Stop trying to make hard work easy
superorganizers.substack.com
superorganizers.substack.com
The most important subsection is "Most moments of distraction are caused by internal triggers." But that section lacks anything approaching concrete advice. It just repeats already written ideas then offers this:
> So if you want to deal with distraction the first thing you have to do is deal with the negative emotional triggers that lead to it.
The next section, regardless of the title, is about routines rather than internal-emotional triggers and is primarily an anecdote about their writing with no larger take-aways.
I think it is an article with good ideas, going down the right road, but never quite reaches a useful destination. Too bad.
Maybe because he wants to sell his book :)
Also notice he uses distraction instead of procrastination most of the time. The core ides is solid though that it's a emotion management problem. If you can control your emotions related to a given task, you can be more productive.
> Nir is also an advisor to several Bay Area start-ups, venture capitalists, and incubators.
Good it's on the front page of HN ;)
Otherwise it becomes a suck-it-up-and-just-do-it strategy, which is a fine when used reasonably, but it too can be exhausted as a strategy.
But anyway, all of our tools and progress flys in the face of the author’s suggestion. We are at this point in society because we put a lot of thought into not having to work hard.
The irony of working hard to not work hard.
I agree with you that rote work should be minimized with better tools and processes. I can delegate the bookkeeping for example.
Hard work seems like a matter of culture. There might be the expectation from your organisation, family, community etc. that working long hours is the only right way of working. But I don't think that's what the author is addresssing here.
So that leaves challenging work, like writing, marketing, cold-calling, etc. I should be cold-calling much more for example, but I've become quite proficient in finding excuses not to do it (one of them is that it's illegal here in Germany for my product in many cases). I certainly see the author's point about avoiding the discomfort for these types of activities.
I guess the widely availability of free sources has skewed perspective on what is of value.
- Procrastination/distractions are reactions to discomfort: “They’re not character flaws, they’re emotional regulation problems”. So: try to to develop better internal tools to manage discomfort.
- Things like email or items checked off TODO lists are more pernicious, because they feel productive. Recognize this.
- Set a routine (e.g. work 2 hours on writing), not targets (word count).
- When you do sit down to work, expect discomfort, e.g. from boredom, frustration, anxiety, uncertainty. When it arises, instead of trying to get away from it, lean into it: approach it with curiosity, like a scientist.
- When you get an itch to go look up something, instead of acting immediately, set it aside for 10 minutes (I'd say an hour) — and see if you still care at the end of it.
- For urges that don't go away, “surf the urge”: sit with the sensation and examine it.
- Once you have made some progress in managing your internal triggers (e.g. can deal with some discomfort), try to understand your values (the kind of person you want to be/become). Then create a schedule for tomorrow that fits it.
- Remove external triggers, those that tend to distract you.
- For tasks where all this still doesn't help, try some “pacts”, like the one in the article about the $100 bill.
This may not seem “anything approaching concrete advice” but his defence in the article is that this is his strategy: “There isn’t going to be one tactic that works for everyone. You use the strategy to try individual tactics until you find the right formula for you.”
Yes, there are few concrete pieces of advice to tackle the "internal triggers" of distraction. These are to be found in ourself and any tricks, like turning off all of the notifications, will only address the surface of the problem. Any concrete advice would risk here to conceal the truth that that hard word is not easy.
I like the path proposed by the article.
* searching in oneself for the deep obstacles toward our goals. boredom? loneliness? fatigue? uncertainty?
* clarifying our priorities into a concrete daily schedule;
* imposing ourselves a routine on what matters
* and even using pacts with ourselves.
Looking closely at my own current habits, this helped me to better understand what I already do well and what I need to improve.
I'm adding features to an existing service, and it causes me emotional distress, because there are 3 layers of legacy code next to the stuff I'm adding. I so want to go hog wild and rip up the old stuff. The only problem being, we're short on time and devs right now, so I have to add these strategic features.
Here's how I deal with it: Chunk up the work, and think of the next small piece I can accomplish. Get started on something, and leave the last easy piece sitting there while I take a break. When I come back and finish that chunk I have a positive reward feeling for finishing a chunk of code. Then I feel more like starting the next piece.
I can relate to your experience. However, I struggle with keeping digital entertainment away from me. On good days, I keep away from entertainment until I'm done with work. On unproductive days, I start one thing piece of entertainment and collapse through a series of distractions. It's like, I start with Instagram, find myself on reddit, then on Youtube, then on Netflix, then on porn. I have this problem of the dopamine train which I unwillingly get on. Can you offer some advice?
I think it's important to have something to return to after your break. It's also important to feel like you are making progress.
