Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

One source of the procrastination is that the assignment is boring and the only way you can feel alive is to slam it out under pressure.

There are other coping mechanisms you can use, although some of them are arguably worse than procrastination (eg overengineering).

View on HN

I had a study partner in intro to CS. I met him in Calc, which was much more of a weedout class than the CS class was. God the homework was boring. If we got the assignment done early, we’d spend an hour or so trying to make ours go fastest or take the largest input without crashing. It rubbed the wrong way that a fib(n) implementation that blew stack at n=50 was considered acceptable. So we gamified doing a better job.

As a grownup in a hurry to reach mastery, I kept that but reduced it to 20-30 minutes. Although these days I concentrate on robustness and readability. I tell junior programmers to do the same; finish the work and then ask yourself how you could make it better in 20 minutes. Nobody is going to notice that your day long task took an extra 20 and in six months the quality of what you turn in will be much higher as you start incorporating those ideas up front.

>some of them are arguably worse than procrastination (eg overengineering).

Drinking.

Oh yes. There was that one time in my life many years ago, that I completed a pretty complex piece of a project while carefully keeping myself within Ballmer Peak. I was severely burned out back then, and discovered that a single beer was enough to kick me out of high-anxiety state for a couple hours without impacting cognitive capacity too much (in fact, I recovered cognitive capacity as anxiety tends to make it difficult to think). This trick probably saved me a couple days worth of work. Fortunately, I later changed jobs and worked in much less stressful environment; with the burnout slowly subsiding, I didn't need to use it again (I tried it a couple of times off-work as a control measure, and I discovered that the effect most likely came from anxiety reduction).

[0] - https://www.xkcd.com/323/; the BAC values are probably made up and the peak doesn't feel as thin or high as drawn.

Sounds about right. Other methods along those lines, besides alcoholic beverages, would be sleep deprivation, loud active music, microdosing. These are all from the bag of just-the-right-amount-of-cognitive-impairment. This is ok bag. Fun bag.

There's also bag of make-it-hards, including time constraint, software astronauting, refactoritis. I hate this one. Not fun at all.

Of course, there's also bag of do-it-rights, like discussing how you feel with your stakeholders or partners, recognizing your NFC (need for cognition; handling it with, well, cognition or exercise, either will do), meditation (or just introspection). I love this one.

Out of the fun bag, sleep deprivation and loud active music work really well for me. They've been my main coping mechanisms for the past 15 or so years (loud music didn't feel cognitively impairing, though in retrospect I recognize it may have been - but it paid it back with interest in the elevated energy levels).

> There's also bag of make-it-hards, including time constraint

Or artificial commitments, aka. making it hurt to miss the deadline, usually by committing to pay someone money (there are services like Beeminder that handle this for you). I hate that one and it almost made me broke (it was around the same time I had to use the Ballmer Peak method to finally move forward). It works for some people, but it doesn't work for me; it only ends up triggering huge, debilitating anxiety attacks.

> also bag of do-it-rights, like discussing how you feel with your stakeholders or partners

AKA. career or social suicide. Nah, not risking that. There's too good a chance that your boss never had that problem, and way too likely your replacement won't have it either.

> recognizing your NFC (need for cognition; handling it with, well, cognition or exercise, either will do)

Could you elaborate on that one? Wrt. exercise, nah, I procrastinate too much on that :/.

> meditation (or just introspection)

I keep trying the insight meditation (vipassana) ever since I learned about it on HN & LessWrong close to a decade ago. It keeps not working :/.

> AKA. career or social suicide. Nah, not risking that. There's too good a chance that your boss never had that problem, and way too likely your replacement won't have it either.

Sure, this is definitely dependant on environment. You owe it to yourself to someday work in a place where they'll go: "Sure, go hack at whatever you want for a week, get it out of the system. We've all been there." But, to note, main effect of this (for me at least) is early acknowledgment of the situation in a safe environment and a timely manner. These things can spiral out of control and shaving of a day or two in its inital stage is very helpful. Additionally, I'm frequently surprised by responses of the type "What? We didn't even have those expectations you think we had. Why are you even worried?" Don't let your mind build illusory labyrinths.

> Could you elaborate on that one? Wrt. exercise, nah, I procrastinate too much on that :/.

It's pretty well outlined on wikipedia[1], and it's simple idea - some people have a literal need to do cognitively hard things, so piled up boring stuff will drain you in various ways. An alternative route, recently proposed[2], is to wear that out via physical exercise. That route is a bit at odds with my goals in life, but I guess there's some sort of healthy balance.

> I keep trying the insight meditation (vipassana) ever since I learned about it on HN & LessWrong close to a decade ago. It keeps not working :/.

I've never studied any formal approach to it so I keep it simple - whenever I feel "noise" (anxiety, neurosis, whatever), I sit (not any strange yogi poses or whatever, nor lying down, since I'd fall asleep) in a quiet place for 5-10 minutes, and try to tune everything out. I focus on breathing and heartbeat, as those are the only things you can't really tune out in a non-handwavey way. If you're in a noisy environment, headphones with some brown noise or similar help.

Also, I always welcome recommendations for "loud active cognitively-draining music". :) Just putting on King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard discography on album shuffle works really well for me last few months.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19606141

EDIT: Oh, I forgot one more for the fun bag - fasting.

for music, I've tried lots of different genres and have settled on progressive house mixes as a good focusing background sound. It's complex enough to occupy me without any jarring changes or vocals that cause me to pay active attention to it. There's quite a few playlists on YouTube and I just run random ones each day, this is the one that's currently playing for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w23j_nspEy0

> early acknowledgment of the situation in a safe environment and a timely manner.

That could work. The problem is trust though - how do you know the environment is safe? Especially in employe-employer relations. I did worked in a receptive place once, and I regret not being slightly more open, telling about a few more of my personal quirks. Ultimately, we all hide stuff that are implementation details of the abstraction a "productive employee" is; the question is, how many of those details can leak before you start looking bad against candidates whose abstractions don't leak?

> Don't let your mind build illusory labyrinths.

Yeah, that's a good point. Seen that happen both in myself and in others.

> It's pretty well outlined on wikipedia

Oh, thanks. I didn't realize "need for cognition" is a proper name.

> Also, I always welcome recommendations for "loud active cognitively-draining music". :)

I don't have any particular recommendations; I tend to keep a collection of individual songs, not artists. I've also discovered that the most cognitively enhancing music for me is the one that "resonates" with my current mood - so if I feel sad, I listen to depressive stuff; if I feel energetic, I pick something powerful. In that latter case, quite often it's either Sabaton (or other power metal), or random Nightcore songs from YouTube, on a loop.

A better way is to slam it our under artificial deadline pressure in exchange for some reward.

But be aware that sometimes "it's too easy is an excuse for unconscientiousness inability to do work at the demanded level of precision. Often smart people have a problem where that write off their low abilities in some areas as a problem with the assignment instead of acknowledging that they lack a valuable aptitude like conscientious.

Boring doesn’t necessarily mean easy. It could mean mundane. If the outcome isn’t rewarding and the time and energy investment is high that can lead to stress. If you start narrating in your head about how unfair this is or what else you’d rather be doing then you are really sunk.

For people used to a certain intensity level, just sweeping a large enough floor could be thought of as a punishment. It’s straightforward and you can’t really speed it up much, which makes the act much harder to get through than it appears to be, creating dissonance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com