How a lazy bitch like me learned to be productive
madisontaskett.com
madisontaskett.com
I think people change slowly—much more slowly than we usually assume. Every time you try something to fix your life and you fail, you actually make a little bit of progress on yourself, just not enough to switch your behavior into something recognizably better. When you try a new strategy and succeed, there is a strong chance that you would not have been successful had you not made all of that incremental progress on yourself from all your failures. That's why it's important to never give up on yourself.
I've had "breakthroughs" that were basically just me trying the same thing I tried (and failed at) years earlier. The difference was that I'd gotten stronger in subtle ways over that time. Then, 6 months later, I'm back to my old habits. This is depressing, but when I remember that this is the first time I was able to stick with something for months instead of weeks, I realize I've actually made progress on myself.
Even though this isn't strictly about productivity, I think the best lesson from OP is that things get easier as you practice them. This seems obvious, but when we talk about building skills, we often frame it as us rising to the challenge. I.e., there's this very hard thing we want to do, and we need to become stronger to be able to do it. This isn't wrong per se, but I think it's bad for motivation because it frames progress as doing as doing increasingly more difficult things. Instead of thinking about getting better, I think it's more helpful to frame progress as things becoming easier. No matter how weak you feel you are, the things you find difficult in life will become easier as you work on them.
For example, I dislike doing pullups. Many times over the decades, I embarked on a program of daily doing as many pullups as I could. I failed because it just took too much willpower.
I finally hit on a solution. I started with doing 3 pullups a day. 3 pullups are easy. It didn't take much willpower at all. After a few months, I "graduated" to 4, which then was just as easy. After several years, I am now up to 10, which is easy, and something I had kept failing at before.
You might think "why wait several years", but my goal with this is long term, so that doesn't bother me.
It's the willpower to be self-accountable which forms good habits.
1. The project stays fresh in your mind, rather than winding up in the "garage" of your thoughts.
2. It's surprising how much you can get done one minute at a time.
3. Sometimes you discover that one minute had turned into a couple hours without thinking about it.
4. My motivation returns a lot quicker than if I just set things aside.
For example, if you're trying to solve a difficult bug it can be overwhelming and you feel like you're not making progress and you procrastinate because you don't have the time to dive in for five hours and you feel like spending thirty minutes isn't enough to accomplish anything.
My advice, if you're struggling with tasks like these is to make excessive notes. Save the link to the Stack Overflow question you looked at. Write down file names and line numbers with your thoughts. Copy bits of relevant documentation right into your notes. The basic idea is that if you can ramp up from your notes in less time than it took you to make them then you have made progress.
30 minutes won't be enough to solve many nasty bugs, but it can be enough time to rule out a possible cause, or rule out a possible technique as not being helpful for tracking the bug down.
One of my nastier crashes took two weeks to root cause - I eventually ruled out every smart technique I could think of, and resorted to dumb ones. 15 or so build + test cycles later (taking maybe 10 minutes of work each and another 2 hours of waiting for builds to complete) I'd bisected VCS history and found the cause. Turned out to be a change to use some third party code that looked completely unrelated. So unrelated that I spent another 10 minutes creating a completely isolated standalone repro case to verify I'd actually found the culprit (I had) instead of something that would hide the symptoms.
She’s probably got another 4-6 months until she can do the full pull up, but it’s coming.
Unfortunately I'm too short and my ceilings are too tall for a joist mounted deal. (However that does mean I can do more pullups I guess)
I'm not affiliated with target or the bar manufacturer.
If you don't mind the question, how thick is your door frame? I feel like the bar tends to slide down / put pressure downwards on the wooden frame and I'm reluctant to hang on it for fear of breaking it, not sure if it's how it's supposed to work.
I find it improves my satisfaction to log my progress and put it on a graph. This lets me see how my small steps have paid off over time and is a lot more rewarding.
