How to get yourself to do things (2015)
raptitude.com
raptitude.com
More generally, if you have a bunch of tasks, commit yourself to at least one. Don't necessarily push yourself to do everything but force yourself, no matter how hard, to do at least one. If it's a big task, break it up into smaller tasks.
This one rule is seriously like a magic bullet. 90% of the time you'll end up doing everything. Somehow you're brain just goes from thinking "I hate this, it's so hard" to "wow, this is easy, let's keep going". The other 10% of the time, you can keep your pride, because 1) you at least tried, and 2) it's sometimes a sign of an actual issue (e.g. you feel bad running because you're actually sick). I've heard this advice many times, and somehow I've never yet heard a single person say it didn't work for them.
When there's not a blocker, I usually end up doing way more than 10 minutes worth.
Then I sleep on it :)
Still, I have also found the quality of leadership really determines my productivity. When working independently, and there are 100 different objectives I could work on, it's very logical for my brain to say none of them are important. I have come to appreciate how helpful it is to have a decent boss who can laser focus on objectives in a way that help me line up my work.
It has its downsides. I had mostly bad experience working with software developers from rote learning cultures, because you may guess it, they tend to execute but not think about it. IMO the main worth of a software developer is unpacking customer requirements and getting them to make logical sense so that a computer can understand them.
If you don't question anything coming from authority, i.e. the customer, due to your upbringing, you're already off to a bad start.
Because executing without thinking is not what you hire the humans to do, it's what the computer does.
We don't ask artists to describe the painting and let someone else do the execution part. Working with the pigments, and seeing how they interact on the canvas is important for getting a good result. An intermediary would be detrimental.
In music maybe there's such a thing when you have somebody who can sing well, that has a team of songwriters doing the creative work.
Maybe the question is what other jobs rote learning is good for. I think there are enough jobs that don't ask for creativity, but instead require discipline.
And as with all things, there are probably shades of grey in between. A mix of discipline and creativity might be better than the extreme for many jobs.
Choices have trade-offs, business believe, in general, that things are simple and should be done fast. However, IMO, good design ( independent being software, etc... ) takes time and effort.
Agree with your comments on leadership!
Keep in mind there's a selection bias at work. People who don't get things done are much less likely to get through the US's selective immigration system.
To be fair, if you're self-employed, this is an accurate model of reality.
The curse of the smart lazy person. I've felt this acutely in my life. But I've made it a goal to develop proper discipline. I'm no Elon Musk and I have my good and bad days, but I at least learned how to work consistently hard for the most part. It only took twenty years to unlearn the bad habits from school.
I’ve found that as you move up, the ability to “lead yourself” (e.g. solve for those despite clear direction) is essential. A CTO can’t just ask their leadership what to do. It’s their job to figure that out! (With high level vision/direction from the CEO, but the details are on you)
It's ostensibly focused on helping grad students with procrastination, but the tips and techniques he gives in the talk can be applied by anyone.
https://www.amazon.com/Solving-Procrastination-Puzzle-Concis...
A mediocre life is the best I can hope for without modern medicine. When I had access to it, I felt normal for the short but brilliant time it lasted.
Taking long walks in nature (as in 2 or more hours long) can help, as can unplugging from the internet and other media, and meditation.
Many of us hyper-stimulated, and are in a pavlovian loop of jumping from one source of instant gratification to another, without taking much time to reflect one's own life and the world. Quieting one's life might help.
As for nutrition, I do think I'm doing well there. Other than a sugar fix at night, I eat pretty good/healthy/whole food.
Unplugging is probably my short term answer. I'm also going through the stresses of resigning from my day job and ramping up my side work, so that's a source of intensity too.
Tomorrow - a mystical land where 98% of all human productivity, motivation, and achievement are stored"in situation x, I will do behavior y, to achieve subgoal z"
good stuff.
I don’t know exactly why I find that so amusing, but I feel like I’ve done something fairly similar. Added that one to my queue.
I suspect that under recognized health issues are a common factor in such patterns. I knew a guy who swore he wasn't allergic to anything but began every single day with something like an entire pot of coffee and ended it with up to an entire bottle of wine. Uppers in the morning and downers at night is a common medical approach to managing severe allergies.
The other thing that helped me enormously was reading some book from a library when I was living in Germany in my mid twenties. (No, I have no idea what the book was called.)
