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Comment by juiced | Hacker News Reader

What does help me too is to just start on something and not procrastinate. If you survived the first 2 seconds of starting, you can go on for hours.

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What helps me is a moderate dose of amphetamines. It takes me from being someone who steps over something on the floor for a week because he's to lazy to put it away to writing code for 56 hours straight.

And the code isn't actually bad. The real problem is that it also makes you into a perfectionist who starts to write his own jpeg library if he finds anything about libjpg that he does't like.

Coffee has the same effect on me, but only works 2 hours, luckily not enough time to rewrite a jpeg library. X-D

I bet if you had said aderall instead of amphetamine that wouldn't have been down-voted.

A moderate dose of Adderall wouldn't have you coding for 56 hours straight...

Sadly, this doesn't seem to do much for me. I can be 20 minutes into the task and really want to stop it. I think this only applies to certain kinds of personalities.

Worse, I remember that I disliked the task through its entirety and I'm very acutely aware of that and start associating starting it with a bad experience.

I would have the same problem if I started doing things I don't like. I'm fortunate I can do things I like, but that's because I made sure I can do things I like. And that started by quitting doing things I didn't like.

I think that's a good philosophy to have, but there are still many things that I don't like, such as cleaning. I don't see any way to resolve that outside of hiring a housekeeper, which is not really worth it at the moment. Not to mention all the people in the world who definitely don't have such resources.

The same happens to me. It's more effort to think about to do something than sitting down and start doing it.

Yeah, and I think that a cause of procrastinating is the idea that as soon as you start on something your time will be occupied for the next few hours/days/whatever by it and therefore you will not start, because you have other things to do too and you feel you need to first plan out the expected time you need for the thing you want to start, and then procrastination starts. It doesn't have to be, if you start on something you can stop anytime you want and start later again by only surviving the first 2 seconds. You can do this as many times as you want. This way you don't feel something will take over your life and needs planning and you are able to do other things too, etc.

A physicist might think of that as static vs. dynamic friction.

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