The last two weeks I made it a goal to run 5km every morning. A few times, particularly today, I felt lazy and run down, but I got out of bed anyway and told myself that I'll at least walk. The next thing I know I'm running and feeling amazing and on to set one of my better times.
The point: When you tell yourself "just one more game" or "just one more post", or "just one more video" and end up doing 3-5 hours more, do that with your other tasks too! "just one line of code", "just one tutorial", "just one rep", "just one line of reading/writing".
We all have this amazing mental tool that we've been honing for years, the tool of self deception. Time to use it for good and not evil.
For me that doesn't work because then I learn that "yeah you say just walking but we both know it will end up in running."
What works instead is I promise I will walk. And then I actually only walk even if I feel like running. That way you will trust yourself. If I say "ok i go to the gym 30 mins. just for a quick training." Then even if I'm in the flow at minute 30, I stop and go home. Next time I remember that and I know that if I say 30 it will be 30 and not more, that creates a trust in yourself that you're not trying to trick yourself into doing something you don't want to.
I think the problem you have is that you don't know which 'you' is making the decisions. Let's call the 'tricking' you 'You' and the one you are tricking 'Body-You'. Then here is how the conversation goes:
You: "Time to get up and run."
Body-You: "Oh hell no. I'm tired. Plus we did a good job yesterday. And we have a lot to do today. Also, we don't want to over do it do we?"
You: (sighs) "Fine. Let's at least walk for 30 minutes."
Body-You (sighs): "Ugh. Fine."
10 minutes of walking pass.
Body-You: "This feels great! Let's run."
You: "Okay."
...
First notice that You said, "at least." You is not lying. If, at minute 30, Body-You is like "Ugh, still no," You can capitulate.
Second, notice that it is Body-You that makes the decision to turn it into a run. In your version, Body-You never gets what it wants. Both times You has to control the situation. The first time, to start the run, the second time, to enforce a more-or-less arbitrary contract for the sake of the contract, even though both parties want a new contract.
I feel the same thing Valakas is describing. Which of the "you"'s is remembering the next time, "yeah but 30 minutes that's not how it went last time"?
(also, I don't think body-you would say "we have a lot to do today"?)
Body-You will say anything to get what it wants, including “We don’t have time.” I’m calling it Body-You but, at least for me, it’s really a collection of parts of my mind that are against the action.
As for the “lying”, Body-You knows it is not a lie but doesn’t care. If You believes You is lying, Body-You is more than happy to use that as yet another excuse.
Personally I call these two people the "Planner" and the "Doer". Neither of them start out with bad intentions, but only one of them has to actually do things in the present moment, so resentment can definitely build up between the two.
I've read in the book Atomic Habits by James Clear that the solution is to only do that much time and actually just stop right afterwards, even if you want to do more. Therefore, it's at most 30 min rather than at least. This teaches you rigor and in fact motivates you more because now you know it's not actually a trick.
"""
The Two-Minute Rule can seem like a trick to some people. You know that the real goal is to do more than just two minutes, so it may feel like you’re trying to fool yourself. Nobody is actually aspiring to read one page or do one push-up or open their notes. And if you know it’s a mental trick, why would you fall for it?
If the Two-Minute Rule feels forced, try this: do it for two minutes and then stop. Go for a run, but you must stop after two minutes. Start meditating, but you must stop after two minutes. Study Arabic, but you must stop after two minutes. It’s not a strategy for starting, it’s the whole thing. Your habit can only last one hundred and twenty seconds.
One of my readers used this strategy to lose over one hundred pounds. In the beginning, he went to the gym each day, but he told himself he wasn’t allowed to stay for more than five minutes. He would go to the gym, exercise for five minutes, and leave as soon as his time was up. After a few weeks, he looked around and thought, “Well, I’m always coming here anyway. I might as well start staying a little longer.” A few years later, the weight was gone.
"""
This is one of the most important empirical "truth" I've heard, now from several prominent people in the field¹.
You are, in effect, prioritizing (self-)discipline over short-term performance, learning or productivity gains.
I would surmise that your bodymind² has in effect realized, learned, that compound effect is the best strategy for long-term results; and/or that systems are better than goals. The invariant requirement of any long-term strategy is enough discipline to execute it.
“Never, ever break promises to yourself.” is the real lesson to learn and never forget. The usual rationale goes like this:
Imagine two people, one who always does what they said they'll do, and another who never does what they said. How do you feel about the first one? Trustworthy? Reliable? Someone you can count on? Now what about the second? Empty-worded? Unreliable? Unworthy of trust? Lazy, big mouth, etc?
Now consider how "you" (the "it", your third eye observing yourself) is going to feel about "you" (the "I", the one who carries all the emotional weight) if you behave like person #2 above?
You need to be able to trust yourself. And this is based on facts, not words, just like how you judge anyone else.
That's why it's important, critical, to pause and ponder before making any promise to yourself: make sure you won't break it, make sure you'll be excellent with your own word. Be person #1, the reliable, the trustworthy, for yourself. Give yourself the facts to back that belief, because words, well, they're empty, and you're the only one who can't lie to you.
[1]: Off the top of my head, you hear it from Stephen Covey in the 7 habits (honesty with yourself), you heard it from Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie well before that, you heard it more recently from Brene Brown (in Daring Greatly and her TED talk on vulnerability and courage). Iirc, don't quote me on these, check twice, but the gist is correct.
[2]: Bodymind = body + mind (no duality), i.e. "all of you", your being, your brain and all the things that connect it to the real world including its own, your entire body
Then get ultimately crushed by the world because actually nobody but you cares about the results if the gain is small.
Or you get a pat on the back, that's it.
Ultimately you might also find that the end result was totally not worth the effort sunk.
Or worse, there's no way to compare if you gained anything.
There are only relatively few ways that do change life significantly and most of them do not take intense effort or self discipline.
(I'd love you to provide examples to the contrary. I know of two: training new skills when they matter and training children and pets.)
> “Then get ultimately crushed by the world because actually nobody but you cares about the results if the gain is small. Or you get a pat on the back, that's it.”
You mean that the world will only care if the gain is big, if I achieve "a lot"? If so, I question:
- Should I condition my happiness to something external that I can't control? (what the world thinks of me, of what I do/did)
- How can I ever be satisfied if I only compare myself to others? There's always someone better than me. Shouldn't I compare myself only to myself, past-me against present-me? Shouldn't I be making gifts to future-me by doing now what will make me happier / better / whatever?
- Why does "nobody care if the gain is small"? Can't a small subset of the world, e.g. people close to me that I know and who know me, care about me as I care about them? Isn't that enough, most days of our lives?
> “Ultimately you might also find that the end result was totally not worth the effort sunk.”
That would be the logical reaction of someone who only cared about the end result, and failed to reach their goal. But what if you care about the journey, the mission, the doing? What if "the effort sunk" was welcome, what if it was pleasure, growth, a good bone to grind for you? What if it made you happy?
Then you would find that the effort is well worth it every single day, because it is its own reward, because there is no further expectation beyond today's step, or because you learned to decorrelate your happiness from the satisfaction of expectations that lie beyond your control, your actions, your thoughts.
> “There are only relatively few ways that do change life significantly...”
Agreed.
> “... and most of them do not take intense effort or self discipline.”
Strongly disagree, with every fiber of memory and experience I can find. You would need to substantiate that, because it's an extraordinary claim... If one puts neither "intense effort" nor "self discipline", very little happens, and certainly not "significant life change". Quite the exact opposite is required for growth IME.
One key to all this is to stop thinking in terms of "goals" and instead design "systems" whose outcome gets you closer to where you want to go. In effect, building a vehicule and giving it a direction (or rather, recognizing that you are a vehicule, and take charge, assume full control). Whenever you put energy into this thing, it goes that way, your way, and you along with it (i.e. personality changes, evolves). Even your happiness, it's not a distant or abstract "goal", it's a very real, very practical system that you design to fit your life, values and aspirations. It produces your happiness whenever activated.
The ultimate goals are superb and never attained. The practical systems are tiny Legos but they work every time, and become huge in time.
And when you die, a "happy life" is often judged by a dumb sum of all moments, of all the little things, little bricks... That's the compound effect we get to see, but only retrospectively, unless we're told about it and we train ourselves to see the world in 4 dimensions, before it becomes too obvious/late.
I guess I'm in the middle. Sometimes "just walking" is actually just walking. Sometimes it turns into running. I have no expectations about where the initial push eventually leads, which makes it easier to take that initial push.
I prefer this approach as it ultimately results in a greater output than forcing myself to stop at some prior agreed point I made with myself but would now prefer to renegotiate.
Huh? You have a weird "relationship" with yourself.
I never did not trust myself anymore if I did more reps than I "promised" myself before.
Would a child ever grow distrust against her parents if she changes her mind and wants to do more dishes than initially asked for and they allow her to do it?
> because then I learn that "yeah you say just walking but we both know it will end up in running."
And this doesn't motivate you? For me it's actually more motivating: I only have to muster enough willpower to start walking, not to run, but I'll end up having a good workout anyway.
That’s only a motivation if you viscerally believe running to be an enjoyable activity. I have found that when starting something new, the most important (and hardest) thing is to stop while I’m still having a good time so that I associate that good feeling with the activity instead of the pain that comes from overdoing it.
The verbal voice in your head is rationalizing. Don’t think. Just do.
(If you want a good resource that synthesizes a bunch of modern psychology research relating to that suggestion into a single, entertaining non-fiction book, see “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior” by Leonard Mlodinow [0]).
This approach is interesting to me as it would have not crossed my mind.
I view goals I set myself as a minimum I of what I want to do. Doing more, because I feel like it, is a bonus that I think adds to the feeling of accomplishment.
I guess the main difference is that I actually want to do these things and just have to overcome the hurdle of starting while you describe them as "doing something you don't want to".
The grandparent didn't say, "I'll just walk", but rather "I'll at least walk."
Give yourself permission to only walk. That way, if you later feel like running, you can still get that extra benefit as well, without breaking some promise to yourself, and if you just feel like walking the whole time, no problem there, either.
Note that if this relationship of explicitly limited commitments with yourself is preeminent, your goal should be "go out exercising each day" rather than "run 5km each day".
You need to be more truthful with yourself, then! :P
My "I'll just do 10 reps" always comes with an implicit "but I can do more if I feel like it." Then if I'm feeling strong and have another rep or two left, I'm allowed to do them.
I’ve not heard of that perspective before however I’m not going to discount what you’re saying because everyone’s psychology is different.
For what it’s worth, most people I know feel pride and a sense of accomplishment if they’ve found motivation to do more than they promised themselves. But as I said, everyone’s psychology is different.
I toyed with this feeling. Not to repeat the dopamine theory we see everywhere.. but it feels that most of the web really ends up in the low hanging easy pleasure of our brain, and any moment of struggle will tickle that reflex. And when you ignore/fight it for a second... You (at least I) can sense blood pressure change in my brain and then the thinking side of my head goes back into rhythm again. Thinking is a pleasure too, but it's requires a bit of patience.
Can relate to that ”moment of struggle”. Thinking about stopping the use of any dev tools that don’t have instant feedback, as having to wait a few seconds for something (currently deploying to google app engine mostly) makes me instantly alt-tab to reddit.