It covered an idea that was supposedly fairly common before modern psychology became popular. The idea was that you have a certain budgeted ability to do a particular type of thing and if you aren't getting enough of that thing, you will do more of that type of thing voluntarily (as a hobby) and if you are being forced to do more of that type of thing than your internal budget supports, you will start experiencing burnout.
Programmers routinely give a variety of anecdotal testimony that fits with this concept. Some can program all day at work and come home and program some more to work on a side project. Some are so done with it after programming all day. Others loved it when it was their hobby but have come to hate it now that it is their day job. Their internal budget only supports doing this part-time and such people tend to change careers at some point and then eventually rediscover their love of programming as a hobby.
I think one key to making life work is figuring out how much internal budget you have for different sorts of things and arranging a life that fairly consistently uses up that budget without demanding more and also somehow pays the bills. And then everyone thinks you rock and you get to be contented.
And few of us get told that. We usually get told x, y and z external things matter a great deal and we need to somehow conform to that instead of being told our lives should be designed around ourselves and that's the path to success.
"The idea was that you have a certain budgeted ability to do a particular type of thing and if you aren't getting enough of that thing, you will do more of that type of thing voluntarily (as a hobby) and if you are being forced to do more of that type of thing than your internal budget supports, you will start experiencing burnout."
Everything else I've read has generally been about increasing capacity, and perhaps to some extent one can, but perhaps there is a sweet spot. For example, in lifting weights, you have your capacity for today and for this week, and you want to manage hitting your sweet spot for where you are at a given time so that you can grow without injuring yourself.
This shifts the conversation from trying to find and endless source of creation inside yourself (not realistic) to an awareness of and managing your current energy budget for a specific type such as creativity so that you tend to your self and optimize your choices so that energy is not wasted.
Pardon? Can anyone elaborate on this idea?
On the other hand, allergies may also cause restlessness through symptoms such as itching, a runny nose, burning eyes, etc. So a downer might help someone ignore those symptoms.
That's at least how I understood it. I never thought about it like that before - quite enlightening.
On the other hand, not everyone who regularly drinks coffee in the morning, and alcohol at night has allergies. I'd guess it's probably the minority.
I'm not comfortable with how much attention that detail got. It's speculation on my part and there could be other explanations for the behavior, though it fits with what I have heard from people who were on prescription drugs for their serious allergies.
I think the general point that "under recognized health issues likely contribute to so-called procrastination" is solid, but I'm not really comfortable with the direction this went in comments.
https://www.raptitude.com/2021/03/what-raptitude-has-always-...
Make it work, not crash, fast, pretty — in that order.
People write whole books about it just to avoid calling it a disease and making medication more accepted.
What also helped is realizing there isn't a silver bullet or magic pill that will get me to do the work: the work has to be done, and I have to do it at some point.
I started a few spreadsheets for things I'd like to log: amount of piano practice per day (aim for 30m), amount of script pages written now that I've transitioned away from programming, the amount of laps I swam that day, etc.
It feels appropriately "bad" to keep filling in the cells with "0". And looking at the "streaks" I have keeps me going.
Here are example pics of some of my spreadsheets, maybe this could be useful to some:
Piano Log: https://i.imgur.com/H0TbSSC.png
Writing Log: https://i.imgur.com/6Qb7Dka.png (not doing as well there, clearly...)
Conditional formatting reminds me of various thresholds per day and per week. Red = below minimum, yellow = at or slightly above the minimum, green = above the minimum
1. https://lifehacker.com/how-seinfelds-productivity-secret-fix...
I'm not sure it's accurate to say he denies "that he ever had anything to do" with it, but his comment there is vague enough to be read either way I suppose.
He finds it hilarious presumably because people have been crossing things off on calendars probably since calendars and writing implements both existed at the same time.
Remember, streaks are not goals in itself, but a mean to achieve a goal.
But this one was an interesting lecture. Even if it sounds stupidly simple, I found it really helpful to link procrastination and level of anxiety and I’m glad it helped me put words on how my feelings are.
Thank you
[0] https://habitlist.com/ (ios only, just a happy user)
There’s a line from the movie Ghostbusters that I like to quote when I need to get started: “Type something, will you? We’re paying for this stuff!” https://youtu.be/7dnaumEHJa8?t=14s
https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti...
The key is to lower the psychological hurdles / consequentiality burden of doing things. Simone Giertz's philosophy in making shitty robots that do stupid things poorly is an exemplar of this. There's no fear of failure *because the whole idea is not worthwhile" ... which makes the process an excellent learning tool.
I'll read it later.