Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it
deprocrastination.co
deprocrastination.co
I get what they're going for, but it's sort of funny to me that the three 'tricks' to start working all amount to "well, start working".
This article: "But have you tried... just working today? :)"
"Well, have you tried not being sad :)?"
"Just be structured", "try to focus more", "just write a journal", "Oh we all feel these things from time to time"
'Have you tried just going?'
I'll tell myself I can do the most absolutely abysmal 3 sets of whatever lift, and I can walk out if I'm not feeling it. 99% of the time, I stick it through.
This article: "But have you tried... redefining 'work' radically crapward ?"
Initially IT was just fun and games (for many people literally, just LAN parties, endless crazy things on IRC), then script kiddies grow up and have to prepare for meetings and review proposed standards :o
The problem is often distraction, so turn off your screens and just think about the work you're not doing. Not the consequences of not doing it - the actual doing of the work.
It works.
e.g., Don't feel like working out? Well, it's harder to commit to 30 minutes than it is to commit to 10 minutes, and 10 minutes is still beneficial. Who knows, you might accidentally go for 20 minutes.
Dumb article though.
It’s an important skill to be able to reframe things for your brain, and not just in this context.
Obviously not.
If this article helped you, great! I did not find re-stating "just start" to be an effective motivator for me.
Start playing in a domain as closely related to the work as possible (i.e. explore a tangent you're curious about), then, if/when you gained some momentum try to identify a good stopping point try to smoothly pivot into what you should really be doing instead of stopping.
It doesn't always work, but every now and then it does.
todo: https://emojipedia.org/black-square-button/
done: https://emojipedia.org/check-mark-button/
:)
Can you elaborate a little more on what you mean by that? I’m genuinely curious because the sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense to me!
Alternatively, most of my housework starts off as, "just wash dishes for two songs..."
of course, as a side effect, you'll start to only work, being wonderfully productive as the depression wraps everyone around you in your irritability blanket and snuffs the life out of your relationships
...but hey, it keeps you productive
it does work, but as you note, it's not sustainable. It's horrible for the mind and body.
please take care of yourself -- overwhelm is the pits.
If what's stressing you out is the work you have to do or where you're working, now is actually not a bad time to search for a different workplace. You don't have to prove anything to anyone if that means that your mental health takes a toll, and you'll not be able to prove anything anyways in such a state.
If it's something different then feel free to chat here, or write me via mail(if you want to vent to a stranger), or look after your mental health by visiting a professional, if that's possible for you.
Are you able to take any time off to decompress at all, or have a mental health professional you can talk to about it?
I'm fighting the urge to tell you all sorts of different things that I've tried and have helped me in that spot -- but I recognize that's probably not what you need.
do you have any sense of how a random group of HNers could support you? If nothing else, I hope knowing that you're not alone in the experience helps.
Source: Am burnt out.
"If you don't want to do something, make a deal with yourself to do at least five minutes of it. After five minutes, you'll end up doing the whole thing."
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/the-5-minute-hack-insta...
For example, if I'm sitting in a chair and I need to do something, I only need to try standing up. I can always sit back down if I don't have the energy to start walking. Most of the time, I keep going. The times I don't, well, I know I tried.
If you can define what trying looks like, then you know when you've tried your hardest and failed through no fault of your own. (For most people, it's a lot more than just five minutes!) Accepting failure makes moving forward in another direction a lot easier. Guilt isn't a good emotion to dwell on.
The important thing with this advice is to remember you probably don't know your limit. Most people keep more energy in reserve than they realize and they can afford to spend that occasionally. This means the advice to push beyond your limit is really good advice for most people. But for many people dealing with chronic health issues, we already tend to push beyond our limits and hurt ourselves. Thus we need the opposite advice. :)
Edit: I should clarify, by "dealing with depression", I mean trying to be productive when you are depressed.
Procrastinating on filing taxes. Next step is to log in to tax preparation app.
Procrastinating on cleaning office. Next step is to pick up a piece of paper off the desk and throw it away.
Whatever it might be, once I get to something absolutely concrete and absolutely doable... I can usually get started and make some progress.
It's much easier (for me) to procrastinate on "do your taxes" than "log in to tax prep app." Once it's that clear it's like... ok, why procrastinate on that?
