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Comment by laurieg | Hacker News Reader

I like the advice but it always seems to backfire for me.

I started jogging everyday. Maybe 2 or 3km. But recently I struggle to do 500m a day.

Same with programming. I'll start with a few good days but then it devolves to opening an editor, writing a comment or one line then closing it straight after.

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You can try to convince yourself that the activity you want to perform is a given, just like eating and showering... you don't think whether you should do it, you just do it.

It works for me. I can go to gym religiously 3 days a week, and been doing it for years. Sometimes there's a company online after-hours or something... sorry, can't go , it's my gym day. If you start allowing certain things to stop you from doing what you want, then anything starts becoming a good excuse to not do it. Don't let that happen.

Regarding programming: I can keep up for months but sometimes I run into a problem that is really annoying to fix... I know I can fix it given enough determination, but then I think I am not getting paid for this, so what the heck... which results in me starting a new project and leaving that one aside until I actually need it (which happens every now and then).

> You can try to convince yourself that the activity you want to perform is a given, just like eating and showering...

I wish these activities were a given. It’s 5pm and I’ve not eaten since breakfast at 8am. I had to force myself to shower.

Note: showering wasn’t a problem pre-pandemic and perma-WFH hermit life. Eating, however, still was difficult to remember unless food was brought to me. And even then, sometimes, it just sat going cold on my desk

It can help to set more strict 'triggers' for yourself.

ie: - When it is 12, I will take a break for lunch. - At 3 o'clock, I will take a break for a snack and stretch

I get what you are saying, in that once you are in a flow, you don't want to stop. But, you need to be strict about it, like the user you are replying to is saying. Don't let yourself off the hook.

Also, it helps me to realize there is value in stopping and stepping away from something. It helps me recharge, and step away from any problems I am trying to solve.

It's important to self-motivation to not beat yourself up over these "bad days." For example, without these bad days, you have nothing to contrast with the "good days," so it's possible it makes you appreciate those times more. It can also give you insight into what produces a good or bad day for you, personally, if you start to monitor the circumstances around good and bad days in terms of how much sleep you get, your diet, general mood/feelings, etc.

I found that I tend to get backlash if I start with too ambitious of a goal. Instead, I'll aim for something stupidly easy and just focus on getting started at all. I've found that works much better.

At first I aimed for 1 hour of exercise a day. That failed within a week. So then I aimed for 10 minutes a day, which barely felt like exercise, but it got me to the starting line consistently! The trick for me was treating anything past 10 minutes as beating expectations, rather than treating anything under 1 hour as falling short. In practice it means I'm able to get about 20 minutes per day consistently, which is still much better than 1 hour never.

The key for me was making it so I could consistently feel good about a reasonable goal instead of constantly feeling like I was falling short of my own expectations.

Now if only I could apply that to flossing.

Physical exercise is an exception because the body needs rest. The "just show up" goal with exercise is to begin with 3x a week and then gradually increase that as your body grows stronger.

Why is non-physical activity any different? To me 3x a week sounds like a good idea for starting mental exercise as well.

The related alternative that has worked wonders for me is to commit to getting something done every day, that is all the way to completion. This may be a well defined partial bit of work like defining a data structure or implementing one part of the CRUD code that will be needed. Targeting some level of completion doesn't always work out but has an effect on goal setting and chunk size of work parceled out which improves the hit rate for every short working session.

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