It will block the time waster websites you configure and will block them for you until you've ticked off the list. It's simple but effective for catching that mindless ctrl+t -> reddit reflex.
Trivial inconveniences are huge. For years, I could not get myself to floss. I had no problem with the brushing habit. So then I tried using those floss-picks instead of the reel. Bam, flossing rate went from about once a month to every other day.
It doesn't always work, but at least you've done the one task. That's one thing you can tick off the to-do list, regardless of how productive your day has been otherwise.
As a lifelong realist (= pessimist) this is one of those things I struggle with too.
It reminds me of William McRaven quote: "If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed... If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. And by the end of the day, that one task completed, will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter. If you can't do the little things right, you'll never be able to do the big things right. And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made, that you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better."
I know its not the point of the quote, but I can't believe I'm the only one who feels less comfortable in a made bed. Tightly tucked sheets feel so constricting.
For me, "made bed" just means re-aligning the sheets/blankets/pillows so that nothing is tangled or crumpled up, but never any extra nonfunctional things (no tucking, no tiny decorative cylinder pillows that no one ever uses, etc.)
> My strategy has become: Just do one task today, that's all. Doesn't matter how small. Leave the office feeling like you've done something productive.
I feel like this is just a way to make yourself feel better about doing basically nothing. Before you implemented this, were you really at risk of spending an entire day doing absolutely nothing productive whatsoever?
People ask me why I take cold showers regularly, post to my blog daily, and never miss my burpee-based twice-daily calisthenics over more than a decade (approaching 150,000 cumulative burpees).
Among many reasons, developing the skill to do what I said I would is tremendously valuable. Without these habits, I lacked discipline and thought to avoid tricks, which I thought of as short-term cheats. The habits developed discipline in me and revealed that developing tricks is the way to make habits work.
I have no doubt that the most accomplished people use tricks to do their most valuable activities -- athletes, politicians, business leaders, whatever.
Things like if I want to run but am feeling lazy, I put on my running shoes and clothes, which means I'll eventually run. To put on the shoes is trivial, but it works to get me on a run, however long.
Before I lift weights, I mop the floor since some of my exercises put me on the ground. Mopping is easy and makes lifting automatic. For some reason, once I mop, I automatically transition to lifting.
Starting my burpees took years of experimenting on what would avoid my standing there intending to start, but not starting. Counting down or up didn't work. What worked was committing to starting on the next breath. Now I pace all my calisthenics by breath.
These are examples of little things I found that if I do them, I do the big things. As far as I can tell, the way to find tricks that work is to keep doing the activity until a trick that works emerges.
I wish I had this written down somewhere, but I don't; perhaps it's well known enough that someone else can correct my mediocre paraphrasing:
A Marine once told a civilian that everyone is programmed to believe their 80% remaining is their 0% remaining, and the courageous work of realizing that limitation is what unlocks the extreme feats that someone so well physically and mentally conditioned can undergo.
I'm not military, don't know anyone military, and have no particular leanings, but I have always been absolutely invigorated by the apparent, quiet force that service members project. It's inspirational even devoid of agenda.
> everyone is programmed to believe their 80% remaining is their 0% remaining
Of course. When I do my reps in the gym, I know I could do more if someone put a gun to my head. I stop because I don't want to hurt myself, not because I cannot do anymore. When I feel sleepy in the evening, I am fully aware that I could go 48 more hours without sleep if I really needed to. But would it be a good idea? No, it would not be.
And even if we ignore obvious health risk of pushing yourself to the limit, in general, I would rather be more comfortable than more productive. There are always things to be done, so why stress about doing a little bit more?
Then it sounds like you don't actually believe you're at 0% remaining. What your parent is saying, and what I've observed myself, is that most people really believe they physically cannot (say) run any further.
> most people really believe they physically cannot (say) run
Do they? I would expect that when you "physically cannot run", it means you are collapsed in a pile on the ground unable to stand or move. People might say things like "I cannot run another step", but that is not the same as actually believing it. That said, unless you are very fit and very young, it might not be a good idea to get yourself to the point where you actually cannot run anymore. Unless there is a tiger chasing you or something.
I have fallen over on the ground after 20 miles of running in both legs my quads and hamstrings were cramping. I got up and ran another 10 miles. Didn't have any choice, either run 5 miles back to the check-in table or 10 miles to finish the race.
A cramp is not being at your limits. A good stretch and your ready to continue.
This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKWWRS9CpTY is being at your limits. But I'm willing to bet that a tiger would make her body remember that maaaybe there is actually (a lot) more energy left to keep going.
Without getting philosophical about the definition of "belief," the point I took away was that people have a hell of a lot more left than they normally admit to themselves, even when the bar is merely "I'd be injured" rather than "I literally cannot." This may be more true for cardio than weights.
Usually that %80 left at their %0 left is done with fairly horrendous form, which leads to injury. Try putting perfect form on that condition and most would fail soon after.
In general people have way more capacity than they believe. Our worlds are built around immediate, short term gratification. I find that doing something everyday that's uncomfortable helps me stay out of the short term gratification trap. Getting up early when the alarm goes off, exercising, intermittent fasting, BJJ, are all things that at times are hard and uncomfortable, but they are a constant reminder of the capacity that we as humans have to excel.
You just end up getting tired and going to bed early that night. If you can make yourself do it, it’s a lot more effective to fix sleep schedules by pulling instead of pushing.
It's primarily because in the military you get used to the ideas that you are in big trouble if you are not on time and also that you cannot fail (failure may mean death). That plus the quiet confidence you gain in yourself and others helps add some of that extra sauce.
Sometimes I have a really hard time to start working on some tasks and I think it is linked to anxiety and stress, not mere laziness. As long as there are no big expectations (like when exercising), I have usually no procrastination issues.
Sometimes I'm kicking myself that I should really start work on this now, and it doesn't work, and I get more and more anxious.
Upon reflection (sometimes I get to that point sooner, sometimes later) the problem is usually that the task is too vaguely defined to start working on it.
Very apropos for me as I went to the doctor yesterday for increased anxiety about getting stuff done.
I was promoted to a team lead position in Autumn of 2019. Things went well, if hectic and stressful, for the first couple of months. But the slower period in December really did a number on my motivation and focus, and my anxiety kicked in big time.
Now I have a huge problem doing actual work, and so often get distracted into spending hours on technical, interesting tasks that aren't work related. It doesn't help that I have a million different interesting projects that I'd like to mess around with.
And the work to-do list gets longer, and longer. And my anxiety gets worse and worse.
I hope you find a solution to your issues. Good luck!
Yes! Exactly! I had a issue that I wasn't sure how to start, and didn't understand too well, and it was killing my productivity.
I ended up just doing something, anything, even if it's wrong. Then I could correct it and do it properly. But sitting there fretting about it being hard and vague wasn't making any progress
I’ve dealt with this as well, particularly with programming. At least with programming, what I usually wind up doing is raising an issue on Github about the feature I’m trying to implement or the bug I’m trying to solve. It helps me actually start working, keep track of my thoughts, and define the problem well enough that I can ultimately begin working on it.
With other things, usually it’s best to run to google, or send an email to your boss or professor, or just pull out a notepad and start jotting things down. Sometimes it also helps to take a quick break - exercise, take a shower, etc - and then come back.
Although the irony is that I’m typing this comment out as a form of procrastination when I should be pulling out my laptop to do some remote work...
Totally. And I find it already helps tremendously to think and come up with the first/next action to start working. Sometimes, I need the first two, but any more again ends up in procrastination land. Unless the entire plan just crystallizes like that, in which case it was probably something else holding me back.
Anxiety is an emotion that you feel when you expect something bad to happen in the future.
Anxiety can be measured, your body segregates hormones in order to change the state of your entire body in order to prepare for this danger.
Unfortunately danger for primitive humans are different than current society dangers.
It usually prepares you either for a fight or a flight (running away as fast as possible).
If you get too anxious for example fighting for your life or your children, you can break your bones and don't feel pain.
But this natural response is of no help if you feel that you will lose your job, or break your relationship...
In fact some work can't be done at all under these hormones influence, like intellectual work. Your body prepares you for action, not for reflexion.
On my last contract, working with very competent people, I got struck with one of the biggest procrastination wave I ever experienced. Thanks to a bit of introspection and awesome support from the team, I Realized this was just anxiety due to the imposter syndrome.
I've faced that issue. Not totally solved it. I found some help in a YouTube channel on ADHD in a couple of videos from "How to ADHD" titled "wall of awful." That gave some good ideas to make it past that point and start.
I damaged my shin bones because I was running too much too soon and currently taking 2 months break. Side note, I used to run 20k every week, then stopped.
Be careful of the problem on the opposite side of the spectrum: your body might not be able to keep up with your motivation.
Couch to 5k (a.k.a. C25K) is a popular way to build up slowly and steadily.
Once you're up to running 5k three times a week (which is roughly where the plan leaves you) you can limit both volume and max distance increases to 10% per week.
I used to run 5-6 times a week with a usual volume of 50k/week so adding in another 1-2 gentle 5k recovery jogs to do a minimum of 5k every day wouldn't be difficult at all. But that's an entirely different prospect to just going out and trying to run 5k every day (although some people do exactly this and get away with it) with minimal existing running fitness or conditioning.
In my (totally unprofessional) opinion, C25K progresses too quickly for most people. It think the "None to Run" variant is better (and emphasizes that repeating weeks is normal, and even expected)
Agreed. I joined the military out of HS and got hurt in a car accident. Nothing serious but enough to keep my from PT-ing for a little. They had me do something like C25K as part of rehab -- lots of run a lap, walk a lap, repeat x 10, with increasing amounts of running as I progressed. Worked okay, got back to reasonably fit in a couple of months.
Few years later I'm a softbody IT guy looking to shape up, and decided to follow the reddit C25K sub -- it killed my shins. Bad splints, had to cut out running for a while. I got there eventually but I think 60 minutes of biking or eliptical + leg workouts did more for me than the C25K (as written) did.
None to Run looks great! The slower the progression the better for beginning runners in my (also totally unprofessional) opinion too.
As a general comment, shin splints is the classic beginners too-much-too-soon running injury. Experienced runners get a whole range of other injuries, but rarely shin splints. The only time is after they take a break and try and come back too quickly (notice the pattern).
Yep, with running as an absolute beginner, you really want to start slowly, both in terms of tempo and in terms of distance. The key is regularity and persistence.
By running slowly a lot, your body has time to learn how to run efficiently and safely simply by trial and error. By not overdoing it, you give your body time to recover from any errors made during the "trials", without injury.
Incidentally, lot of slow running is also a great way to build up base endurance, so it is not wasted time, and you will "recoup the investment" later, when you start running longer distances.
Shin splints suck, though. Even experienced runners get them from time to time. Probably best to switch it up a bit, include swimming or bicycle instead of some runs every now and then.
To quote an amazing motivator, Jocko Willink, "Good". Now you have more time to do cycling or strength train or some other exercise instead of running.
That's a fascinating idea, our bodies may not be able to keep up with our motivation. I've been pondering a lot about how our minds can live in a fantasyland of imagination that can hold long runs of time never being put to the test. Physical reality is the great check and test for many things.