Doing all those things I mentioned in the article aren't just possible now, they're easier and in fact feel better than my routine before. I wish someone had told me this years ago... for some reason I thought that routines just continued to be hard forever, because I usually gave up before the point where they became easy.
Identify your "life long practices" and try to find room to work on them in every day, week or month cycle.
Life long practices are sometimes discovered and sometimes chosen.
Personally, I lift them from the stories I tell myself and then slowly accept them as descriptions of me. This makes it easier to iterate (i.e. fail), you draw strength from having accepted yourself as someone who does this thing and that gives you the patience to not give up as easily.
Of course this patience develops over time. For example, programming is something I have been coming back to, with increasing frequency, for multiple years now.. and it's only recently that I am able to do it every day.
Regarding getting better vs becoming easier, I think that touches on something orthogonal to patience which is being able to set reasonable goals for each session and putting the original lofty goals (that get refined rather than dismissed) to the back of your mind. This is your skill of evaluation - it develops with experience and is also a great enabler of iteration.
tl;dr
Patience :: Faith -> Determination -> Courage
Evaluation :: Experience -> Understanding -> Trust
And now I apply this pattern to a lot of things. I hate waking up early. Well... after months of inching up the wake up alarm I'm now a consistent 5:30am riser and dig the early quiet morning productivity.
This small, continuous, incremental that you barely notice stuff is a powerful weapon.
Unfortunately, after we had kids I got out of the habit, put a load of weight back on and am now back at the beginning. On the plus side, I know what I'm capable of if I take it slow and steady, and I have two more reasons to look after my health.
I also read The Oatmeal's "The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons I Run Long Distances", which really just described my relationship with running perfectly.
For me, the boredom is also aleviated by copious stacks of podcasts. It's kind of my mental relaxation time. Half an hour outside away from the child induced chaos (which I love, but you need a break from it sometimes).
Maybe procrastination is an emotional regulation problem and tying your self-worth to your productivity leads to more internal conflict between guilt of not doing enough vs fear of failure.
Maybe we could approach improvement out of a place of genuine interest or self-care, instead of treating ourselves like a computer on a cron schedule and then inevitably getting frustrated when we discover that we're human.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dont-delay/202003/ne...
Ask yourself:
'Why do I want to make this change?'
'Why does doing this thing make me feel bad?'
The answer to the first question is just for you and it should be solid. If you don't believe it then it's not going to work. The answer to the second question is usually either because you have had a bad experience in the past or because it's enough out of your comfort zone that it challenges your identity. It takes a lot less than you would imagine to challenge your identity.
If you can work through these issues a little bit before you start on your journey of change and continue working on them as you go it will be a much smoother ride and you will be far less likely to give up. It involves being OK with negative emotion during the act and taking the time to process those feelings afterwards.
The cool thing is this doesn't just apply to productivity but anything you want to change in your life. Sometimes you need change and sometimes you are just guilting yourself into doing things other people told you were good for you. That is why you start by asking 'why?'.
Kudos to your success. Please do not get complacent. I had a similar brief transformation at the start of this year and felt on top of the world for a couple months.
Then I got Achilles tendonitis which made even walking extremely painful for about 6 weeks. My son's mom died after a long fight with cancer. That same week my current girlfriend was diagnosed with cancer. And then quarantine happened.
I let these events allow me to regress back to worse off than I was when I started. And it all felt so easy at first
The challenge is keeping it up beyond the few months when the novelty wears off, life gets in the way, and it becomes difficult.
I personally find that these kinds of things keep my interest for about about three months so I have to find ways to make progress towards goals while also changing whatever I'm doing enough to continue to hold my interesting. Examples might include changing my workout routine in a way that is different enough to hold my interest but similar enough to continue making progress. Or switch to learning a different style of guitar. Stuff like that.
Having defined goals to begin with helps a lot.
Months of progress wiped just like that, and now I'm worse off than before I started running regularly.
I've never had any sort of injury like this, which means I never learned how to recover or avoid them when doing so would have been easier (when younger).
