Do literally anything | Hacker News Reader

Do literally anything

aaronfrancis.com

127 pointsaarondf25 comments

When I'm in that scenario, so much to do, so little time, what should I do ahhhh. I love to ask myself - "What am I resisting?" and then doing that thing. It's the biggest momentum creator that I've found.

It's a highly accurate radar system into the fact that I know what I should be doing, and I just want to cover it over and pretend that I don't as a means of continuing on and amplifying my own exciting melodrama!

My coworker calls this “shoveling the sh*t”. It only gets stinkier if you don’t.

This is the first step people who are clinically depressed are asked to do too. So, you might have rediscovered an ointment for depression and anxiety.

This is how some computer games can be used. Goal -> Achievement -> Goal -> Achievement...

If used judiciously, they can help. Caution: Do not use free-to-play microtransaction games for this purpose (with a few possible exceptions) as those games tend to monetize pain.

You're better off doing something real, though. Bake a loaf of bread. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make yourself a sandwich with bread you made.

This cycle of goal -> completion -> next goal is the opposite of depression. Do what you need to lift yourself out. You can do it.

Over the past several months, we have converged on a set of slides that we fill out at the start of a week.

Slide 1: To do list.

Slide 2: <Fill items from the todo list into this 2x2 matrix>

    |                | Not important | Important now |
    |                | now           |               |
    |----------------|---------------|---------------|                 
    | Not actionable |               |               |
    | now            |               |               |
    |----------------|---------------|---------------|
    | Actionable now |               |               |
    |----------------|---------------|---------------|

Slide 3: We pick the most important of the important now/actionable now quadrant and break that down into action items.

Over time, this has proven to be incredibly powerful at focusing us on the things that matter while not losing track of how everything else are evolving.

This is very similar to the Eisenhower Matrix except you swapped "urgent" for "actionable". Not to discredit, I just think it’s an interesting difference. Seems like a startup mentality to me. I think declaring something as unactionable can do oneself a disservice, but it’s also a totally reasonable call to make.

Urgent + Important = Do now

Urgent + Not Important = Delegate

Not Urgent + Important = Schedule for later

Not Urgent + Not Important = Drop

> Seems like a startup mentality to me.

Good insight :) I'll leave it at that.

Indeed, it started with the Eisenhower Matrix, but the problem for us was that everything is Urgent in some sense. Things that aren't urgent don't usually make it to the top of our list.

On the other hand, we needed a mechanism to track things that we couldn't actually make forward progress on, despite it being urgent. These are the "Not actionable" items - usually because they're blocked on something else.

The final point I'll make is that the most valuable part in this exercise is actually reaching consensus on what quadrant to put an item in. It's superb at getting alignment.

Do anything ... except surf the web or social media! Those activities give the feeling of being productive but it's an illusion.

Related: Fire And Motion, Joel Spolsky, 2002 <https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/>

This is so seemingly trivial that one might think it’s not worth saying out loud — let alone writing down and publishing.

…and yet it is so true (and so hard to actually put into regular practice) that I’m happy to hear it a thousand times.

Momentum can be a gift or a curse. Keeping average speed above 0 is often a more important metric than top speed when you are trying to go far

I also find this approach helpful. Except when the thing I do is "start a new project", in which case it is extremely unhelpful.

Yes, this is very important. Starting a new project is just another form of procrastination where you’re avoiding the already large pile of things that actually need to be done.

The caveat here is that either you have really good self-control and prevent yourself from sinking into time wormholes like social media (is Hacker News one?) and video platforms, or you artificially create barriers that prevent you from falling into these digital distractions.

I happen to use the latter method to get things done. I don't know what the real solution to this is, because since I'm the one who creates firewalls on all my devices, I also happen to know how to work around them and turn them off. With enough time spent with firewalls on, I have slowly started to forget that I can turn the firewall off. But the internal urge sometimes breaks this discipline and the end result is often hours spent on YouTube or Hacker News (like right now, typing this comment).

started reading Atomic Habits this weekend, and this is very similar to the "2 minute rule" - https://jamesclear.com/how-to-stop-procrastinating (relevant excerpt from the book)

Another thing I do that works well, is to decide to do something slowly rather than nothing. I'm always surprised how much gets done when intentionally moving slowly as I seem to spend less time changing my mind as that already happened before I got to it.

Thanks this was a great article. It really resonated with me when I have lots to do I often get overwhelmed and end up doing nothing. Instead of something.

My life changed tremendously for the better when I started telling myself to "take the just-do-stuff pill"

Doesn't matter what $stuff is, just do it.

(Please don't sue me, Nike.)

> I'm just gonna sit here and worry about everything that needs to be done!

Do literally anything besides that.

This reminds me of the "power of two choices" in load balancing [1] and is summed up by this quote:

> The solution lies in the “power of two choices” load‑balancing algorithm. Instead of making the absolute best choice using incomplete data, with “power of two choices” you pick two queues at random and chose the better option of the two, avoiding the worse choice.

> “Power of two choices” is efficient to implement. You don’t have to compare all queues to choose the best option each time; instead, you only need to compare two. And, perhaps unintuitively, it works better at scale than the best‑choice algorithms. It avoids the undesired herd behavior by the simple approach of avoiding the worst queue and distributing traffic with a degree of randomness.

I suffer from this decision fatigue, burnout, or anxiety all too often. I'm also especially vulnerable as someone with ADHD, since I don't get that dopamine hit when I successfully accomplish a task.

What I've found really useful is a combination of medication and accepting that I should continue to do things my not making the worst decision. For example, if I need to do a DIY task, I'll read a blog, watch a YouTube, and maybe ask two contractors and make the best decision out of whatever I find out. Alternatively, if I need to accomplish a bunch of chores, I'll look at the list and roughly sort them by urgency and importance. I don't need to pick the most urgent-important task, just one that falls into that category.

I think of it as time-boxing for your bookkeeping. I find the meta-work that helps you decide what work you need to do can be endless so if I just set a 5 minute or 25 minute alarm, it helps me get out of that bottomless time sink. I also time-box how much productivity time I want to spend on something. Often, I'll think that a task should be easy and I should be able to do it in 30 minutes. But after 30 minutes pass, I'll have a lot more experience to say this if a task is actually worth whatever new estimate I can provide.

You can spend an endless amount of time researching and making decisions on how you should behave, but the returns diminish as you do more research and soon you should just do things. Doing things will teach you, sometimes much more than just researching and planning.

I'd recommend reading about time-boxing, pomodoro, Eisenhower matrix, deep work, power of two choices, explore vs exploit, and 37% rule if you're interested in "getting things done" and personal performance optimization.

[1]: https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-power-of-two-choices-load-b...

The answer I come up with when I say do literally anything is woodworking or browsing YouTube. Not really solving my problems.

What are your problems? One of those things is much more creative thus fulfilling than the other.

My issue is that I have a million creative things to do, so I become so overwhelmed I can only muster the energy for YouTube.

Oh I just mean it doesn’t contribute to furthering my career. I love spending many hours in my shop making things out of wood that doesn’t bring in any money.

That sounds perfectly healthy

That's better than browsing youtube for videos about woodworking. Something so satisfying about watching people cut trees, use sawmills to create lumber and make a table out of it.

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