In my case "deal with it" doesn't mean "make me not depressed": I'm still depressed but it does help me turn some some of my bad, hard-to-do-anything days into ok or even occasionally productive ones. And having something useful come out of a day I thought I would be useless is also helpful in fighting depressive thought loops about being a useless/lazy/bad person generally speaking.
Sincerely,
a depressed person
The advice is to break the goal down into the smallest possible pieces and start there. For getting out of bed, I'd probably start with rolling onto my side.
It's not a cure. It's not guaranteed to work. It's a strategy for expending as little energy as possible to get started. If you can focus on one small, actionable item, it can help reduce how overwhelming the entire task feels.
If you don't have the capacity to do something, there is no advice that will make that thing possible and no one should be expecting you to do it.
I've tried setting timers too, and those help, but I also sometimes turn them off because I'm more focused on something else, and I don't understand what the timer is supposed to mean.
I find a lot of this advice is well intentioned, but it does not solve mental illness.
I just remembered where I was going with this: the practicing helped me remember learning certain tasks like brushing my teeth. So now I replay good memories of a task as I perform it instead of concentrating on the task itself. The higher the percentage of time spent NOT thinking about what I'm doing, the easier it is to start the task next time.
Maybe this doesn't make sense if you don't struggle with anxiety or haven't burned out yet. But for people who have, changes happen in the brain where it's hard to forget what happened, so you come out of the experience a different person, disillusioned. The games help overcome the mental logic that (often correctly) predicts bad outcomes after years of negative reinforcement loops. Spending more time daydreaming helps restore the feeling of novelty and being young.
I really like the idea of "practicing in order to devote less consciousness to it". I think this works well for a lot of low-thought tasks that aren't very mentally stimulating. Not sure about those where it requires conscious effort (paying taxes) but it's certainly a new avenue I haven't tried before.
If it's a habitual task, e.g. practice guitar or write my novel or get 1 hr of code review done, then the best thing to do in my experience is to associate the habit in your brain with a dopamine hit. For example, as you sit down to do code review, have a cup of coffee or maybe a sugary drink. Or as you sit down to practice guitar, have a twitch stream on. After 5 or 10 minutes, let your focus switch move over to the activity and turn off the video and continue the task.
But the point is, after weeks of this, the beginning of that activity will be tied to a dopamine hit for you. And then you won't dread the activity (but actually look forward to it!)
My Rules:
1. When I feel like not working, I will commit to doing just 5 minutes of the task.
Then I stood there probably looking like an idiot (mercifully I came in a bit early so it was a mostly empty hallway) spinning the dial around trying to recall what I just did a minute ago.
I really think it's going to be a profound addition to the literature. I am thinking it's going to be a NYT best seller, but I can't seem to find an agent.
I’m sure I’m missing the context and nuance, but I’ve started applying the quote to mean I can be happy in any activity, no matter how small or short in duration.
Has been working for me lately to get me moving on projects I’ve procrastinated on, but YMMV.
Sometimes that's enough to get me in the mood and I can satisfyingly cross out a dozen items in one go; other times I'm not in the mood, and after just a few minutes I can check the box for the day and move on. The knowledge that in the worst case I'm just literally 10 minutes away from feeling good takes the edge off a lot of causes for procrastination.
Scroll HN for 30 minutes while agonizing on whether to commit to 3 hours of feverish debugging or just have a nice evening? No thanks, I'll just spend a few minutes setting up the debug environment in the most convenient manner possible, or find out just one tricky detail, and deal with the rest in the future.
Of course, not all tasks can be split up like that, YMMV etc.
Edit: if the task is big and just writing the todo list is too daunting, that too can be split up.
Also, despite the simplicity, obviously some days will be missed, and that's perfectly fine. In my mind it's not even "at least one item a day" anymore as much as just making the smallest unit of work less painful than the baseline suffering rate of procrastinating on something.
If your partner won't go to the gym, you can't make them, but you can make sure their gym clothes got washed. If your coworker won't do things, you can't make them, but their boss can, and that's easier if you've made the task more straightforward.
I am always most productive after actively focusing on rest. Today I solved in 2h what I've been struggling last 2 days because I went sunbathing, swimming and to cinema over the weekend and work didn't feel daunting anymore. I could chose to work over the weekend and try to complete because it because it felt like I am behind schedule but that's not a healthy nor correct way.