If you can think of your breaks as breaks, that may help. It is important to recognize and deal with the emotions that are keeping you away from work. The time away from work/code/whatever is not the problem.
But really, this is the key problem of my digital worklife. I used to work construction and I was able to stay on task all day. For a long time I thought I was able to do that because I was away from distractions; and that is definitely part of it. But another part is the fact that software development is creative work and technical in a league almost by itself.
You have to be creative, but you also have to be correct. It's hard to be both at the same time. Maybe if you split your time between being creative and correct it could help?
Sorry I can't help more.
The is the first time I have seen it.
Donald Knuth
What I always seem to forget is that; Making the hard work easy has diminishing returns.
For example; If I spend 10 hours making a website deployable in 1 click, how many websites do I have to deploy before it's worth doing?
Of course it depends, but usually it's important to work on the problem that matters, not the meta problem.
There is of course a xkcd for that:
I think there's definitely a time and a place for the problem vs the meta problem.
Now that deploying a website is 1 click, what kinds of mistakes go away, what other processes you can integrate with that deploy, and what is the gain of deploying more often?
For the specific case of deployment, just by the chance of error, I would say it's already above break-even on the first deployment.
How many times do you need to deploy a website? At certain stages of development, probably many times a day. Automating it would not only pay for itself in few days, it also enables CI/CD and a whole new category of tests to be run.
Engineering is all tradeoffs- let’s be precise on our adjectives unless we’re talking about things that are like 95% of the time a bad idea (eg goto statements?)
I also don't buy into the title's command to stop trying to make hard work easy. Apart from reproduction, that's literally what organisms are wired to do: make biologically demanding processes less demanding so we can free up more energy so we can have more babies.
This is a new person reiterating old ideas in a broken way.
Work becomes hard when you allow yourself to become an agent of your own negative internal triggers. It's not hard if you possess the techniques to judo it to the ground (see meditation).
But I remember a funny quote, once: "Laziness is the mother of invention."
I'm big on Personal Integrity, Habit, and Personal Challenge.
1) I Have Integrity.
This means that I have a "personal code." There's things that I will do, every time, and things that I won't do, ever. There's conscious, considered postures on various aspects of life, accompanied by rigorous self-inventory, and immediate correction/amends when I stray from beam.
I often think about why I do something, as well as how I do it. I'm constantly applying my Integrity Lens on what I do.
It's also important that I apply this lens only to myself. Life gets fairly miserable, if I am constantly measuring everyone else with my lens. There was an episode of "The Adventures of Pete and Pete," where they encountered "Inspector 34."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyEzVEvQYEc
2) I Establish good habits.
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -Aristotle
I cannot stress enough how important habit is to everything I do.
My GitHub ID is solid green. I'm coding many, many hours a day.
I want to be a good coder, so I code. There's no substitute.
Ever watch a really good musician at work? Watch their hands, as they do it? They have a relaxed, casual demeanor, as they play a cheap, beat-up old Univox, and we say to ourselves "That's so easy! I could do it!"
Then we run out, buy a PRS guitar and a top-shelf amp, and sound like a couple of cats..."having fun."
That musician spends several hours a day, practicing the most boring stuff imaginable. I have a friend that picks up his guitar, every chance he gets, and just runs through scales, constantly. It's completely automatic and without any thought.
Also, a bit maddening...
3) I Challenge Myself
I try to always be "biting off more than I can chew." If I habitually work on stuff that makes me sweat and worry, then the basics are almost thoughtless. Works like a charm.
I write about that here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...
TL;DR
None of those three things are unique to me. They are patterns, not inventions. I hang around a lot of folks that are always doing them, and we seem to be a fairly happy bunch.
I think that a lot of the reasons for "making hard work easy" is a sincere effort to "commoditize" experience. Corporations, especially in the Software Development industry, are obsessed with hiring cheap, inexperienced engineers (often, quite brilliant, but inexperienced), and expecting them to have output like experienced, top-shelf developers that have been doing the 3 things I mentioned above for decades.
Also, there's what I call a "cargo cult" mentality, where we think that if we dress the part, and learn the lingo, it will somehow make us what we want to be.
It makes sense, when we think about it, but never seems to actually work.
In my experience, there's no substitute for Integrity, Habit and Challenge.
"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong." -H. L. Mencken
"Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think." -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
You need to find your own method as you better understand the problem. Ie., stop trying to make hard things easy...
https://medium.com/swlh/stop-trying-to-make-everything-easy-...
However, the sections on dealing with external triggers and pacts are pretty practical advice in the current climate.
This works for him for writing, you see what applies for your field of work.
If you think this, but I have a way to make something 10x easier that you can't or don't know how to do then I can sell my idea to you as a service for a monthly subscription fee.