What can I do to get out of the rut?
A delay is in the “good” category if there are specific reasons that it’s likely that there will be another time in the near future which is better than right now.
For example, if the task you’re considering require mental acuity, and you’re really tired, and it’s likely you’ll be less tired tomorrow, then it could be good to delay.
Or, if it’s time to do a chore except you’re in flow and productive, it could be good to delay the chore: it’s likely there’s a time in the near future where you wouldn’t have to give up productivity to complete it.
On the other hand, if there’s unlikely to be a better time in the future, and you should just do it immediately. (This is especially true for tasks that actually become more work to do if you wait.)
Before drawing this distinction, I had thought the way to avoid procrastination was just never to delay. Attempting to live up to that had proven unrealistic/costly, so I would end up delaying a bunch for all sorts of reasons including bad ones.
After I started drawing this distinction, I set about never procrastinating for bad reasons, while often delaying for good ones.
I heard so many times that writing is effective. But I couldn't believe it until I've forced myself to try it. I think a lot of people are just waiting for a magic course or a pill to solve this issue. But in reality solutions are all those simple things that we've heard many times.
- I set daily goals. I do it every night before going to sleep. I have on average 3 daily goals(Sometimes more). You are guaranteed to achieve something every day. And that's so rewarding that you want to do more
- I write down my goals. It's as effective as having a good friend that keeps you in check.
- I have a Trello board for every side project that I do. Pretty much like a Jira board. I have backlog, in-progress, testing, and done columns. It's like releasing space from your mind. So you don't have to track everything in your head and be busy thinking about them all the time. Also when you are working, you don't have to stop and think what is the next thing to do.
- I've created my home office. I have my own room but it doesn't have to be a room. It's important to keep it consistent. So you train your brain to stay focused when you are at your office. Also your family knows when you aren't available.
- Find healthy hobbies. I do hiking, cycling, and tennis. The time you spend there helps your body and your health. And after a while you enjoy it so much that you don't want to waste your time with social media or video game. I also do it with my wife which keeps her more satisfied as we spend the time together. Happy wife, happy life.
- Find your big time wasting distractions and only do them as a reward for your weekly achievements. Mine was video games and I was really good at it. I started limiting myself to a two-hours session per week. After a while, I have weeks that I don't want to play at all. I just enjoy spend my time playing tennis or go for cycling.
Maintain a good lifestyle. Good food, enough sleep, enough physical activity, rest enough, use your holidays.
1. Find a friend who is a software engineer or data analyst and cares about you as a person. Talk about this with them. Humans evolved being able to talk things over with their aunt or best friend. When you are perplexed by something, a rubber duck probably won't cut it -- you should talk with a human.
2. Make sure you're taking care of your body and brain: exercise, good food, good sleep (this is easier if you're getting exercise), meditation, etc.
3. Understand what your "reward model" is. Under what conditions do you recognize "Aha! I've made progress!"? To really understand what I'm getting at here, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYylPRX6z4Q
4. Find internal things to strengthen your reward model's signals. Go back to when you originally started learning ML and Re-connect to your "Why". Do you still find those reasons compelling? If so, take some time to bring some vividness to your picture. -- Start With Why.
5. Find external punishments to remove. Now that you've spent 8 months working on it, you've noticed the things which are annoying you about your workflow.
- After 8 months, it is totally healthy to take a week or two and improve your development environment to sand the edges off of things that give you friction. For a stranger's recommendation: https://fishshell.com/ has made it dramatically easier for me to write little scripts that take away annoying tasks.
- Maybe you feel like you've been "in the weeds" for two long and your mental model is a bit scattered. Maybe just take some time and explain what you have learned in order to make it fit together in your head better. I find it helpful to pretend I'm back in university and fill an A4 sheet to prepare for a test.
6. Find external things to re-enforce your "reward model". In normal programming, this is what Test-Driven-Development does. In thinking through a hard problem, the anticipated social rewards from a person who is curiously listening to your thoughts serve the same purpose.
A few ideas, not sure if they'll work. I hope it'll get you inspired!
Idea 1: do it for two hours or a bit more, and when you do it, simply ask: what do I like about this right now? If the answer is "nothing" rephrase it to: "what's the coolest thing about this project right now?" Be a pure positive person. I'm a realist normally, but when it comes to becoming motivated to something, I simply ignore the negativity to the point of being irrational about it, because the power of positivity makes me feel motivated (and biased, but I guess that bias helps with motivation too :) ).
