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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

> I should have allowed myself the flexibility of 7 hours a week to be used as I saw fit versus one hour per day each week. Creativity and motivation comes in bursts and there were many days when I felt I wanted to go on for longer but couldn't because of the rules I set for myself. Conversely, there were days when I was exhausted and didn't have the same drive to work on the competition.

Given the title, I was expecting the opposite conclusion.

Successful writers often seem to follow a strict schedule regardless of motivation. I wonder if this helps stop burnout.

I'm definately of the "just keep going once I start" mindset but not sure how much this is because I can't force myself to work while unmotivated and if things would be better overall if I did space it out to an hour a day.

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From what I understand, people use a strict schedule regardless of motivation for two reasons:

- be sure that even if inspiration never strikes, you still have something after a week, a month, a year

- maximize your chances of inspiration striking

I've often heard that the first 20 minutes of doing a task are the hardest, and that's where you should force yourself the most. After that it gets easier. And if there is a "wave" of inspiration, you should ride it while it's there.

That sounds like the best of both worlds. There's always going to be an activation cost to pay, even for the most motivated.

So if I'm inspired, it'd still be helpful to put hands on keyboard and start, otherwise that inspiration might be squandered.

On the other hand, if I'm not inspired and don't become inspired in the first X minutes, there was probably a better chance of becoming inspired because I did start, but also a ceiling on X that indicates it just isn't happening today.

So maximal productiveness = {start regularly, to take advantage of inspiration} + {start regularly, to see if inspiration strikes}

And also worth differentiating forward progress tasks from epiphany tasks. Sometimes a great book still needs 2 more bad chapters to be complete, but a bad modification on a mediocre ML model doesn't help it score better.

The first 20 minutes are also true when I exercise as well. Once I'm past 15-20 minutes I find I can keep going.

I think you're ignoring your own passive thought processes as the mind turns a problem over.

For me, I've noticed that my mind cogitates while I appear to be procrastinating.

Once there's a potential solution in sight the "keep going once started" mode activates and it's easy to keep going because you've already anticipated pain points.

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