some stupid sketch comedy.

So when you've got six papers due, motivation can be tough, and the only real way I've found to combat not wanting to do anything is to leave. Busy yourself somewhere that's not a place you're completely comfortable. Surround yourself with people who are either very serious about school or think that you're very serious about school (whether you actually are or not - not important) and then when you're waiting for them to show up you can feel productive, because you've been working on a paper for three hours and have got something done whilst glancing up every two seconds to see if maybe someone that you know is going to show up. And honestly, papers are going to be due. There's going to be that giant rush of, "oh god, I've got six papers due" but you're going to get them done and turn them in one-by-one, and by the end of the semester, it's just the two worst papers due that you've got to deal with, and two is a lot easier to handle than six.

Motivation is something I'm working on finding again. I think I've maybe found it, at least a little bit. It's a lot easier to work on something a little bit every day rather than to try and do it all at once, and that's something I'm trying to work on - but the rush of a deadline is sometimes OK for things due that aren't that important. But I'll be at that outside table in front of the library for a while yet, trying desperately to get things done, and that's the most that I can really ask for.