Hacker News Reader

Comment by frlnc_throwaway | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend Jean Moroney's blog. She digs deep into the psychology behind productivity and goal-setting. I found many unique insights in her articles. Thanks to her writing I've come to believe that procrastination often stems from deeper emotional issues or an unacknowledged clash of priorities (for example, when you try to force yourself to do something that you don't, in fact, want to do, the deeper issue is that you haven't resolved the clash between your short-time desires and your long-term goals).

E.g:

https://www.thinkingdirections.com/dont-motivate-yourself-le...

https://www.thinkingdirections.com/three-steps-to-following-...

General list here:

https://www.thinkingdirections.com/category/time-management/

View on HN

More and more research is showing procrastination to be an emotion management problem. [1]

That's why it's been really helpful for me to start keeping a journal. It helps increase self-awareness and helps when I get off-track on my side projects. I can can realign my goals and ease back into being productive again.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90357248/procrastination-is-an-e...

Have you guys ever read the "War of Art"? It comes from a place that understands Procrastination as an emotional problem, and has a fully developed solution for dealing with it in that way.

At the end it gets REALLY artsy and religious in a way that made me very uncomfortable. But its still the most helpful book I've ever read on productivity.

Jean Moroney would say that War of Art is based on the "duty mentality" - a mentality where there are certain things that you simply need to do, that are considered intrinsically important, and that your own personal desires are irrelevant and should be squashed. This mentality leads to problems. It's not surprising that the author is religious.

https://www.thinkingdirections.com/join-the-thinking-lab/ - ctrl-F "ineffective thinking habits"

"5. Duty Mentality: you treat your desires as irrelevant to your conclusions about what you should do.

Symptoms: You describe the obstacles to your goals in terms of temptation and resistance. You often feel you have to force yourself to do what is right. If you don’t, you feel guilty.

Practical Obstacles Created: You over-commit. You feel unmotivated. You work well only under pressure."

I can see how the symptoms listed could lead to the obstacles listed. However, as a religious person, I do regularly treat my desires as irrelevant to what I should do - and I do not exhibit the symptoms listed. So not sure what to make of that. Seems there is another way to have duty.

Also read the book and found it deeply inspiring, I’d recommend war of art to anyone that is pursuing creative endeavors.

I’m curious though why did it make you uncomfortable?

I'm an overly skeptical and rigid atheist. I have problems getting value from religious stories even in the metaphorical sense because I know how many people interpret them as facts.

I'm working on it.

I have a close family member who was a TV Televangelist (retired now) but who still claims to have the ability to heal people with the laying on of hands. Seeing the after effects of this "healing" when I was very young sent me down a path extreme anti religiousness.

I really disliked that book, I found nothing actionable in it. I only read it to the end because it is recommended so often and I hoped to find something useful in it. Sadly I didn't.

The book is REALLY for a certain kind of person who has a deep seated fear of success that they don't really understand.

If you have ever written 3/4's of a novel that you all of a sudden couldn't finish, or always abandon projects just as you are about to be able to reap the rewards, the book is for you.

I'm hoping the book wasn't for you, because fear of success isn't really a problem for in your life.

I’ll concur with this thought.

It’s inspiring but there’s nothing really to take forward from there.

It’s like a talk from a motivational speaker - it’ll get you into that desirable state of mind for a little bit, but won’t help you change anything fundamentally.

> So often, people take on tasks because they think you have to do them, or the task meets some criteria that someone else has set. You feel you have to do the project because it's required for a class, or your boss told you to do it, or it's the only way you see to get the credential you need to take the next step in your career.

Remided me of passage from J.K's book.

"There are two kinds of action. One brings you reward, and the doing of it strengthens the ego, the ‘me’. The other kind of action, the action which you love to do, has no reward or punishment and is not concerned with what the neighbour says, or with gods or with the priests or with belief. You do it because it is the only thing to do. You rejoice in the very doing of it, not for heaven or the avoidance of hell. You just do it and in the very doing of it is the delight. This action is of freedom from society and has nothing whatsoever to do with morality. This action is from nothingness. When there is this, you can look at the world from that silence of nothingness."

