Comment by lionhearted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lionhearted | Hacker News Reader

Very, very good post.

Some other thoughts -

If you notice some habitual thing you do when feeling initial frustration (surf to a website, turn on the TV, whatever) - then try changing your environment slightly to make it harder. If you use Google Chrome, delete or move a site you go to habitually. This can help a lot for not bailing out during that first 15-30 minutes of warmup when working on something a little frustrating and a little beyond current skill level.

Silence is good, but if you have a hard time finding it, try to find music that drowns out the outside world for you. Electronic music helps me - a nice mix of Benny Benassi, David Guetta, or John Digweed and I can ignore background noise. Also, if lyrics distract you and you like electronic, maybe try looking up some "minimal techno" - it's kind of weird, but very cerebral. I work very well to it, it's zone-getting-into music for me.

Silence or kill your phone entirely.

Make very clear to people when you're about to work on something important and don't want your concentration broken, let them know you're going to be an angry cave bear woken up from hibernation if they bother you, and let them know exactly what to bother you on - "Don't disturb me from working unless something is on fire, and maybe not even then" tends to get the point across.

Also, you've kind of got to regular your caffeine/sugar/food a little bit so you don't totally spike and crash. It takes a while to get this down, but there's very few things that are as much of a bummer as having your blood sugar crash, caffeine withdrawl, and hunger kick in all at the same time when you were doing good work. Knowing your own rhythms and eating/drinking/caffeinating intelligently during your work helps a lot.

A great trick I've found w/r/t your first tip (going to unproductive websites when feeling initial frustration) is to stop using the "Keep me logged in" option on those sites. If I hit a problem and habitually go to Facebook or Gmail, having that buffer layer of needing to log in makes me stop and think "Wait, I should really focus on the problem I've avoided by coming here."

Good one. Randall Munroe trained himself to turn off his computer whenever he switched tasks, so that the handful of seconds worth of power down, and then boot up, would break his habitual distraction. http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/18/distraction-affliction-corre...

I agree completely with your caffeine recommendation. I used to be mostly a coffee drinker, but then I would crash sometime late afternoon (and crash hard on a three day weekend where I wouldn't drink any coffee). I've since switched to a green tea, and that seems to have mostly alleviated the crash. I was simply getting too much caffeine too fast.

As for music: I've lately found that Digitally Imported radio is awesome when my personal electronic/techno library gets stale or repetitive. There's always something different there.

A bonus of limiting your caffeine intake is the quality of sleep you get.

I get a solid 8 hours since quitting caffeine, and it's really good sleep, too. I'm almost 100% ready to go as soon as I wake up.

And I get a lot less of the "you look tired" comments from my partner.

Ever listen to Ricardo Villalobos? It's some of my favorite background/work music, it's very minimal. I often find listening to long mixes (Fabric CD's or something similar) works really well for helping me concentrate.

When I sit down to do work, it's usually around 7pm and it's homework. I don't like homework, but I dislike spending too much time on it even more. Often I'll go to check Facebook or HN after typing out a sentence or so, because it feels like a reward. It took me a while to realize how miserable it made the whole process.

Now if I want to get stuff done I'll remove distractions. No computer if possible---if I do have to use it I'll turn off Internet or edit my hosts file, which is usually a big enough roadblock to send me back to work. I turn off my phone. I also find that Tea helps me tremendously, in addition to tasting delicious :)

I deleted my reddit account a few days ago and added reddit.com to hosts, but I've found its effectiveness very sporadic. Firefox and Opera can't connect, but Chrome and Safari can. I'm confused as to why "127.0.0.1 reddit.com" works for some browsers but not for others.

Are some browsers going straight to www.reddit.com, perhaps?

Good stuff I found recently is electronic composer Maximillien Mathevon. He does music for documentaries mostly I think but also releases albums of good chillout music. 'A Pause In Your Life' is a good album/collection

'Moving Immobility' :

http://open.spotify.com/track/4Wcwk5QWQusi1t8KejoHw3

I totally agree on the music part. I tried a lot of different genres and silence, of course, but voice-less style electronic music has the biggest success rate for me. My personal recommendation is progressive trance.

I use a variation on pg's laptop-across-the-room-plus-no internet-on-dev-machine trick.

I need internet for what I do, but I keep all of my bookmarks (especially RSS feeds) on my laptop in the next room. The laptop is also at bar height, with only a hard plastic stool in front of it. So procrastinating for too long is uncomfortable.

I can still go to various distracting sites (I'm doing it now), but it's a decent speedbump (and noprocrast is your friend).

Minimal techno is very good for concentration, yes. In that vein I recommend checking out Monolake.

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