I had to stop playing basketball with the guys when my knee couldn't keep up with my joy of playing.
I think this could do more with your running form and listening to your body than your will that kept you going. It might be worth checking out your form with a running coach. Either way, wishing you a speedy recovery.
You can absolutely injure yourself by running too much, even with perfect form, and before you would notice anything is wrong while "listening to your body".
Yeah, people say "listen to your body" like this is simply a settled issue and all you have to do is make a decision to be more responsible. Researchers have barely even begun to properly unpack variations in interoception or RSI susceptibility, let alone the interactions between them.
I think you missed the point. Regardless of if their form was good or bad they ran through the pain. Shin splints and pantar faciticus are really bad to do that with as the recovery takes forever and you just can't do anything during it related to that area.
I think your getting downvoted as you answered x when they were discussing y.
It’s so amazing how making it easy to get started is basically priming your brain to complete the task.
I’ve gotten fit by hanging up a chin-up bar on a spare door frame. When I had a trainer, I was always amazed at what I could accomplish - even on days when I swore I felt dead in the morning - just by getting there and starting. I’ve gotten good at coding by keeping my IDEs of choice in the taskbar and working on small tasks during downtime. I study better and more often when I leave out my notebooks and calculator.
The lower you set the barrier to entry, for a given activity, the better a chance you give yourself to actually complete that activity later.
I have never in my life regretted working out, but I regularly regret not working out. It is so weird to me that, despite hundreds of trials of this dynamic, by brain still hasn't totally internalized this lesson and I end up having to tell myself "dog it if you want to, just show up", then proceed to have a great time.
I regret running all the time. There are wild swings in the difficulty of doing the same run depending on weather, hours of sleep, time of day, what I’ve eaten, and apparently just random chance. Digestive system tends to be unhappy early in the morning, and the times I ignored its warnings and went out anyway were the most physically uncomfortable I’ve ever been.
The lifestyle discipline required to make running consistently tolerable is overall a good thing. But on days when I know conditions are going to make it miserable, I don’t go. I’m not in it for competitive greatness, I’m out there for an enjoyable and sustainable habit.
In 2014, I ran 5km every morning. 356 days. I hated every single one of these runs. I did get better at it, but I did not end up enjoying it. Certainly was never "feeling amazing".
Eventually dropped the habbit. Now spending more time in the Gym and on the Bike.
First, I'm not saying this would've helped you (I don't know), it's just a story and perhaps someone who is like me gets inspiration from it :)
If I hadn't created three excellent mix tapes (that I still use to this day!) when I started running 10y ago, I might have ended up in your boat. I didn't care much for the running, but having a burn out meant I shouldn't be on the computer as much, and I didn't know what to do with the time. In the beginning I was having fun with how far into the mix I could get before running out of breath (I didn't sprint or anything, just no physical condition to speak of), and adding to the mix as I got further. At some point I decided perhaps I needed another mix with alternating running and walking parts[0]. I adjusted the BPM to my natural running gait. Added a little intro for when I leave the house to when I'm on the street. Everything was chosen with the idea that I wouldn't get bored during running, so it was a sequence of the "best", most uplifting, powerful parts of each track, each lasting about a minute (or 128 beats maybe). Between runs I kept optimizing the mixes for a while, improving the splice points and crossovers etc. Unfortunately I lost the original Ableton project files to a fire. Thankfully I had shared the mixes to friends, who could at least provide me with the mp3 renders.
One day I'm going to add a fourth mix :) But I don't use pirated software any more, and not being a professional musician I can't really justify the cost of buying Ableton (or Bitwig, which at least runs on Linux). Unfortunately I've found no other free (or cheap) software that comes close to the ease with which you can simply splice and beat-match audio clips. Or just navigating and zooming a large audio file. Audacity is there when you really need something done, but it's hardly a smooth workflow.
[0] it's as if psytrance and psydub were made for this, one is exactly half the BPM of the other!
I read a book called 80/20 running, that pointed out that most of us run most of our runs too fast. It made a huge difference in my training, to run at (say) 60% of my pace most of the time instead of 90% as most of us do. I felt better, I enjoyed it more, it created less anxiety to start a run, I recovered faster, and I could log more miles per week.
I feel when you push yourself too hard it will make you look less forward to your next workout. Best to end on a good/interesting note similar to how TV episodes do - making you want to come back for more.
I'll go ahead and fire off a recommendation to find a muay thai gym that has dedicated conditioning classes and some cool people. I wish I would have discovered it 10 years earlier when I started running cross country.
Running, for me, was the Runescape of sports. Very grindy, with very little room for me to use my mind.
There is a company dedicated to tricking (voluntary and conscious) people from procrastination to actual sport, see https://www.squadeasy.com/
The main idea is to leverage the brain's sensitivity to cooperative team goals or competitive goals, plus some gamification. And it works!
Disclaimer: the main founder is my brother, I was involved in the very first steps of the project, and I'm currently on a freelance mission with the company. And the team is looking for a freelance or a permanent Typescript coder in Paris.
Then tell your brother that they need to work on cheaters because my company uses Squadeasy and every year it's just a disgraceful experience.
I know it's tough, especially when a giant like Strava that gamifies the hell out of sport barely does anything, but for the sake of giving an example, a cheater from my company basically took a tcx from someones marathon and uploaded every other day with shifted timestamps. I know it because they used Strava and with summit I saw the gpx from their workouts and the lat/long data was always identical. Also from averaging like 10k a week, he shot up to 200k, magically.
At least I managed to get some people's points revoked because they tagged each other on Strava for every workout even if only one/two of them were actually working out.
Now if I couldn't stalk on them on Strava there's absolutely no transparency on Squadeasy and I wouldn't have been able to point anything out to the team. These guys for sure are setting their profile private next year to prevent people from calling them out (since they did mid competition last year, actually).
> Typescript
So frontend, it certainly needs work too. If there's any work foreseen in backend, especially crushing cheaters, let me know.
Thanks for reporting. Yes, detecting cheat is one of those numerous cat-and-mouse games. Whatever you do to detect, will deter more cheaters yet with diminishing returns.
Squadeasy already deals with a number of scenarios, though not exactly this one. Thank you for your concise yet insightful report. I keep these ideas: cheating with multiple uploads of time-shifted TCX, transparency in third party trackers helped.
I just opened an issue in the internal tracking system with your text and a few lines. The team will notice it tomorrow morning (it's 10:30pm here in Paris), yet we have quite a backlog already so don't hold your breath.
To answer your last sentence and Typescript, the freelancer or new hire will be working on both front (user profile web-app) and back (bugfix, toolset migration, API evolution). Any contact welcome.
Very correct! I love the thought. We have to replace the lazy tasks into the active ones by telling our brain just "one more time". And I have realized that whenever I tell myself to do something which requires getting out of bed and be active, the thought is itself exhausting. But ones you do that you feel amazing and your day just go right! You just have to push yourself for that one time again and again.
This is a technique often employed to help people suffering from anxiety, you can always break something down into smaller tasks and eventually you'll get to a point where the task feels doable.
But equally something being fun or worth doing doesn't mean you won't procrastinate doing it. Cleaning the house, for example, is definitely worth doing but many people procrastinate doing it, and it's actually a really good time to apply this technique:
You don't have to clean the whole house, you can just clean one room. You don't have to clean an entire room, you can just clean a bookcase. You don't have to clean the entire bookcase, you can just clean one shelf. You don't have to clean the entire shelf, you can just put one thing back in it's place. You don't even have to put it back, just go over and pick it up. ...
You can keep on going if none of those seem doable, right down to something like wiggling your big toe, but most people would probably at the very least find putting a single thing back doable.
And I've used an example of something that is worth doing but most people don't find fun, but there are plenty of examples of things that are both fun and worth doing that people still procrastinate (probably mostly occurs in mental health sufferers, but that was the entire point of my original comment).
I like the idea and I'm glad it works for some people but I tried it and often I would get out the door with all my running gear on and then turn back around and give up. Something about thinking about it like this made it easier to give up.
I recently started mountainbiking, and I often excert myself way too much to the point of having to get off the bike and just resting. After watching the tedx talk "How "normal people" can train like the worlds best endurance athletes" I made it a thing to go out on the bike and _be slow_. Just go as slow as possible up the hills instead of almost collapsing.
Now I feel like going out almost all the time instead of thinking "ooh, wow I was sooo tired the last time I was on the trail!". Made it much much easier to keep a routine of getting out regularly. Also my pace is much more even, and actually not much slower in total on my "slow" runs, since I never have to stop and rest.
Learned helplessness is a particularly insidious form of this. What's fascinating is that in the studies, some animals never get it, they just keep fighting it. I wonder if that trait can be tapped in to, I doubt it'
an all-or-nothing parameter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
This is why I advise gym newbies to quit and go home while they're feeling pumped, and not to stay so long that they feel exhausted and cranky. It's more important to create the positive subconscious association with the gym.
I mean you did not start the activity. This trick works only when you have already started the activity.
I suggest that next time you become serious about it: There is no way you could let yourself not doing the minimum activity BUT you can leave after you have done your minimum.
For example: Your minimum activity is going out and running for a minute. You do it, period.
Your mind will try to put excuses, like "I don't have time", but because the activity is minimal you don't have to think about that, you spend less time doing it than thinking about it.
Another suggestion: Only complete minimal activities first, and feel good about it,until you get used to going out each day.
Going out for running just minute over 30 days is much much better than running kilometers one day, being exhausted, feeling pain( and guilt) the next.
After 30 days you will have established a routine. It becomes harder not going out each day than staying home.
I should've expanded on my original comment a little more. I'm currently on a run streak of 130 consecutive days, including a motorcycle crash and international long haul flights.
One of the most frustrating things is I have no idea why I have managed it this time but not before.
The other failure mode I have is procrastinating leading up to the activity. Yesterday I woke up at 6am with the intention of going for a run like I had managed to do for the past 2 weeks. After much procrastination I finally managed to go at 3pm.
I think I've been quite successful over the years in doing exercise but the lack of insight into my habits and motivation is maddening....
That sounds like me. No matter how hard I try, I just can't seem to get the time from wearing normal clothes to running to having showered and wearing normal clothes again, down to less than 2 hours if it just includes 25 minutes of running. Trying to do the "just one minute" approach when you don't feel like running, still becomes a "just 1h36" problem. Or indeed sometimes, quite randomly, worse.
> PS: Now , After you have already run for a minute, it will sound ridiculous not doing one more.
Unless you don't work like that. Maybe I'm weird, but if I promised myself "just one minute" and I trick myself into doing more minutes, I'm going to remember that next time I'll tell myself "just one minute". I might say "just one minute and then see how you feel". But again, there shouldn't be anything ridiculous about it if I just do one minute, because who is being ridiculous next time they say "just one minute" ?
This is a good reason to break your tasks up into smaller chunks too. One more thing checked of the list is easier when its something like "add a button" and not "implement entire feature".
If you can pull it off and restrain yourself, there is this trick of leaving one easy bug (or task) open, to get a nice start of the next day. You could start looking out for that task or bug half an hour before quits, maybe?
Sometimes when you feel the worst when starting, your performance is best. And professional athletes have documented the reverse, ca. a fresh pitcher getting knocked out in the 1st.