Idea 2: consistency is key, it's better to do it 4 days for 2 hours than 8 hours on one day. The reason for that is that you want it to slowly but surely become the top idea in your mind (see Paul Graham's post on that [1]). You'll also have more creative thoughts about it.
Idea 3: try to get other people involved. Heck, I'm up for a 30 min. call to hear about what you're learning as I have a passing interest in ML and read http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com and made this for fun [2].
My email is in my profile.
Good luck!
Also, some ML awesomeness for that fun hype factor :)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrIbQ0pIFOg
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSVrKK_uHoU
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6wn8zMRlVE
(15 min. probably in total)
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html
[2] https://github.com/melvinroest/Interactive-Neural-Networks
Regardless of the pandemic, there's still truths here to learn about the connection between your body and mind. CGP Grey is great. : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck
Do you have a boredom routine? I find as a creative it's important for me to force myself to be away from the productivity grind for a little bit each week so I can get hungry to get back to it.
Start DO-ing something that is more or less interesting.
DO-ing is physical. This will override mental state with physical energy that will in turn re-ignite proper mental state.
I'm into a lot of different things, but only 1 or 2 at a time. I can't force myself to do something I'm not naturally into at the moment. I'm taking better notes now (started a couple of decades late) so when I go back to a subject months or a year later, it's all there waiting for me to continue.
You seem to be trying to force yourself, and seeing it as a problem with you that's it's not working. Be kinder to yourself! If you were treating someone else that way, trying to force them to focus on something they didn't want to, day after day, you would seem very mean, wouldn't you? One thing I've learnt is, we're taught to be nice to other people, but not to be nice to yourself, which is perhaps most important, as treating others well is difficult at best without that, and we're with ourselves 24/7. Treat yourself like someone you really love.[1] Sounds like you're blaming yourself, torturing yourself! The Albert Ellis' classic New Guide to Rational Living[2] was also very helpful to me, to become aware of how I was treating myself, what things I was saying to myself, and changing the negative things.
John Perry's essay on procrastination might be helpful too[0] – in short, have such a great list of To Dos that even if you're procrastinating by doing things much lower on the list, they still add up to an awesome life! I thought it was genius.
Good luck!
[0] http://structuredprocrastination.com/
[1] I think I got that from Louise Hay's How To Love Yourself.
[2] Also Wayne Dyer's excellent first 2 books Your Erroneous Zones and Pulling Your Own Strings cover similar ground, and might be more to your taste.
Do pomodoros (similar to above).
No zero days/don't break the cycle (made famous by Seinfeld).
Leave a small task to do for next time, making it easy to get into it.
Set a realistic goal/project to make with your learning rather than learning open ended (could be the reason for your plateau, as it can be interesting to get into something initially but hard to maintain after the low hanging fruit is learned).
Blog about each topic/micro topic/learning.
Get peer feedback/reinforcement by announcing to someone or a community what you are working on or learning and when you will finish.
Good luck!
Any recommendations for this? I've always wanted to make a blog but I never have anything to write about. What I work on is trivial so it doesn't seem worth the time to write about. I've thought about researching interesting topics and writing a "research paper" for each blog entry but that feels like cheating and using another person's work.
In my case I realized I actually want to do what I'm doing, and the current procrastination crisis went away. But you may also realize you want to change some goals.
I feel internal alignment of goals is the first step and then look at some of the more direct tactics others have mentioned e.g. reward cycles and a good mental and physically state
"Just get started" is good advice sometimes, but in your case it sounds like you're burnt out, in which case you can't get started so easily.
Rather than doing brain hacks or productivity "tips", try doing _less_. Instead of aiming for massive bursts of productivity, try doing a tiny bit at a time. If you miss a day, who cares.
You are under no productivity "debt". You're studying and learning, these are creative processes that have a daily limit.
Finally, a sustainable level of motivation should feel like you're "kind of hungry", not that you're obsessed. I have ADHD, and sometimes I fool myself into thinking I'm no longer "passionate" about something because I'm no longer in a hyperfocus phase. In reality, healthy long-term productivity is much less extreme than obsessive hyperfocus.
and as I just read few minutes ago... "If you find it a struggling maybe it's not for you..."
You'll never succeed without fascination for what you doing...
I use the app 'Waking Up' from Sam Harris, and I find it absolutely brilliant.