Seems like you need all kinds of productivity tools/hacks for the former and none for the latter.

> clash between your short-time desires and your long-term goals

Or maybe its a clash between the artist in you with cog in the machine that you need to be live the life you want

Sometimes making art has boring parts, too. Writing a book, for example, can be drudgery, even if you're not writing for anyone in particular or aiming to make a profit—just because there's an order-of-magnitude difference between the amount of effort required to exhaust your creative impulse, and the amount of effort required to actually create a whole work from which you can feel satisfied that you have communicated the thing your creative impulse was driving you to communicate.

> Sometimes making art has boring parts, too.

Right but productivity hacks culture is not usually talking about this specific type of work.

Yeah, if I only ever did things that I rejoice in doing I'd be getting nothing done. Not everyone is a super naturally passionate type.

What is the other option though? None of the "productivity hacks" actually work.

> for example, when you try to force yourself to do something that you don't, in fact, want to do

This is called a day job, even for programmers.

> you haven't resolved the clash between your short-time desires and your long-term goals

Is it even possible to resolve? One would like to read books (play guitar, gardening) for the rest of his life instead of trying to get his docker-compose file working properly. How a productivity technique could resolve such a discrepancy between goals and desires?

I have this observation as well. Many lifestyle ideologies fall apart like this in practice, I think. The one I’ve found work for me the best is Eckart Tolle’s “The Power of Now.” If you forgive its aloofness and smirkiness, I really do believe finding a sense of joy in doing what you do, even mundane things, can really help your mood and stave off procrastination.

If you actually spent your entire days gardening, you'd soon feel an irresistible urge to bake a working docker-compose file. You'll procrastinate and dream about YAML files instead of paying attention to your plants.

This is why some advanced communities have a weekly/monthly duty cycle where people switch activities.

> This is why some advanced communities have a weekly/monthly duty cycle where people switch activities.

Monthly/monthly sounds more fair to me. Or even monthly/weekly if I'm allowed to dream...

To clarify: Either weekly work routine (Sun. gardening, Mon. kitchen, Tue. teaching in school...), or monthly work routine (same, but tasks are retained for longer consecutive periods)

Got it. I agree with your point that after months of gardening I will probably be dreaming of the beauties of YAML files, or even XML if the gardening period was too long. But still, does it solve the motivation/productivity problem? Also, during long breaks you lose the context, so both types of activities will be less productive.

I don't think this way of organizing work is about maximizing individual productivity. It's more about the (forgotten?) idea that there's more into humans than being productive in some narrow scope.

Then play guitar for the rest of your life. It might be a short life.

"Productivity" techniques are inherently flawed by the way they put capitalist "productivity" at the top of the most important things in life. Check the blogpost where the author describes playing a computer game as "life down the drain" and how their productivity tips have to tightly control that.

If your life is to be commercially productive and own a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar house and get paid for docker-compose, then you can't switch to playing the guitar and have the same life.

But if you consider your deathbed and think a life of fighting Docker was a total waste, what was the point? The "resolution" to the discrepancy doesn't come from a productivity technique, it comes from a enlightenment; losing the desires to control particular life outcomes and desiring "good" outcomes and fearing "bad" outcomes.

Go far enough down that and you'll unpack the fears and anxieties about not being good enough, not being perfect, making mistakes, being inferior, etc. which cause procrastination in the first place, and be more able to work on Docker without feeling bad. And more able to turn away from it and play guitar without the anxiety of "what if my boss says I wasn't productive enough".

Honestly I find that an important part of being “productive” at my job of drawing weird comics for Patreon money is to make damn sure I take time off. I love doing this job, I’m delighted that I manage to pay my bills with it, and I still need to take regular breaks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com