Motivating yourself when you're freelancing can be hard at times, but it comes much easier when working in a team environment. Within a team, you know you that a little competition never hurt anyone and is generally just good for the team. It perks people's attention and gets them fired up to do better the next time around.
With the ZURBlog, we needed to step up our blogging efforts and decided to make it one of our goals—and you may notice that it's paying off. Heck, extending my lead over Bryan, who's in second place, is what prompted me to write a post today in the first place.
So how does the ZURB team stay motivated to blog? A friendly race between teammates: The ZURBlog Cup Race.
A screenshot of the ZURB Dashboard's Blog Cup Race in action. It doesn't matter who's winning because it's the ZURB team that benefits.
OK, so we're not actually racing, but the effect is the same. We decided to engineer a points-based system for ourselves with blog posts, comments, and views, each worth a certain amount of points. Those points add up to the scores you see above and keep us moving right along. When one team member starts getting up there, the response has been to step up your game and get in there.
Motivating ourselves through a race between the team has worked well, and is benefiting ZURB—our chief goal that we accomplish through the race. Our Dashboard is where we focus our attention around all things ZURB. Every day we open up our Dashboard and check out what happened yesterday or overnight. It's a wonderful way to stay on top of things and keep our team motivated.
For motivation at ZURB, it's always a race with our team, but the fact is we're still a team racing to a finish line that's always moving forward. We may never reach it, but that just keeps us going and going and going...