I did this last summer. Simply walking early to get some bread. It quickly turned into an automatic alarm clock, gave me a good 30 min of "warm up" walking that also let my brain coast while watching the woods. You come back both refreshed and all warmed up blood wise. It was very very beneficial altogether.
If it wasn't for the wrong job I took next and winter killing the morning sun I'd still be doing this. Actually now that spring is here, I feel the need. The need for .. walk.
> A few times, particularly today, I felt lazy and run down, but I got out of bed anyway and told myself that I'll at least walk
This is also used with people who suffer from some kind of limb paralysis. You first start to tell them to wiggle the extremity of their finger (or toe). Then part of the of the finger. Then the whole finger. And so on.
Basically the concept is the make every single effort leading to the end result as effortless and frictionless as possible.
Looks like most of use discover this rule one way or the other. I had a simple rule, where I would try not to give up for the smallest period of time I could hold on to a thing.
Often that is like the next 5 minutes. Like I just tell myself, we are not trying to do this the whole year or even years. Just the next 1 hour, and then tomorrow we will try again.
This helps me get to the gym every morning at 6am. I go every morning, even if I don't plan on working out and just stretching. The simple 8 minute walk to the gym is the main blocker, so once this step is done it's easy to start working out anyway.
I used to be sceptical that the concept of overtraining was a thing, but it definitely is. Just saying that running every day consistently might not necessarily be good for you in the long run. Listen to your body.
Agreed, "listen to your body." is really important advice. I've been running every day without exception for 1252 days now, and there have been really slow, really short (2k) runs whenever I felt my body needed a bit more leeway for recovery. It takes some practice and it's not for everyone, but daily/streak running can be transformative (and was/is for me).
Crucially, when you tell yourself "at least walk" or "at least one more X" you have to allow yourself to sometimes just walk and not have it have to turn into a secret run.
Just waking up at the same time every day and kickstarting yourself (practically no matter what time you end up going to bed) seems to work absolute wonders.
Without knowing the op’s condition (so take this with a grain of salt), I’d advise against running 5km each & every day as it could wear out your knees, specially running on harder terrain (as most do).
For amateur practitioners it’s good to alternate different activities so that certain muscles get to recover.
Agree but the point was to try a light version of the challenge and you may get the determination to do the full version. Sure, running or any high impact sport can do damage to joints.
Do you have some evidence to back that claim? I run long distances, and whilst I have been given repeated advice of this nature, I have never seen any actual evidence that this is a problem?
However the thing is the group is self selecting, people who experience joint problems stop running or do not run ultramarathons.
(Ex-runners in this study did not in general stop because of joint problems.)
Ultimately, the activity seems safe from standpoint of miles ran.
Fitness routines and work are not the same thing. The former is IMHO pretty much a pointless waste of time (nothing bad will happen if you skip one day) and work usually just needs to be done eventually or there are serious consequences. The former thus needs self deception, while the latter just requires realization/visualization of its necessity and of the dire consequences.
Wow, that's some low effort post... I'm not lazy and I exercise when I need to wait/kill time or when I feel like it (e.g. I run instead of walking somewhere), I don't wastefully allocate extra time for it.
Your argument is a bit contradictory: I can skip one day of work just like I can skip 1 workout ("nothing bad will happen").
However, I am pretty sure there are dire/severe consequences to not maintaining your physical health over time [1], just like there are if you do not perform at work.
If nothing happens when you skip one day of work, perhaps you should work less or be fired. In important jobs, not working stalls processes and sometimes even endangers lives.
This feels like grasping at straws here: How do you handle acute illness? Do you just "push through" and potentially get your coworkers sick, all while cranking out sub-par work?
Further, should I be fired or reduce my schedule if I am hospitalized after a car-accident, or require a surgical intervention like the one I 'skipped' 7 days of work to have done?
...The logic of your argument just really doesn't compute, but I may just be missing something.
>Another trick to start sloppy - you might have high expectations of your finished work.
>You want to write a great book, not just a good one. Or create a stellar artwork, or start a great business.
>All those expectations can put more pressure on you than you can bear, leading you to avoid it by procrastinating.
>Instead, you can escape those expectations by starting deliberately badly.
I use this one a lot. I always heard it called a 'vomit draft'. It really works. It's easier to see how truly terrible thing could be improved than it is to just start working from a blank slate.
This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote:
"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
David Bowie and Tin Machine used this technique on their album Tin Machine.
>The Sales’ also pushed for a punishing first-take philosophy, which Bowie found enticing. No overdubs unless necessary for guitar solos, no synths (the old Queen boast), and most of all, no lyric rewrites. The band would go to lunch and return to find that Bowie had written out a complete provisional lyric for whatever song they were working on. But that was as far as he was allowed to go: he was forced to keep to his first instincts. Sometimes this worked out, sometimes it didn’t (see “Crack City”).
>Given these strictures, Bowie and the band stuck to music “that didn’t have too much orchestration about it,” as Bowie said in a 1989 interview. “If it got too chordy and arranged, it wouldn’t be anything what we wanted to do. The structure had to be as loose as possible so that we could improvise.” Rather than reworking songs, they just kept cutting more, with as many as 35 to 40 pieces coming out of the sessions. So most of Tin Machine is basic blues-centered rock, with the average song having no more than five chords: it lacked the harmonic ambiguity and structural games of Bowie’s older work. While the record often worked on a song level, with 14 tracks on the CD version, the album was a wearying listen. Few records are as exciting in miniature and as draining as a whole as Tin Machine.
I can’t remember the name of the ceramicist, but hearing him interviewed on Radio 4, his apprenticeship in (China|Japan) involved every pot he made being deliberately smashed at the end of the day for a year. A way to get over a fear of failure and to learn to keep repeating the process of learning.
I don't find it now, but I've read that anecdote is made up. And I don't think it make sense. Except for when you are an absolute beginner, you won't improve if you don't put in any effort in the quality of your work. See deliberate practice etc..
No, the point of this anecdote is that you get good at quality by pursuing quantity.
It's an appealing idea because it's counterintuitive, and here on HN were are absolute suckers for contrarian ways to outsmart the herd. But we have been given no reason to think it actually works.
Well, in writing terms, it seems to have worked for Ray Bradbury:
> The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.
... incidentally, also Neil Gaiman's advice in the Masterclass lectures.
The reason it works so well for writing is, as Neil Gaiman points out, that if you work for a year on one story, you've probably practised starting a story 52 times. But you've still only practised finishing a story once. And getting into the habit of finishing things is one of the most important habits to get into.
I understand the point they are trying to make, but I still think the anecdote is harmful. It gives the impression that it is more important to put in the work than any real effort. The only thing you’ll be good at after producing 1000 crappy pots is producing crappy pots.
I think you are over-simplifying the situation. Malcom Gladwell's book Outliers popularized the notion that a person needs on average 10,000 hours of practice to truly master a given task. A lot of people took this to mean, "if you put in 10,000 hours of practice, you will become a master." This is not true. The 10,000 hours of practice is necessary, but not sufficient. The practice has to be _intentional_, guided, goal-oriented practice. Not just playing the same song or making the same shot over and over.
That was exactly my point. It is harmful to believe that mindless practicing, or pottery, will make you a master just because you put in the time or prescribed number of pots. How am I oversimplifying?
It's also tinted by the fact that learning a skill is usually logarithmic. If you are a student with no pot-making skills, those first few pots are gonna give a lot of XP. I think it'd be a different outcome if done with more experienced potters.
Maybe this works for potters but I don't think it'd work for developers. If a compSci lecturer suggested one group would get an A for writing a perfect, bug free app and the other group would get an A for writing 50,000 lines of code, I wouldn't expect the group writing as much code as they could to make the best app.
Knuth suggests, in TAOCP, that the best way to write a program is to write it once, scrap it completely and rewrite from scratch. Very much in line with spending an entire semester making one perfect program vs spending a semester writing and rewriting new programs from scratch.
I used this extensively for code assignments in university, but for a different reason. We had to do most things in C, which can be very painful for prototyping and experimenting with new approaches. So I would solve the problem first in Python, try different approaches, and then after I was happy with the solution I'd write it again in C. Saved me a lot of time in the end.
A better approach in my experience is to grow the whole system from a “skeleton” implementation, refactoring the architecture and code as your understanding grows. With the key use cases being your guide.
In the pottery example Group A were marked by weight ("fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on."). Making a single giant pot could get you an A if the lecturer wasn't pedantic about the meaning of "pots".
I think it does work for developers. You also learn programming by doing it, rather than by thinking about it. Write 50 apps, and your 50th is bound to be better than if you start out trying to write the perfect app on your first try.
I think if doing this I would have a group split so one has to create an app that's finished (defining that would be fun) and one that has to write one that's code is 'clean' (again, fun defining that).
I say this because I've worked with a lot of inexperienced developers that commonly have a stack of half finished projects, or things they've re-written half a dozen times to get the architecture right. I'm my experience you learn a lot by finishing things, and being constrained by previous decisions.
Bonus points if you can get customers relying on your work, nothing motivates like support emails.
Consider someone with little to no experience with programming trying to build a single app and planning it out and refactoring and refining it continuously, compared to constantly creating and archiving multiple toy prototypes of the same app and then considering the best among those.
(The app's size and complexity should be commensurate to a single clay pot in a ceramics course.)
It requires the students to actually try to make something of quality, sure, but only to the same degree that the students in the original (apocryphal) story did- after all, those students could easily have shown up with a pile of baked misshapen clay instead of proper pots.
in the extremes, neither of approaches work, if you are just fighting yesterday's bugs or paralised by choice and perfecction, both are bad ideas.
It's like order and chaos, what you want is to find a balance that allows you to explore, and leave things a bit open so they can also be extended, but also sound and precisse enough so that it actually works, and does the job.
In this hypothetical scenario, instead of counting final lines of code, maybe we should count lines of affected code: take each commit and count how many lines were added, modified or deleted.
That matches "the quantity trumps quality" idea above more closely in our industry.
It's often easier to add to something that already exists than to start something new from scratch. And when you're the one who created the thing in the first place, it's that much easier to make the improvements.
Even if the initial thing is so terrible it needs to be redone completely, at least you figured out what you don't want. All while getting into the habit of doing the thing.
I stumbled upon this when trying to get started with my master thesis. In frustration, I threw a bunch of buzzwords and random thoughts at LaTeX and then stashed it for a day or two. After that, I picked it up, looked at it critically and went "well, this paragraph is obviously wrong, here's what it SHOULD say..." and two hours later I had a very rough draft finished.
Write out the whole thesis as headers and fill all the sections with Loren ipsums until you have the page count you want. Then, start filling in the real text
Reminds me of an idea from Ira Glass's lecture circuit: as you learn a craft, you develop the taste to recognize that your own work is crap long before you get good enough to satisfy your own standards. You just have to push through and trust that it eventually ends.
As Ernest Hemingway never actually said, "write drunk, edit sober". Which I don't take to mean literally getting drunk before you start working on something, but do it as if you were drunk, i.e. with little to no inhibition.
I also like how they mention marathon. Indeed, you don't start training for marathon by running all 42km on the first day, are you? No, for some of us in our current shape even running 5km is hard! So we should start with smaller things - those we can do - and tell ourselves that we have achieved something - and that tomorrow we probably will achieve slightly more.