It just did. Halfway through my usual route, I started to notice a light ache around the knee. Initially I didn't think much of it, I figured it's just a little stronger than normal muscle soreness, nothing unusual for exercise. But I did lighten my pace a bit (not that I was pushing hard to begin with). About half a mile later I switched to walking because I didn't feel comfortable. I walked home OK and it wasn't terribly painful at that point, took a shower, ate, relaxed a bit and by the late evening it had gotten much worse and I couldn't really take a step with that leg.
The other knee was similar but different. Started feeling light ache when I took steps. It never got very bad but I stopped running. What was bad, and painful, really painful, was pulling on the leg. Like when you pull your pants off when changing clothes, or when helping a tight shoe off with the hand. Apart from that, it was always an annoying ache when taking steps. Rest and it goes away. Walk to the grocery store and back, and the ache is back, and so is the pain when you take pants off.
> and do you have any suggestions for avoiding it?
Not really. Checking with a physiotherapist or some experienced running coach would probably be ideal, but I guess the alternative is to just.. not push as far as I did. Give your body plenty of time to adapt, increase the load only in tiny increments over months, and immediately stop at first sign of pain? But as you say, it's hard to gauge. I didn't think I was pushing hard at all! If anything, I felt like I was in great shape to run longer and faster than I did.
If you do a search for knee injuries & strength training exercises, you'll also find that there's supposedly a lot you can and probably should do to improve muscle strength to stabilize the knee and let other parts of the body take up some load to reduce the likelihood of injury.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliotibial_band_syndrome
Non-specific knee ache leaving you crippled walking down stairs, and some other specific movements that cause the iliotibial band (on the outside of your knee) to rub over the bone/bursa. Super common running injury.
For me, the fix is - ice, stretching, instantly stop running if I feel a twinge, and, most importantly, ramp up mileage very very slowly (first week, 1 block, second week, 2 blocks, third week, ruin 3 blocks). Learning what it really means to "ramp up slowly" was the big challenge for me - it's always too tempting to go "hey, I used to be able to run 10mi easily, I'll just crank out an easy 5" - boom, limping for a week.
As you said, and what a nurse told me I needed stretching. That's helped against part of the ache, but for the running, I read the book born to run. They talk about using your calf muscle as a spring (sorry if this is the wrong words, I am not a native english speaker).
To do this you need to take short steps where you land your feet under you all the time so you don't put your heel in the ground. Very tough training to begin with, but it at least removed all my running problems.
Since I was a heelrunner I had to start over, since this is very tiring.
I'm no expert, but one thing that seems to help me is exploiting my natural laziness and bad habits. For example, I got in the habit of getting a nice expresso during the day from a place that's about a mile's walk away. Kind of dumb, but it built a walk into my day that I pretty rarely missed.
Along the same lines, I chose a place to live that involved a fairly long walk to the train. In principle I could have started taking a cab to the station, but I'm just to lazy to make a change like that, and indeed that worked for years (until I moved).
And that's an important point about regression. For me good habits tend to break after about 2 weeks of non-compliance. Then it often ends up being months or even years before getting back on track. At which point it's like starting over.
But the fact I got back to where I was the second time taught me you can get it all back with enough work. You still have to do it, of course, but you should only regret losing progress if you fail to get back on track when life is telling you it's time to. But don't regret the fact that life can, and will, push you off the track now and then. Embrace it, accept it, and get yourself prepared to build it back up again.
The worst thing you can do is fall off track (which will happen) and then think because of that it's not worth starting over again. Or that what you accomplished wasn't worth it because you lost it. Or that it was a one time gift, that you failed to keep. The gift is the fact that you now know you can do it, and so can do it again.
Having the recognition that it is a cycle and you have the means and the will to correct it out of the trough is the only way to really ensure life long habits. It's easier to maintain than to build, of course, but don't feel like rebuilding is totally avoidable, and that it's a failure to have to do so when life gets in the way.
I share the same frustration with regressing back to where you started (or worse).