1. https://www.chestergrant.com/26-highlights-from-mini-habits-...
Just start? stop reading HN and go read the code.
Start small? Open up my editor?
Start sloppy? Dump some printlns?
Anyway, time to go read* through some old cold fusion code I've been ignoring all morning.
There is no magic to want to work which is why you are being paid to do it or there is some form of incentive. The only advice I'd give is pay attention when you drive under bridges and overpasses and remember you're only a few bad decisions away from meeting your new neighbors, drive home and remember you get paid to tinker on a computer, then get to tinkering.
I didn't cure my procrastination until I internalized a sense of professionalism. I go to work like everyone else who goes to work. When I'm at work I have an obligation to my employer, my family, and myself to do what I'm supposed to do as well as I can. This also makes it easy to indulge in what I want when I'm off the clock.
If you can't get started, at least try and avoid distractions during your "professional" time. You can work or you can do nothing. That is typically uncomfortable enough to gain some forward momentum on a project.
1. Do less.
For me, this means playing fewer video games, watching less television, and going to bed earlier.
There is a ton of other knock-on stuff that I can add to this, but doing less is the first thing. If your job eats every waking moment of your time and is paying less than 200k, it is time to find a new job... or move to a new city that isn't stupidly expensive.
Other things I do:
1. Keep track of time. No goals. Only time.
2. Get up early and do it.
Works for both work and exercise for me.
Because if that's what you mean then I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about. Lovely weather we're having, right?
> 3 Tricks on how to get it done! 1. just do it 2. just do it messy 3. just do it small
Otherwise the natural aspect of wanting to do work would have kicked in and with it the loop of work hard -> reward cycle. Every single thing I've learned about productivity is wrong. If you ever go down the rabbit hole of productivity or battling procrastination the odds are that something else is very wrong.
From a strict definition point of view:
> pro·cras·ti·nate
> /prəˈkrastəˌnāt/
> verb
> delay or postpone action; put off doing something.
I'm not sure if I agree with your assessment. That is, procrastination has no implication of why the action was postponed, merely that it is.
Procrastination is a symptom of depression, ADHD, and other disorders that impact productivity -- the actions do in fact get postponed. The neurological process driving the postponement is irrelevant to the classification.
I think perhaps a better phrasing may be "there's no such thing as laziness" -- laziness being an attributed cause of procrastination.
There's generally a reason other than laziness, but society likes to dismiss those excuses and instead insist that the person themselves willfully choses to procrastinate. This is of course incredibly unhelpful in every regard, but society loves a good opportunity to shame people outside a standard deviation of typical.
Yes, you didn't mean to hit Sally with a stick, and yet here we are, with one crying child, and you, protesting your innocence. You need to apologize. Even if it was an accident.
Similarly, you can avoid doing a task because you are mortgaging future you to deal with something you don't want to, or you can simply forget that it needs to get done. The motivation is different, but the outcome for the person who expected that you made a fancy dinner reservation you keep forgetting to make until after the last responsible moment is the same.
I think in part this is a big factor of tension around The Last Responsible Moment with respect to Agile and YAGNI. People know themselves or their coworkers better than the author does. The last responsible moment is quite a bit earlier than you'd think, once you factor in not only queuing theory but also illness and distraction. You're not being responsible if you haven't accounted for predictable failure modes, Parkinson's Law, and some extra buffer into the equation for Hofstadler's Law, and then some extra buffer into the equation for <checks notes> Hofstadler's Law, and some extra buffer into the equation for Hofstadler's Law...
For my money, you should tackle a task when it pisses you off. You will never be this motivated again. But I will qualify that advice by saying that one of my favorite passtimes is to invent Plan B and sometimes Plan C in my head, so at any given moment if you ask me to fix something, odds are at least 50/50 I have a coherent solution tucked away in the back of my head somewhere, instead of just throwing bullshit at the problem until it looks different, so YMMV.
For one example, someone who knows themselves to do certain work well under pressure and even get a thrill from it, and who has many interests that “pay rewards” available to them at any time, may choose to procrastinate on work until there’s enough pressure to trigger that special lovely “no time to waste” flow state.
There’s no depression there, no lack of reward triggers, just a priority sort and a special extra reward for working in a certain pressured mode.
But it still looks like procrastination from the outside and still raises some inner dissonance over risk management and social conformity that make people fret over it as a strategy.