I agree a lot with this. A blank page is the worst - I find it hard to get started. But if I just put something (probably something bad) it is much easier to just continue improving it.
For me it's different. It's easy for me to start a project. I get overly excited over a week, banging a lot of code. But as soon as I get stuck, I often get stuck forever and never come back to the project.
Or I decide to "refactor" a piece of code, and then spend days thinking about how I'll "refactor" it, rather than just doing it or not doing it in the first place.
Make it work, make it right, make it fast [1]. This has helped me tremendously in my programming career and especially in my side projects, where I have very limited time and energy. Its a solid strategy for breaking down complex work.
> Start in a way that you could enjoy.
Start doing in in a way that you could have fun, even if it's not as efficient as other boring/normal ways, so that the fun itself is the motivator.
Many people do! This is the 'architect' vs 'gardener' debate. A lot of writers start out with the notion of a story, then let it develop in the writing. If I remember correctly, Stephen King writes this way.
>Does this mean that, for instance, if you're writing a novel, you start without a structured outline?
It could, but there's no reason you couldn't start with a terrible outline instead of diving right into prose. The point is just that when you see something your brain will stark noticing all the ways it sucks and it gets things going.
Make sure the thing you have to do is something you want to do. While you can procrastinate on the things you're truly interested in, ultimately you're more likely to follow through with the things that interest you than the other random tasks that require doing.
Writing that design doc, report, or review at work? Meh. I drag my feet until I'm the last person in the office and I have to finish.
That obscure side project that really interests me? Hell yeah. It's called hyper-focus, and those with ADHD know what it's like.
Check out my Github streak. I think I've got the world's fastest faster-than-realtime CPU-only neural TTS and Voice Conversion (VC) systems with multi-speaker embeddings outside of Google. And I wrote an entire data ingestion, cleanup, and curation engine to build massive data sets for training. A year ago I didn't even know what any of this stuff was, and now I can't pull myself away from it. Building is magnetic and addictive, but it's not the thing I need to do.
Sometimes you can pivot the energy you have from a desirable task into an undesirable one. I tell myself I can't work on the fun thing until I get the mundane one done. It's a hack that doesn't always work.
I want to structure my life around things I want to do to the exclusion of all else. I think I'm starting to get there. I've trimmed a lot of unnecessary things from my life.
My dream is to get rich enough doing desirable side hustles that I can pay people to take care of all the undesirable tasks. Delegation to achieve efficiency.
I can work like there is no tomorrow on random side projects. I just wish I could redirect all that focus and energy at will into the areas that need them.
>Sometimes you can pivot the energy you have from a desirable task into an undesirable one. I tell myself I can't work on the fun thing until I get the mundane one done. It's a hack that doesn't always work.
It can even backfire: sometimes you end up just browsing reddit or doing some other nonsense thing for hours just so you can avoid doing the mundane task. At the end of the day you wonder how you wasted an entire day without doing the fun side project or the mundane task.
>My dream is to get rich enough doing desirable side hustles that I can pay people to take care of all the undesirable tasks.
Hiring somebody to do the cleaning at home seems to help quite a few people. People in tech probably earn enough to be able to afford to just hire someone to clean the apartment/house once in a while. It's probably a better option than to either hate yourself for it or to just not clean for a long period of time.
I don't have an ADHD diagnosis, but I struggle with procrastination.
Does it help you at all to have external recipients of your work, or does it not factor in at all in what gets done?
It helps me if I tell someone else "I'll send you the report today", because it makes me more accountable. I'll probably delay it until panicking at the end of the day, but I will at least hammer something out and send it off. Or worst case finish it tomorrow morning, after having started, but having to leave work the day before, which is still better than postponing even longer.
For me to do tasks, I need to reach the "Screw quality and completeness, I need to send _something_!", which usually turns out to be plenty good enough based on feedback. I just need to find someone to promise sending the result to for my more important tasks.
This does have a downside. Sometimes you associate that anxiety and negative feelings with the person that would inquire about it. This can make you just want to avoid them as much as possible, even if it costs you elsewhere.
Your post resonates with me greatly - often I'll find myself making up _new_ side projects to take the place of the things that actually need to get done.
How do you push yourself to get the right things done now, that is, until you get rich enough to do otherwise?
I wish we could switch. I had the same maker drive but something changed in me as I've gotten older and now I struggle with tasks. I could easily spend the rest of my life writing/reporting/reviewing/etc and never get any actual work done ever again. I know, it's crazy.
I'm not going to discount advice like this, because it is helpful. But it is only one piece of the puzzle. There's a stark difference between "I don't quite feel like starting this yet, so I'll put it off for a little bit" and "I absolutely want nothing more than to start this but I can't force myself to", between laziness and a genuine inability to begin.
Not to give medical advice in the comments section of a web article, but if the latter description describes you, understand that most people don't go through those struggles. This may be an issue that needs more work to solve than reading self-help articles; it may be caused by burn-out or ADHD or some other executive functioning issue. Do look into this is procrastination is something you are constantly struggling with in your life.
I wrote [an article][1] about my experiences with procrastination and ADHD, if you're interested in more. I'd also recommend the fantastic [ADHD Alien comics][2] for a nice digestible summary of what ADHD is like.
There is a third type of blocker. Being too sick or fatigued. Knowing when to push through but risk having less energy later or the next day, or hold back can be a challenge.
If you don’t get fatigue think of t like the decision to do an all nighter: you can’t do one every night!
Awesome article, I definitely relate to a lot of the things mentioned. Wondering if I have ADHD as well. I was always smart enough to make it through school without applying much effort, so perhaps it went undiagnosed..
I read your writeup on ADHD. I really appreciated the advice that you give (seeking help, finding ways to commit, etc), but you (as any other existing resource on ADHD) could not convince me that ADHD is a thing.
The symptoms you described, you explicitly say, are rather unique. If I think about most of the people I know, I would instead say that they are quite common. Either everyone around me, me included, has ADHD, or the definition for this disorder is quite fuzzy.
Just think about the astonishing number of people that buy books, watch videos, read threads - like this very one - that propose solutions to procrastination. All these people have similar symptoms, but I wouldn't say they are ill (even though they all have problems, and they all would greatly benefit from help, don't get me wrong). Nor I would be satisfied with the simplicistic way of classifying some of those as "sick and allowed to legally do amphetamines" and the rest in the negative set.
I read the official set of symptoms to diagnose ADHD that you linked in the article.
I found that embarassing. Lacking in scientific soundness. Please pardon my bias as a data scientist, and allow me to distort a quote for an increased dramatic effect, but a thing like "if you have at least 6 symptoms among: moving too much, not wanting to do your homework since before you were 12, etc. - > then you have ADHD. But if you are more than 17, you only need 5 symptoms. Because you know, 5 is the magic number" doesn't strike me as a sound classification method.
I'll add that the sole fact that there are significant differences in the percentages of diagnosed ADHD cases among different continents should convince anybody that believes in science (=statistics/scientific method) that the model "if you check these boxes, then you have ADHD" is a horrible one to fit a very complex reality. Symptoms are like a mixture of mostly independent gaussians, and we are trying to force a binary classification on it, clumping variables together and imposing arbitrary thesholds. But we'll never get a decent representation of reality in this way. Having only a few classes, if having classes at all, is conceptually wrong in this case.
I think this simplified way of doing things can be ok for doctors that want an easy life (tick some boxes, get paid, feel you helped somebody) and for people that want a quick improve in performance and/or that want to feel relieved/justified by being labeled as ill (it may be adults wanting this for themselves, or anxious parents for their children. And both could be not fully aware about their drives. Therefore I'm not attacking anyone here. I'm highlighting a diffuse social problem and trying to raise awareness).
But this cannot be accepted by people that care about grasping all the nuances of complex phenomena, and that want to sensibly improve people's lives (by reducing the stigma around psychological problems, which we all have, by pushing for a culture with less simplification - especially in medicine and psychology - and that acknowledges observables as being continuous, by fighting for more equality around the world in the access to drugs and nootropics and for more education on drugs and mental hygene).
Pardon my English (it's not my first language) and pardon my tones (I may sound salty but I am really just looking for a high quality discussion in a beautiful place like HN, and I would love to be proven wrong on the ADHD existance).
(((And pardon all my lispy parentheses.)))
TL;DR I rant about ADHD just being a label attached with poor criteria. It does not capture the complexity of reality, which is made of all shades of unsatisfaction, lazyness and interconnected psychological issues.
I'm prepared to bet folding money that the folks who worked on the 5th Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (DSM-5) have given at least as much thought as you have to these matters.
The implication that research and practicing psychologists and psychiatrists, as a profession, are unaware of the profound variability of human beings is just silly.
I'm not saying that all psychologists and psychiatrists are unaware of mind's complexity and are sloppy/mechanical when applying diagnoses. But I would definitely say that some of them are.
However, my main point was not to attack a profession, but rather to point out that the claim that "ADHD exists" is somewhat weak, given some evidence (like differences in percentage of diagnosed cases among continents, official guidelines that seem arbitrary on some points and open to various interpretations on other points, and the fact that some of the symptoms typically assigned to ADHD are present in all sorts of mixes and magnitudes in almost every human being).
I would rather see the medical community substitute this claim with a more saner "there exist a lot of diverse psychological symptoms, and they all have roots in problems that people have".
Therefore, we need more psychology (as in "let's talk, see what's wrong, and get to the causes, to the roots, and try to solve them") and less "medicine done wrong" (i.e. "let's see what symptoms you have, let's see in what box you fit, and let's stuff you with pills for the rest of your life without ever getting to the root of your problems").
And I would like a society which is more aware of the importance of mental hygiene, of introspection and communication as ways to solve problems (which should almost never be solved with pills), and that is more educated and mature on drugs (I would love to see less kids being stuffed with Ritalin and other meths, and more adults instead experimenting with these drugs for productivity and psychological self-exploration, aware that they are doing amphetamines and aware of the risks and benefits involved).
Your objections are based on spending a few minutes looking at guides intended for the general public. May I suggest spending some time with the professional literature? These issues are canvassed by researchers and practitioners in enormous depth.
But if you'd like to know the broad conclusion so far from decades of research with multiple lines of evidence: ADHD exists.
I have a nagging feeling that any time we have to force ourselves to do a task, something is wrong at a fundamental level; that we are somehow out-of-tune with nature; that contemporary society is missing a key insight about our minds and the way we organize our work.
An eagle doesn't force itself to hunt for food; it just hunts. I can't imagine it having to psych itself up simply to be. Looking for and harnessing that level of purity seems ultimately more fruitful than playing psychological tricks on your mind. Easier said than done, unfortunately.
What you're thinking of is delayed gratification. An eagle doesn't have to force itself to go hunt, because physiological processes tell it that it needs to hunt. It's the same reason you don't have to psych yourself up to go have lunch - your body desires lunch.
Humans have evolved to sometimes delay their gratification. That is, we don't hunt and eat our catch immediately, but instead we hunt and preserve the food to eat next time. This has been an immensely successful strategy, because it allows us to do things like plant crops and use that as food later. Modern society is essentially built upon delayed gratification. You go work, but get paid later.
