LifeHacker had a pretty great article that helped me a lot that was about Jerry Seinfeld's secret to his success as a comedian, and it's entirely apropos:
He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.
He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."
"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.
For myself, I pick a new project per month, write it on the calendar, and stick with it.
For example, one month was to learn about and write my own GreaseMonkey scripts for simple tasks at work. Now I have a little floating window in the bottom of my work webapps that automate small tasks for me, like stopping/starting pollers, inputting data, etc.
That is actually a practical implementation of the age long() wisdom that you need discipline, not motivation to succeed in various long term endeavour.
My personal trick, for stuff I really don't like is to allocate a 30 min chunk a day to them. Does not seem much, sometimes it is just enough time for a few google search, but slowly to start accumulating time and after a few weeks, those 30 min are sealed in your routine and not going anywhere.
Google "Discipline vs Motivation" for plenty of other self-help guides.
() Seemed to be common wisdom when I was a kid although discipline was not really pitted against motivation (like the reading my parent did of the story rabbit vs turtle was the turtle won by discipline), then it went away when I was a teen when motivation was the only path to success ("you can become anything if you really want it"), and it only seems to be back in fashion recently.
lift.do (now coach.me) used to implement that in a dead simple manner. To monetize, they pivoted from a "chain tracker" w/ reminders and (optional) social props to a social and coaching solution, so I don't know if this feature is still there.
http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...
FTA:
He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.
He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."
"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.
For myself, I pick a new project per month, write it on the calendar, and stick with it.
For example, one month was to learn about and write my own GreaseMonkey scripts for simple tasks at work. Now I have a little floating window in the bottom of my work webapps that automate small tasks for me, like stopping/starting pollers, inputting data, etc.