It seems like we all have a built-in set point for productivity. Some lucky people are just able to go, go, go, while those without such fortune are quite lazy and need pushing to do even basic tasks.
It's frustrating because you are always fighting against that regression to your set point. It takes energy, which you have less and less of as you get older. Life's hard.
This reminds me of this guy with the bookshelf in his garage that went viral on youtube years ago. I honestly don't think gamifying your life and jumping on the hedonistic treatmill is a step up from eating cinnamon rolls at 3 am, just the flip side of the same coin. It Reminds me of Baudrillard in America
"The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his wordprocessor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern, in the obsessive fear of failure or substandard performance, a sign and an anticipation of death, that death to which no one can any longer give a meaning, but which everyone knows has at all times to be prevented. The body is cherished in the perverse certainty of its uselessness, in the total certainty of its non-resurrection. Now, pleasure is an effect of the resurrection of the body, by which it exceeds that hormonal, vascular and dietetic equilibrium in which we seek to imprison it, that exorcism by fitness and hygiene. So the body has to be made to forget pleasure as present grace, to forget its possible metamorphosis into other forms of appearance and become dedicated to the Utopian preservation of a youth that is, in any case, already lost. For the body which doubts its own existence is already half-dead, and the current semi-yogic, semi-ecstatic cult of the body is a morbid preoccupation. The care taken of the body while it is alive prefigures the way it will be made up in the funeral home, where it will be given a smile that is really ‘into’ death."
There's fun ways to have exercise and there's military regimentation. There's allowing imperfection and contingency in life, and there's hammering them away.
In a delicate irony, both attitudes are fully human.
It's a huge rhetorical jump to go from "people engaging in focused activity" to "ritualistic pre-enactment of inevitable death", and even after re-reading this quote several times, I'm confused by how that jump is supposed to make sense?
"And it's almost effortless now. Like, wtf. Have I too become one of those insane Patrick Bateman-like beings that I thought all productive people were a few months ago? How did I finally pull it together? Here's the deal."
It may be a tongue in cheek reference but the comparison to Bateman is apt. He is actually the logical endpoint of this sort of life optimization, surface without anything beneath it and symbolic death. I'm not so sure how large the number of people is who unironically thing Bateman is a rolemodel rather than a parody and symbol of the sort of yuppie culture on display here.
The idea being you pick up a new habit using similar techniques to pomodoro, a little bit at a time.
Example of similar reflections:
https://hackernoon.com/micro-habits-changed-my-life-47f572bf...
One thing I did find useful in this particular essay (the OP) was a reminder of the relative difficulty of spending X amount of time doing something new compared to the same amount of time doing something second nature - which is magnified further according to how boring, painful, or just plain irritating it is.
Sometimes the anxiety of doing something important makes that something seem much harder than it actually is.
Lowering the bar helps ease that anxiety.
I've picked up a whole flossing habit just by starting with "at least one tooth and then you can stop if you'd like" ha
As much as I know that habits need to be stacked, I just can't get myself to be patient and do one thing at a time.
Consistency is like compound interest. If you get 15-20 mins of easy-paced exercise in 6 times a week (or even daily), you will get more exercise done than if you do 2-3 hard workouts. In addition, you reduce the chances of injury.
Learning a new mathematical technique or programming paradigm is similar to exercise. Your brain needs to develop some "muscle" memory for a new way of thinking to stick.
The thing I've learned lately is that with habits, going faster in the short term slows you WAY down in the long run. Counterintuitive, but 100% true.
- The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
- Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins
- Indistractable by Nir Eyal
- Mastery by Robert Greene
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
I first started listening to the audio in the gym. I did 2x as many rows as my previous set just because of what Goggins had to say at that moment. I did the impossible. He gave me 2x the endurance with words alone.
At times it gave me those, “people and the world are so god damn beautiful” teary eyes
What I did wrong (and sometimes still do) is that you cannot just add new things without removing other things. It helps to be fully aware of what kinds of things you'll have to remove from your life. What is the habit you're replacing(!) with a new habit? Food for thought ... ;).