The problem is that this delayed gratification is constantly under attack by things that you could do right now that would make you feel good. Delayed gratification tends to lead to better outcomes in the long term, but our base instincts are still about getting pleasure right now. This is why people with ADHD have no problem playing a video game for hours upon hours, but have difficulty doing their job - in the video game they get the rewards immediately, but at work the rewards are significantly delayed.
I'm talking about something much deeper, more fundamental, than delayed gratification. For example:
> Delayed gratification tends to lead to better outcomes in the long term
These outcomes are mostly considered better because they are made in the context of the system we live in. Often they are only better in the sense that they solve a problem which the system caused in the first place. E.g. if you can delay the gratification of eating food now, you'll be fitter later. But is this actually a problem (being overweight) that existed for human beings prior to the current system?
What I'm saying is - perhaps we should question whether being successful within our societal system is actually the same as being successful as human beings. There are plenty of people considered "successful" which are miserable and unhappy on a day-to-day basis.
The thing is that this delayed gratification is what allowed modern society to appear in the first place. Without delayed gratification you can't have farming or housing. Both of which are vitally important for human survival in most places in the world.
Humans, and probably all life, have a high time preference. We even have sayings about this in the form of "a bird in hand is better than two in the bush." My guess is that this has to do with the future being difficult to predict. It's essentially a balance between how many resources you should use right now vs how much you should invest into the future.
I had the same insight. If I'm having trouble bringing myself to do something, there is usually a good reason for it. Often it's because there is more thinking needed, or some other fundamental underlying reason. It's smart to learn to trust one's instincts, and to examine things more deeply, instead of trying to forcibly overpower one's subconscious.
On a related note, some people say that smoking weed doesn't make you lazy, it just makes you realize that the thing you were about to do isn't worth the effort. Also true.
What I have learned from decades of smoking weed and observing things, is that this society has absolutely no idea what the hell it's doing. It's a bunch of kids who are desperately pretending to be adults. The "reasons" given for the things people do are mostly just rationalizations and excuses. At least 90% of these things people are trying to force themselves to do, they likely shouldn't be doing in the first place.
I think what he's talking about is different than delayed gratification, although they might coincide together frequently.
For example, consider animals that bury their food. This is an example of a delayed gratification process that happens naturally.
Also consider the act of striving for monetary wealth. This is an example which I don't think is tied to delayed gratification, but rather of seeking fulfillment within our current social system.
Marc Andreessen advises to do whatever we feel like doing, because it's a good way to stay in flow.
I think he's in a lucky place to want to do important things though. Most of us just want to lie down and watch TV. It's probably the side effect of addiction. If we bore ourselves, we tend to get inspired to try something else.
I kind of agree, but if you take the premise of Sapiens that homo sapiens is distinct from other animals in ability to organize around stories rather than more immediate drivers of behaviour - then this may just be part of the human condition.
Yeah, I'm not arguing that we are simply like other animals, but rather that we aren't organizing our work efforts in a way more cognizant of our nature. Instead, most productivity advice seems to be about fooling or 'hacking' yourself into being some sort of machine.
I completely get you. You also mentioned that it is easier said than done.
Someone asked an Indian guru that what would happen if Jesus had a second coming now. The Indian guru replied that in old days Jesus was able to gather 12 dedicated followers. Today he will not be able to gather even 1 because of student loans and 30 year mortgages.
This sums it up. Even if something is very close to my heart and I don't need any motivation to do it, my first thought is "Will I earn some money from it". I suppose it is the same for a lot of people
It may not always be wise to start working despite not feeling it. One could burn out that way. Scott H. Young write an article about this recently. https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/01/13/too-tired/ I have also experienced this. When I got my first job I actually tried to work all the time, besides the occasional breaks, ignoring feelings of tiredness. This got to the point where I was feeling tired pretty much all the time I was awake. Then I concluded I should give into my cravings for purposeless web surfing sometimes.
I wonder how much of this is because of physiological aspects that have to change to keep up with your other lifestyle changes. Brain exercise takes energy, and you might just not used to eating and sleeping enough to maintain that level of exercise.
Agree, the way should be instead how to make myself feel like starting that task. Ask yourself why you are not feeling it, but obviously it’s because there are more fun tasks, so you need to solve why it isn’t fun, and devise a way to make it fun for you. As opposed to treating the task as torture.
> Every small win is motivating. Every small win builds momentum. Momentum energizes.
Starting small is an unreasonably good way to hack your brain. A book called "Tiny Habits" describes a system of behavior modification based on the idea:
It gives the example of flossing. Instead of resolving to floss every night, resolve to floss one single tooth every night. It takes less than five seconds. As you take on the habit, it becomes easier to expand it. Starting big in contrast is a good way to fall off the wagon.
One of the book's key insights is that the new habit you want to take on needs an anchor - something else you already do habitually that will precede your new habit.
You can pick up any new tiny habit, but you need to attach it to something you already do habitually. This will be the trigger without which no new behavior can stick.
In the case of flossing, that anchor could be brushing your teeth. So if you don't regularly do that, you might want to start there by brushing your teeth every day for five seconds. You could anchor that to the finishing dinner. Or getting out of the shower.
Something I’ve learnt about fitness recently, and particularly recovery from injury, is that you have to push your body very very very slowly up. Much more slowly than I ever thought was necessary. And too much, back off. Gently gently catch the monkey.
Is it that you’ve discovered the mental equivalent of this attitude to physical training?
Pet peeve: when people take phrases intended for one thing and uses them for a slightly modified purpose. I take Branson's "screw it, let's do it" mantra as something entreprenurial, a call to break the rules (and stuff like that). Using it in this purpose feels more like "screw it, let's work even though I'd rather stay in bed", which is different emotionally, and kind of saturates the sayings power.
(Maybe nikes "Just do it" would fit better, but I get that its associations to big corporations isn't as well suited for the startup atmosphere we're surrounded by.)
Especially as the root of that phrase is in really wanting to do something, in the face of overwhelming external pressure to not do it (I think he coined it when launching Virgin Atlantic and noone thought the business plan looked solid).
In the context of programming, every time I don't feel like writing code, I just tell myself:
I'm not gonna write code, I'll just run the test suite and then come back to it later.
That causes me to open my terminal, which then requires me to getting the updates from upstream before running the tests, and then I have to inspect the new changes which then requires me navigating to the project..
By then, I'm writing code. This works really well!
For other things such as exercising, I just tell myself, I'm not gonna exercise, I'll just put on my headphones to listen to my "exercise" playlist. This causes me to walk to my bedroom to grab my earphones (I have a wireless one for exercising and always keep them near my workout clothes), which causes me to open the drawers, and by then, I might as wear change and then I'm all set!
Here's something that I think works best: Detaching yourself from everything and writing things down. Either a piece of paper or a text document.
Start writing concrete things that need to be reinforced, that are easy to answer and can be connected together. Things like the goal of the software, core modules, what you're working on now, etc. Expand to things like what new features would be nice, how to implement them, etc.
This works better than vague solutions like "do one thing" because where do you start? Writing a line of code somewhere for the sake of it is pointless. Especially if it's bad code, that just makes me feel worse knowing I'll probably have to undo it later because that's usually what ends up happening based on past examples.
Detaching yourself from the work frees you from all the things tying you down that clouds your mind. Taking a moment to reorganize gives you a new thing to focus on, and arms you with purpose which makes it easier to work.
This is also important. Some type of work need to have certain kind of plan of 'What's Next'. Even a simple checklist will do. Maybe some kind of simple month/week plan.
Some may argue that it may leads to overplanning, but I found that randomly do something everyday just for the sake of doing it but didn't move into the direction of your goal made you felt empty in the long run, because all those time you've spent lead to nothing worthwhile.
Funny that these are all about starting where my problems are mostly about finishing things. I love to start new things and often struggle to finish something because I would much rather start something new.
I suspect the "shiny new thing" syndrome is common, especially in tech, but I have not read a lot about it (apart from GTD).
Over time, I have developed coping mechanisms for this myself but I was hoping to learn some new tricks. Any tips?
I'm needing this a lot right now for a massive project to deliver at work. I get so tangled up in the mess of trying to make it perfect or thinking that I'm not approaching the problem in the best way that I end up twiddling my thumbs for hours, pretty much doing nothing worthwhile the whole time.
I'll be trying these out tomorrow and see how deprocrastinated I can get before veering off again.
I'm in a similar situation right now, and I've been in this kind of place many times before. I try to keep the seemingly idle time to a minimum, but I also acknowledge that my brain is still thinking about the problem during those times, so I don't beat myself up about it and go for a walk when that happens.
The self-doubt is also normal, and I actively push against it by reminding myself that, while someone that has done this before can likely jump to a good solution right away, it doesn't mean that it's realistic to expect that of myself.
Being tangled in a mess of something you are not an expert in is a normal way to learn. I have to remind myself that this approach worked before and there is no reason to believe that it won't work this time.
I'm going to put these tips to good use today:
I don't know if this is the right module to use for this. It looks like it doesn't do X and Y. Screw it, I'm going to try to get Z working.
I can't figure out the proper way to pass this argument in? Let's just hard-code it for now to get things working and mark it with a TODO.
Mind over matter guys, "Screw it, lets do it." is the best advice: just start, anywhere. I've struggled with this my entire life and nowadays I just start writing (code or documents). It feels like getting out of bed after a night with a crying baby, but you know, have a coffee, stare into the bright daylight of a new day and that moment of actually deciding to push away the sheets is long forgotten.
Edit: I have two brothers, one with ADD one with issues with Alcohol. All three of us have issues starting and finishing things that are import for an orderly life. The one with the alcohol problem is (or was perhaps, he's ding pretty good now) really prone to feeling like a victim and just dropping everything when things don't go smoothly. The main difference between me and my brothers is my ability to kick my own ass into action. Other than that I recognize many aspects of their character in mine. Maybe the thought of the troubles they have had helps me.
Still, the most fun things always go first, but hey, I've earned that little pleasure, right? ;)
"I have work to do, but I'll just check hacker news first... Oh, there's an article about how not to procrastinate... which is great, I'm trying not to procrastinate so much. Let me read that first before I start my work."
Seriously though, I agree with the approach. When starting a talk or writing a design doc, I'll sometimes just start with an outline or half-baked paragraph. From there, writing the rest comes down to filling out areas where more detail is needed, verifying statements, and so on.
One thing that really has helped me with e.g. writing an email that I dread writing is to just write a draft that I don't plan to do anything else with than use as a starting point when I write the real email that I won't write until tomorrow. Often the draft is good enough to send after only small edits. Or the writing of the draft have helped me to clarify my thoughts enough, combined with a night of processing, that writing the real mail the next day becomes relativly easy.
My trick to start emails is to add To and Cc last, when I'm happy with the email.
If I add them first, I worry that I'll click send by mistake halfway through my draft (and a secondary worry is that the draft will be full of inappropriate stuff and curse words, which I never add even to drafts, so it's not a rational thought). If I add the recipients first, it also feels like they sit there looking at me expectantly as I write, which makes it harder.
An email not addressed to anyone, but of course with the recipients in mind to adapt the content, makes it easier for me to treat the first version as a draft.
