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As much as I dislike this, a lot of what we do in life depends on our mood, our motivation and our ability to keep ourselves interested in a certain activity for long periods of time. After all, important things in life will often come through persistence and patience.

One thing that sometimes gets in the way of our motivation is the thought that we are not making as much progress as we should be making or that we're not spending as much time working as we should.

The way I get over those thoughts is by thinking about time in a different way, and more accurately analyze how much time I spend working and how much progress I made lately compared to how good I was when I first started learning or working on something.

For example, let's say you're just starting to learn how to code and you're worried that you'll never be able to become really good at programming because there are people out there who spend 6 to 8 hours coding while you only spend one hour a day learning.

That may discourage you because one hour a day doesn't seem like a lot, but if you think about it in terms of weeks, you're spending 5 hours a week learning how to code, and if you need around 5 to 10 minutes to understand each concept, then you're probably learning about 30 new things every week, which is great for someone who's just starting.

Another example could be drawing. I've been trying to learn how to draw many times in the past, and I started by investing 30 to 60 minutes a day into sketching and just drawing random things in order to develop my observational skills and to just get used to drawing.

That not only did not seem like a lot, but after a few weeks it seemed like I wasn't improving at all. All my drawings were really bad, I didn't even finish one sketchbook and I was simply not making as much progress as I hoped.

However, now that I think about all that time I spent sketching, my efforts weren't in vain. 30 to 60 minutes a day drawing are equivalent to 2.5 to 5 hours a week spent only sketching which is quite a lot for someone who never knew how to draw. The time I spent drawing also seemed a lot more important when I looked at my old sketchbook and I realized that while I thought I wasn't making any progress at all, I was almost halfway through the sketchbook and the drawings I had at the beginning weren't anywhere near as good as the ones I had after drawing for so long.

Our progress isn't always obvious when we're considering how much time we spend working, and that can easily demotivate us to work on something. It's really easy to start thinking that you shouldn't be trying at all when you're not satisfied with your progress and that can make you quit eventually. And there's not much you can do about that feeling. It's in all of us. 

Everyone would love to make huge amounts of progress in a short amount of time, but it just doesn't happen. What you can do to avoid frustration however is to always try to look at time in a different way that will make you feel good about what you do, and to always compare your current work with what you were doing a few months or even weeks ago.