Life isn't "This one thing that changed my life".
Yeah its a blog post not a doctors orders. Someone shared some positivity, on their personal blog, with a clearly playful title.
If it helps "some" people then its a success. Everything doesn't have to work for everyone.
Lighten up
Got any ideas about really improving your life to share? Addressing anything I brought up? Something to move the conversation forward?
Anything that could help a person like me, who could really use help on this.
Maybe a self help book or a therapist? Your responses feel like they're coming from a place of frustration with your own situation. If that's the case then I'm sorry you're having a hard time. I'm not the right person to ask.
Good luck, for real.
However, it’s easy to draw a strong correlation between this and the the departure from farm / manufacturing life into modern urban / suburban office life.
In, perhaps, 60 years, we will be at a point where the vast majority of people won’t even know anyone who works hard (from today’s perspective, such as a garbage man or farm hand). In the long run, these kinds of jobs simply won’t be valued; they’ll all have been “tractored out”.
Most people have these bursts of productivity for a short time that follows a slump and a realization.
Sometimes you try new technique and that trust in the technique provides enough motivation to get you going for a while.
But in fact, relying on a technique is relying on outside factors not having trust in you. Trust in yourself is the beginning of the lasting change.
It’s a simple yet powerful framework that you can use to gain a better understanding of your behaviors.
[0]: https://captology.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Be...
ADHD sufferers: uuuugh...
It’s been incredibly freeing to not worry so much about hitting these arbitrary KPIs and instead just see what I feel like doing in any given moment
You’ll struggle to find any blog posts about this perspective though... we’re all too busy enjoying life
“I only make one or two habits each month.”
The words above it combined with the expectation that I thought it said “baby habits” made my brain flash “I only hit 1 or 2 babies each month.” Hopefully I’m not the only person that experienced this.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0...
Why would the author call herself a bitch? why implicitly promote objectification of women by explicitly being ok with (crazy in my opinion) the personal choice of objectifying onseself?
I understand that she is a growth hacker and her thinking may be perhaps a title like this Only to get clicks. If so, even then, it still seems conflicting and contradicting to a personal beliefs of herself not being an object. On the other hand if she like to objectify herself why would somebody sane do thst ?
But that's missing the point - words like "bitch", "queer", and the n-word are used to mean positive things in their respective communities.
A woman choosing to own the term "bitch" doesn't promote objectification of women any more than me owning the term "queer" promotes homophobia/transphobia. Bigots will always find an excuse to be bigots; they don't need a woman to give them that excuse.
Additionally, your use of "crazy" and "sane" in this context is exactly the type of tone policing that hurts women (not to mention very directly propping up the stigma against those suffering from mental illness). You're not helping.
See: "queer" to the LGBTQ+ community, "bitch" for women, and the "n-word" for the black community. In this specific case, my understanding - I'm not a woman, but am an ally to them - is that "bitch" means a strong woman who does what she wants, regardless of societal expectations.
Learn to relax, man.
your need to caveat your comment with "Serious question / Genuinely Curious", if forthright, should have given you pause in the way your question was phrased, as it indicates some underlying apprehension. that impulse should be a bright red flag to think more carefully about how to squeeze out ambiguity and obviate the need for such caveats.
as is, your phrasing is overly certain, a priori assuming its own correctness, and thus primarily phrased to project an internalized, negative connotation onto others and moreover challenging those others to disagree.
alternatively, you could have just asked "hey, isn't calling yourself a bitch objectifying to women?" in this phrasing, you'd be proposing a similar position, but also signaling uncertainty, which invites the alternate perspectives your "Genuinely Curious" preamble seems to angle toward, rather than challenges.
My first impression was that the article was written by a From skimming some of your other articles you seem anything but lazy.
Glad to see there is some acknowledgement in your article about setting realistic goals and putting some limits on what you consider "enough".