Sleeping on non-urgent emails sounds like an excellent idea, because your view of the issue may change.
This is a good strategy for contentious topics. That said, I would argue that the best thing in this situation to get the task done is to call the person. That way you can hear them, react to them, and the task is done at the end of the call. That said, I don’t know anything about your email, audience, etc so you do what works for you.
My underlying hypothesis is that too many people are afraid of making phone / video calls, but it’s a much better way of getting difficult things done sometimes.
Anyone tried using a chain calendar? I used an app that tracked how many days in a row I meditated and that's the first time in my life I was able to do a good habit consistently for 15 days straight. I didn't want to break the chain!
Later I used the same idea for studying every day, started with a few minutes and worked it up slowly. Eventually, I was able to concentrate for long periods of time. That sense of momentum and progress is very encouraging.
I thought about doing the chains, but I was always held back by the thought of having to break the chain for legit reasons. For example I'm currently practicing guitar, so I'd create a chain for that. But there are legit reasons why I can not play at a given day, I might not be able to access a Guitar because Im in a Hotel in a different country, or a myriad of other reasons.
So cheat! If you use a physical calendar, you can mark those days with another symbol, like an arrow to show that the chain carries on. If you use an app, you can mark the day anyway, knowing that you had a legitimate reason to skip it.
Think of all the benefits you would get from practicing 95% of the days marked, compared to a much lower percent without the chain. Don't let the 5% or 1% stop you.
As an aside, this is my view of veganism. When I talk to people who say they can't go vegan because they'd miss cheese too much, or kebab, or whatever, I suggest they go vegan and keep eating cheese or kebab. 95% is a lot better than nothing!
That said, I can't do chains. I get anxious after a while carrying a long streak, and will either conveniently forget a day and mess up the streak (and feel relieved), or decide during a streak that I'll stop at 30, or 100, or whatever, just to give me permission to get off the treadmill. I don't like when enjoyable things turn into a chore.
Some apps are nice and let you go back and add marks even if you forgot to do it on the day. Some apps, like Duolingo, let you unlock tokens that protect your streak if you miss a day. But some apps are really strict, which can be annoying if you finish something after midnight and realize that you just broke the chain. My wife had that with a writing app where she finished exactly at midnight, which counted for the next day and her streak was broken.
So if I did a chain, I'd use a text file, or a paper, or send myself an email a day logging that I did the task. I wouldn't trust an extremely rigid app, because, as you say, there can be legitimate reasons why you miss.
>As an aside, this is my view of veganism. When I talk to people who say they can't go vegan because they'd miss cheese too much, or kebab, or whatever, I suggest they go vegan and keep eating cheese or kebab. 95% is a lot better than nothing!
This is pretty much how I'm doing veganism, every meal I make at home is vegan. But I eat the occasional cheese and kebab. But I find myself replacing those with vegan/vegetarian alternatives more and more.
Also do vegan > vegetarian > normal food when going out. Without it becoming annoying. It's really uncommon to find a restaurant with vegan options around here, but vegetarian is pretty common.
I personally don't do chains either, as I really prefer being able to do things spontaneously. I approach the tasks I set for myself that way as well, so I end up doing things like squats when I have some dead minutes to fill in a day.
Basically doing anything is better than doing nothing, and often times you find yourself doing more than what you set out to do.
Rather than creating an unbreakable chain, I have a big calendar on the wall with a big X on days when I exercise. Some weeks I travel (or get lazy) and there is a gap, but I find that gap to be as motivating as the Xs are. I'm on year 3 of doing this and it's still motivating to see the Xs fill the calendar.
Something I learned in, I think, Atomic Habits that helped me with this sort of reasoning:
It's not about that first day to fail to do the thing. It's about the day after.
That is to say, of course your chain will be broken. And probably for entirely rational reasons! The trick is really internalizing that inevitability and not beating yourself up over it. You have to learn to say, "Yes, I got derailed for this period; that's OK, and now I'll get back on track."
By the time you really care about breaking long chain, you might find that you no longer need it as you actually enjoy what you are doing or developed a habit.
Duolingo has streaks built in but it allows you to buy a "Streak freeze" with a virtual currency that you earn by just using the app. When you skip a day, the freeze will be automatically consumed and you have to buy another. You also can't have more than one.
I find this system very effective without being frustrating. Even when you skip a day, you have to at least open the app to buy a new freeze.
We built an app* for this and use it ourselves - it's very effective. I have tasks for working (even a token amount) morning or night on a side project, working on the biggest roadblock task I have, and things like that. The app splits tasks into a "front six" and "back six" so I have six focused on work/business and then six focused on home (reading, trying to learn a language, etc).
I remember at one point having 'walk x steps' and 'read x minutes' as daily tasks, so I'd often be walking around the house while reading just before midnight to make sure I kept my streaks alive.
Came here to suggest Streaks, I've been using it for a few months now. My favorite features are:
- Streaks that track Apple Health data. Really nice job with the integration. I use this for tracking daily calorie, macronutrient, and workout goals.
- "X times per week" streaks. I take rest days from working out, so it's nice to have an abstraction that doesn't treat them as failures or breaking the streak.
I guess I should go give you guys a good app store review now. Thanks for making this!
Thanks! From the start, I found that having an easy-to-reach automatically-tracked Health goal (x,000 steps/day) was a good way to keep you feeling like you were accomplishing something. Went some way towards keeping you on track.
I wish they'd open up the screen time tracking because I'd like to have a Streaks task of keeping my daily screen time under a certain level.
I use the small wins trick a lot. I start with the smallest win, which is writing down a small win on my todo list.
Then, when I see the small task, I feel motivated to do it just so I can have the pleasure of checking it off my list. By that time, I'm usually on a pretty good roll and keep working.
Same. I do it when the dishes have piled up. Tell myself I'll just quickly do the easy ones, and then next thing I carry on and decide to do the biggest remaining dishes so the bench looks cleaner, and from there it's downhill and easy.
With a counter full of dirty dishes, I tell myself that I'll just quickly fill the dishwasher with the easy stuff and start it. I'll leave the rest for later. But when I've started the dishwasher, there's usually only three items left, like a soft plastic lid or a tea mug that can't go in the dishwasher. So I wash those by hand. Now the counter is empty, but stained, so I might as well wipe it so that it's clean for next time I cook.
It all starts with the lazy "I'll just throw the easy stuff into the dishwasher", but momentum takes over. Listening to interesting podcasts help!
I’m generally good at avoiding procrastination. I have bad periods but months go by without me reading news or social media during work periods.
OTOH, a friend is the opposite. He’s the biggest procrastinator I know. Between us I don’t see an obvious explanatory factor. I would guess therefore that it’s something innate, perhaps a genetic factor. He just doesn’t seem to have the same discipline as me. The only thing I see that works for him is to have external pressure.
What I’m saying is - if you’re a super procrastinator like my friend, maybe all the tricks in the world won’t help you to be motivated without a real and pressing deadline. Compare yourself in those situations to your every day, see if there’s some insight there.
I procrastinate extremely hard over things I don't want to do, and maybe things I am intimidated by their difficulty.
And yet, I am capable of steady self learning and can quite comfortably find the motivation to exercise 10+ hours a week.
I don't think it's very black and white because along certain dimensions I am hyper disciplined but others heaven and hell would struggle to get me moving. I do respond to external pressure tho.
I think most of the time we overlap lack of scheduling/discipline with laziness (being a couch potato). I'm a disaster at scheduling things, unless they involve other people. But when it comes to putting in the effort and the hours to get something done before a deadline, man, you can bet it's gonna get done.
Similarly I've had periods of 3-4 months at a time where I was super disciplined about nutrition and exercise followed by a period of extreme disregard for anything related to my health. As in eating pizza 3-4 times a week. What I noticed is that it all starts with going to the gym 1-2 times and not interrupting the routine. A trip abroad, a week long illness, they all pretty much end any kind of virtuous cycle that was forming. Maybe the trick is just to be consistent for X time? I don't know.
Routine is definitely helpful for things involving habitual tasks (like going to the gym).
Humans are loss averse and at some point, breaking routine becomes taps into the loss aversion and there actually is a friction to not going to the gym.
I suppose when you're starting out to go to the gym you are averse to breaking your existing routine (which could be bingeing netflix every night after work)
There's enough evidence to believe laziness is, at least partly, a consequence of bad genetics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd7wAithl7I, with sources in the description), similarly to what differentiates early risers and night owls.
Not saying one should use this as an excuse but being aware of it will at least make you stop obsessing about why you're so damn lazy. Just embrace it and (ironically enough) take it easy.
I'd like to submit an another interesting motivational tactic along these lines: The Christian/Catholic practice of Lent.
I've observed many friends who practice Lent make major life changes that are hard to make at any one time (going vegan, quitting smoking, etc.) because of how major they are. Lent helps because the change is "only for Lent", but I observe that many people carry those changes on indefinitely.
Lent helped them trick themselves into taking on a major lifestyle alteration alongside a major support network of many other people doing the same thing. But once you've built a habit for a month, what's one more month? I think there's a lot of value in this tradition done well.
Agree with this, I gave up sugary soft drinks as a teenager after doing it for lent. "I might as well go for another month" lasted nearly 2 1/2 years (until I went to uni and wanted a mixer for rum...)
This procrastination is actually probably useful. If I go on other social networks the probably of usefulness or random items that an Algo targets me approaches zero
Thanks, I have two projects I'm avoiding right now, and even though I've started them a few weeks ago, if I drop them for a few days I feel like I have to start back again. The "screw it, let's do it" and "what's the smallest step you can take right now" approach would work in my case. The first is nice because I sometimes convince myself that I'm too lazy or unmotived to work on it. But am I? Or do I just think I'm unmotivated but would actually put several hours into the job if I started right now?
One of the best ways to get yourself to take a small step on a project is to put some parts of it in places where you will stumble upon it. Eg when you put your computer to sleep have that project be at the front or leave your notes about the project in a place where you're likely to run into them etc.
These life hacks have never worked for me. I realized too late in life that I do my best work at night. I'm not sure if it's because I'm bored, or tired and my brain has slowed, or the news cycle has slowed down, but I can sit down at 10pm and pop out hundreds of lines of working code by 1am. If I ever have a large project to work on, I'd guess 70 percent of it is done after 9pm. Luckily, my company doesn't micromanage and as long as I write quality code on schedule everything works out.
Be aware that the brain is a power-hungry/power-intensive organ. Give the brain (and body) enough nutrients they need for functioning. The brain (and the body) enters a power-save mode if not fed properly, which may manifest as reluctance to work (to perform deeper thought) and result in procrastination and worse, in depression. Don't try to replace real nutrients with coffee or other stimulants - these work great on top of a great nutritional base. Be aware that your body has various nutrient buffers, cycles and momentums and it may take months or even years to really run out of some really important nutrients, given your diet and lifestyle, and this will be exacerbated and accelerated by aging. Other nutritional deficiencies can have a fast onset, triggered by a temporary change in diet (something "bad" you ate), or by an illness. Know, that the decline in the efficiency of your digestive tract due to insufficient diet also has its own momentum, so it may be much slower to re-feed the body all the nutrients you need, because the internal organs need to heal first.
