Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it

If run as fast as you can, I agree that you should take breaks.

As a lifelong realist (= pessimist) this is one of those things I struggle with too.

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?

[0] - https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break-eboo...

It was very frustrating time because knew exactly that I wanna do it. Like I like doing something like it and saw clear benefits doing it.

I tried everything from the procrastinator handbook.

Ritalin helped immediately

(There are other effective ways to exercise and keep healthy than running. Find one that you find fun.)

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.

You should always consider starting again tomorrow, if it hurts.

You don't have to conquer the world in a day. This is a long fight. One needs to rest, recover and try again.

I had to stop playing basketball with the guys when my knee couldn't keep up with my joy of playing.

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.

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 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.

Realizing that really helped.

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.

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.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Uo08uS904Rg

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

It might be better for your narrative to be that you're only gonna walk and see how you feel.

(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]).

[0]: https://psychcentralreviews.com/2016/subliminal-how-your-unc...

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

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".

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.

""" 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. """

From https://jamesclear.com/how-to-stop-procrastinating

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.

You clearly fell into the latter camp.

Running, for me, was the Runescape of sports. Very grindy, with very little room for me to use my mind.

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!

At 5k your body is only just about warmed up - I never really enjoy a run until after the 5k mark, it gets easier after that point

> lazyjones

Ya'll gonna take fitness advice from the lazy guy?

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.

1 - https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/about-physical-activity...

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.

Indeed, same reason why some people sleep with their gym shorts on so they are already dressed for exercise in the morning.

>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.

from here https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/heavens-in-here/

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.

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.

It helps, because eventually people will start to call you and inquire about the thing you promised them. This of course causes anxiety.

Eventually, after spending enormous amounts of energy on riding that guilt wave some work gets done, typically at night.

The implication that research and practicing psychologists and psychiatrists, as a profession, are unaware of the profound variability of human beings is just silly.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

- 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!

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!

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.

At least I'm getting efficient at bad habits ;-)

I only just started Mysore 5 days ago (from the time of this comment).