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Comment by eudora | Hacker News Reader

I must say, just last night I had a bit of coding to start and it seemed like I was being asked to kill a kitten or something, the thought was so incredibly depressing.

I forced myself, through the resistance, just to start.

I said I'd do it for an hour then I could stop. Note that this was beginning a new, big task. If I was in the middle of it I probably wouldn't have had such a huge urge to resist it.

Anyway, once I started it was cripplingly painful for about 5 minutes. Then I couldn't stop for the next few hours - I think because the thing I was working on was incrementally rewarding - every 5 minutes or so I could see the progress I was making.

Also, it helped a lot that I put on an interesting podcast that makes me feel great.

I suppose my point is that this guy is pretty correct, at least for me: it was pain I was avoiding, and just starting was the biggest hurdle.

I'm a bit ADD-ish, I think, so YMMV.

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Yep, it is so hard to actually START doing something. Sometimes I "prepare" myself for multiple minutes, then get too overwhelmed in my head about it and end up procrastinating.

But once I'm into it it's not that bad. It's crazy how aware I am of this behavior, and yet always fall back in it. I've tried every single advice I could find on the internet, but none of them worked because in the end, the only way for me to do something is to start doing it. It sounds easy, but it is so, so, soooo hard.

And the worst thing is that people sometimes associate it with lazyness. I don't think I am lazy. This honestly feels more like something is broken in my brain, and I don't have much control over it.

I'm not giving up tho, still try to fight it daily. Sometimes I spend a whole day with a foggy head, trying to start do get things done, but I just can't...

There is this crazy swimmer here - he swam down 50 miles of the ganges river in some iron man contests - and he constantly swims between islands.

The way he visualizes is splitting down the goals to smaller portions. "I only think about the next 15 minutes, if I would think about the whole thing I would go crazy.".

I've found that's the best for any sort of physical task - for running it was "ok, I'll run to that light post" - a run could be an hour and a half of light posts. And for strength training it's always a lie on the bad days. "I'm not feeling great so I'll only do three sets today." - I always end up doing my prescribed five, but the size of the lies change as I need it to.

When I have days like this, I try to work on bugs. That way I don't have start anything, it's already been written. I just have to fix it. For me it's pretty easy to get motivated to fix a bug because I can just step lazily through the debugger until my momentum catches up.

If I don't have bugs, I'll usually work on a Kata for 15 min or so. Something I've written hundreds of times and can do from memory. This helps my momentum get caught up, too.

I prefer working on bugs, though. I feel more productive.

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