Two of my personal "works for me" tips: explore the ketogenic diet and the effect of ketones/ketosis on the brain function, and/or try out the Wim Hof breathing method.
Cleaning up my diet has been far and away the best productivity "hack" I've ever tried. I cut bread and most sugar without being aggressively low-carb and feel sharper, more focused, and more motivated than ever. I wish I'd done this 20 years ago when my parents and doctors were pushing Ritalin and Adderall on me instead.
What usually works for me: Don't start at all!
Instead, tinker with the project. Just some cleanup, rename a variable, just tinkering without pressure. Before I know, I'm deep into work.
If you don’t feel like doing something it probably sucks and isn’t worth doing. Hustle culture is stupid. When you’re on your deathbed you’re not going to look back on your life and wish you had worked more or made mode money.
Similar productivity hack that works, shared by Kevin Systrom (Instagram founder):
"If you don't want to do something, make a deal with yourself to do at least five minutes of it. After five minutes, you'll end up doing the whole thing."
And sometimes, it's great to just let an idea go and enjoy the present. Enjoying your loved ones, and just doing "nothing", has been my favorite part of life so far. I have returned to things I never thought I would get around to and ended up finishing them, but not all procrastination is bad. Go to work, work 8 hours, and then ride a unicycle with a bunch of clowns, eat pizza with friends.
I think one of the best trick is to split out the work into super small pieces of meaningful work. And treat that as the work it self. Most times it’s because there is no fun in looking at the huge task and getting stuck On where to start. This is why working at a corporation is easier, there are leads and managers Already divided up the work for you to do.
I'm pretty sure I've used these and similar tricks over the years, and still do.
For the most part, I've found that the first two mentioned were the ones that mostly would get me going. More often than not, I find myself hours later lost in the task, having complete way more than I intended to.
The third one - starting with something small - also comes in handy, usually when I am cleaning or organizing something. I'll first look at something and say "yeah, I'll put this back where it belongs right now" and before I know it, one thing becomes another and everything is cleaned up.
But I've always been a procrastinator - especially on personal projects. It's one of my personal failings. Though if the project has a deadline (like I recall with homework in high school decades ago), I find that the pressure to finish quickly ends up gaining me a successful outcome.
I think these tips are useful, and may help others who don't know about them, or haven't developed them on their own.
Related to this post, I just listened to an interesting podcast about habits[0].
It debunks some of the common myths about willpower and self-control. According to the host, the "secret" is building healthy habits over time. The problem is that we need gratification (while forming the habit) and we shouldn't have many obstacles to perform the activity we want to make a habit.
Basically, we're all (maybe not you Elon) wired lazy and the only solution is to force ourselves to have only one easy choice.
My trick is between point 2 and 3. I try to find something, anything interesting in the subject I can play with. It can be really small or minor part of the project, but if it starts to interest me it just drags me to the whole work mindset.
I'm basically conning myself into liking the task :)
My small bit of advice is to think everything what you do as feedback loops. Eg if you start browsing youtube videos, you'll get by each video more and more into it and at some point cant stop watching. Same for work or workouts or whatever. Once the initial cognitive burden of starting the work has happened, it's should be your utmost priority to just keep at it. Minimize the distractions and get back to the 'looping' as soon as possible. In time the act of doing becomes so easy, that you dont need to invest that much in starting up. Just to stay focused. And your flow-state becomes so strong that you dont even become distracted as the work is so interesting to you
If you found the advice valuable, you may also like the two part series [0,1] on procrastination from waitbutwhy. The value there is the detailed analysis of the "just starting" part, why it is hard and how to still do it.
I always used to leave myself a few simple tasks at work ready for the start of the next day, so I could ease myself into the day.
Nowadays email has helped with that, at least reading it. Learned best to draft reply and then after lunch go thru and edit/rewrite before sendings.
Worked well for me. Though the biggest issue (and gift) I have is actually over-thinking and with that, seeing the bigger picture can be darn depressing on so many issues that I often find my zest for life lacking that anything else struggles to stand a chance of having a shot. But, just one more day has worked for decades.
I shot out of bed for the 5th morning in a row today to make it to Mysore style yoga class at 6am.
I was tired and hungry.
I had to pick up my better half from the airport last night at 2am because her flight was delayed.
I was nervous that I wouldn't remember the standing sequence for the 5th time in a row.
I lost my chant card already that I was just given yesterday...
I had every excuse in the book not to go, but I went anyways.
Turns out I wasn't that tired or hungry, I remembered the chant and the standing sequences almost perfectly, and I made it a few more poses into the seated series.
Yep, often when we don't find the energy and motivation to do something, there's something wrong that needs fixing. Depression, the work being pointless, FOMO and other desires that should be addressed. Work as escapism ("start sloppy until the task has all your attention") works sometimes, but it's not really victory over procrastination nor even desirable.
wish that worked for me.
one thing that kept me going without effort was "Duolinguo". this clever language learning app has a points system and system of leagues where you move up if you are among the first 10 in a cohort. for competitive persons like me it works very well. i am working my language skills first thing in the morning and last at night, and anywhere in between.
the idea is being in a community of like minded people stimulates you.
For me, recently, procrastination (at work) was something deep down inside telling me that I was not happy where I was at work. When I got a new job with much more autonomy, and the position was what I could make of it, my procrastination problem pretty much vanished.
At my old job I tried all the tricks and ways to frame it mentally, but all it served to do was suppress something my instinct was telling me I need to get out of.
Just simple markdown pages with daily progress. Eventual goal is a live video stream
For my own part, I can say that once you reach the point where the thing you are working on is more interesting than anything else. The rest of the world melts away
You deserve to be at the bottom, because how dare you!?
It is known that buying and going through the 4 week anti-procrastination program from deprocrastination.co instead of doing real work for 4 weeks helps you not procrastinate. Dothraki choir: "it is known".
Our focus on results (and in turn expectations) is completely wrong. The result is subject to million things which are not in our control. The only thing we can do is to do our part as well as possible and enjoy whatever the result there is.
This way one can be as productive as currently possible for him/her and at the same time have no struggles with stress or failure.
Doing something bad intentionally first is a really great tool. I do this a lot with my Go projects; I'll write a really crappy, huge `main` function, push it to GitHub and then my mind tells me "hey, you can't let that be out there in public like this!" and I can't help myself but to start actually writing on it.
I found that, if I have to meet a deadline, writing down the deadline on a post-it note and making it highly visible, i.e. taping it to the side of the screen, will increase the chances of me meeting the deadline. Also, explicitly promising to the client that I'll do it motivates me to not let down the client.
Hi, I'm wondering what reasoning for getting banned for describing this as a "1st world problem." Not only down-voted but my comment completely disappeared (not only faded out but gone from the page.) Isn't that a violent reaction to a very ordinary exercise in free speech?
I wasn’t there for that but you aren’t gone, you are on the second page. You might not have showdead enabled? Or not realized you are on the second page?
People likely downvoted you because they didn’t feel the comment contributed to the discussion. They may also have felt it was dismissive or likely to cause acrimony.
I think it’s best not to take this stuff personally. It’s take a lot of effort to maintain a high level of discussion on Hacker News, and people try to help out by downvoting comments that seem to need downvoting.
I’ve had comments downvoted and even flagged. I felt upset at first, but then I just decided to view my communication skills as a work in progress.
put a coffee on, start the project while the coffee is still brewing, have your first cup as the reward to push you into gear. Those 5-10 minutes will give your brain a chance to frame the essential challenge of the moment.
I switched to podcasts instead of music to workout. Most of the podcasts I listen are very motivational, also keeps my english from getting rust and I can learn something while I pumping iron.
Three advices given by the article - and many more - was given in "Rework" book (by creators of basecamp). Book worth reading, even though many advices are, well, obvious.
This works for everything except one big case. Project with 90% of work done but the last 10% is the one holding the project to be released because it's a hard but core functionality of it and all previous programmers didn't touch it/knew how and the customer is adamant about it. So I get the ugliest part with the high expectation from the client to be finished fast. I usually avoid this type of projects as well, but in few cases where I did it I found the only working solution is the rubber duck one.
Usually I use my wife (non-technical person) as the rubber duck and I explain to her, while she is in the kitchen cooking, all the steps I need to do in order to complete the last 10%. After the 2 hours filling her head with technical details, to which she pays absolutely 0 attention to it, I can do it.
"If you're not planning, you're planning to fail." Benjamin Franklin
This is what got me from a slump to a very productive, accomplished man. I plan every 15min of my mornings (Elon Musk plans every 5min!), then freestyle afternoon because that suffices me. You should write your tasks as Daily on Google Calendar then you can Sync with Samsung Galaxy Watch (because yes, it is so amazing that it is time to grab a smartwatch!) and display the list of tasks for the morning. Just a tip. Planning.
Obligatory UT Admiral William H. McRaven Commencement Address[1]
Worth the whole watch, however it’s makes he makes a very compelling argument for making your bed in the morning. I’ll add cleaning as part of the morning routine is also highly effective to get moving.
We've pretty advanced stuff coming up like in page distraction blocking using machine learning, 1st party tracking protection (deletes cookies on websites that you're not logged in to), TL;DR before clicking the link submitted by other Baitblock members, blocking sites (although it is pretty standard), etc. Keep in mind that the already implemented features have a few bugs (to put it politely), while the others are in development but this is very early preview (latest version is under store review that is shown in demo vid in site) :)
Since I'm from Pakistan, we dont have Stripe and Paypal here, so Baitblock is free for early people.
TL;DR
every journey start with one step.
so make that first step no matter how small it is, and don't give it __too much__ thought nor emotions.
after that in most of the cases the second step will come naturally and so on and so forth.
The harder I try to trick myself, regardless of the technique, the harder my inner miscreant screams to procrastinate. It's like a resistance to being told what to do, even by myself.
Honestly the most reliable solution I've found is amphetamines. Less than ideal advice to depend on substances, but a therapeutic dose of Adderall can be the difference between surfing the internet and half-assing all day until finally starting work in earnest 5-7 hours later, if at all, and starting work within an hour of dosing. Coffee comes in a distant second.
Of course coming up against a tight deadline does wonders for motivation too...but in my experience if I set an arbitrary deadline I know I'm just lying to myself - there have to be real consequences.
Two books by the same author that I recommend on this subject-
--The War of Art
--Do The Work
Both by Steven Pressfield. They're imperfect -- they call out to imaginary forces uncomfortably too often, and they take a relatively concise bit of content stretching it to book form, leaving it sometimes a bit threadbare, however they're an easy, enjoyable read and I found them useful.
Over analyzing leads to inaccuracies and hairy loops and sometimes actively experimenting, with conscious damage control is the only way to go. I would also like to add start funny. Solemnness is for dead people.
The last two weeks I made it a goal to run 5km every morning. A few times, particularly today, I felt lazy and run down, but I got out of bed anyway and told myself that I'll at least walk. The next thing I know I'm running and feeling amazing and on to set one of my better times.
The point: When you tell yourself "just one more game" or "just one more post", or "just one more video" and end up doing 3-5 hours more, do that with your other tasks too! "just one line of code", "just one tutorial", "just one rep", "just one line of reading/writing".
We all have this amazing mental tool that we've been honing for years, the tool of self deception. Time to use it for good and not evil.
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