Managing my motivation as a solo dev
mbuffett.com
mbuffett.com
I also do this. I learned that if I leave a failing test for myself in the morning, I'll think about it on and off and jump right in next session without wasting time on HN or YT for an hour or 2 in the mornings. Sometimes this ends up causing me to work a little bit late, trying to make sure I actually have a failing test written for the problem (sometimes I have an issue without an accompanying test yet), but it's worth the extra effort/time. A failing test gives me something 100% actionable to jump into in the morning, as opposed to leaving e.g. a feature half written which can have an ambiguous starting point in terms of jumping back into it. I can't recommend this enough.
I really agree, and I also thinks it can be helpful to do something similar when taking breaks (have lunch/take a walk while leaving a failing test).
"Understand it in my head" is often a good stopping point too. Because if i actually go and fix it, i may find out i was wrong and spend even more time re-analyzing the issue to reach a new understanding.
Not good sleep but I would seem to be more ‘tuned’ in on the subject.
It kind of flows into the author's other point, "if I’ve got it, use it."
Unless someone has experienced both dynamics, it's very hard for each to put themselves in the shoes of the other, because we're talking about brain chemistry.
No one with severe ADHD symptoms really knows what it's like to have a calm mind for an entire day, let alone most days (and what that means for one's career and social life). They can reason that such a thing is possible, but that's different from really grasping the experience.
Same for the other way around - you can reason that ADHD is a real and often debilitating condition because you see its effects, but you still might have trouble believing they're not also just a little lazy.
Scott describes the phenomenon roughly as one’s “motivation” existing and fluctuating on a spectrum, with the absolute minimum being full sedentary psychosis and the maximum basically being mania. Some people spend their whole lives towards the edge of that spectrum and upon medication (normally a type of stimulant) bump themselves along into the “normal” range. I’ve witnessed the change for a handful of people close to me and it really is remarkable.
I feel like your perspective might be different if you experienced stinulants first hand.
If you keep thinking that ADD people are complaining about nothing, it may be a good to get tested. You might just have developed lots of coping strategies!
- I don't agree with the guiltiness on zero days. There is just no way to stay sane if you don't truly enjoy zero days. You will burn your candle.
- I 1000% agree that any form of customer validation makes your day. Could be a Stripe ping, a mention on Twitter or here. Set up services like https://f5bot.com/. Google alerts is useless.
My totally failed / crickets initial launch here on HN is findable via submissions in my bio, anno 2018. Three upvotes.
The easiest way I've found is to include a simple Google Form in the product. It's super rewarding to get feedback from users. Ask simple questions like: "What's your favorite thing about X", "What's your least favorite thing about X", "How did you learn about X" and "Anything else you wanted to let me know?". And make all the questions optional so there's a minimal amount of friction.
Haha I share in your frustration with the crickets launch, anything I post here that I actually care about people seeing, gets shuttled off to the shadow realm, then stuff like this that’s just musing tends to hit the front page.
Heavy weights, high intensity workouts or something that has the mental requirement like climbing.
Then the chemicals give a reset and I’d return to the subject.
I’d think of them as activity naps.
You don't need to be motivated to do things. You can do things even though they suck. There'll be good days when motivation is there to cheer you on, but that fucker is the ultimate fair weather friend, so there will also be days when it's a slog and motivation isn't even picking up your calls.
It's a complete misconception of human psychology that motivation precedes action. It's the other way around. Act first, become motivated later. That day you wake up full of motivation and fly out of bed and there's eye of the tiger and you're running up and down stairs airboxing in sweatpants, that day isn't ever coming.
I think the notion that one needs motivation to do things comes from the educational space, where there's a lot of talk about motivating students to do this or that, and somehow this has been internalized into a notion that this is how we also operate ourselves, that we somehow need to bribe or intice ourselves to do the things we want to be doing, which when you think about it, doesn't really make sense.
It's not a misconception, it's the definition of motivation.
The misconception is using the word "motivation" only for intrinsic motivation. If you have a gun pointed at your head, you'll be quite motivated to do whatever the person holding the gun tells you. External motivation can be extremely powerful, it just doesn't last long.
> Act first, become motivated later.
You're right. You need some external motivation to start "acting first". There are four types of external motivation (from more external to more internal) – fully external, introjected, identified, internal. Rewards and punishments are the first (external), rewards/punishments "in your head" (aka image of your parents telling you to do homework or you don't get TV time) are the second (introjected), part of your identity ("I'm Muslim, thus have to wear hijab") - third (identified), and "I truly believe I have to do something" is fourth (internal). Internal type of external motivation differs from intrinsic motivation (which is defined as "acting because I enjoy the process", and you can truly believe you have to do something but not enjoy it).
Discipline and self-discipline are somewhere between introjected and internal types, but it's essentially a codename for external motivation nevertheless.
In many cases you really want to instill intrinsic motivation in kids/athletes/employees/etc. But you need to "act first" and repetitively link it to the positive emotions – and that's where external motivation (and discipline) can be used strategically to create intrinsic one. Unfortunately a lot of people/fields/disciplines get stuck in the external reward systems and don't use it strategically.
Motivation, in the sense of "I feel a desire to perform an act I deem to align with what I want to do although it will bring me immediate-term discomfort", that type of motivation, whatever you call it, does not precede prior success in that activity; that type of motivation, whatever you call it, will go away in the face of hardships and struggles; that type of motivation, whatever you call it, is not necessary to perform the task at hand.
It's an _internal type_ of "extrinsic motivation", right.
> will go away in the face of hardships and struggles
Yes, and this is true for all types of extrinsic motivation.
> doesn't precede the success
Well, that's where things get interesting. There are three main factors that influence motivation – autonomy, competence and relatedness.
Autonomy - perception of your actions being connected to your own values/beliefs/desires. Competence - perception of your actions being connected to the growth or achievement. Relatedness - perception of your actions bringing closer to the people you care about.
Those 4 types of extrinsic motivation go mostly on the scale of decreasing autonomy. And it's important to say that all types of motivation have slightly different natures and can work simultaneously, just one of those will dominate.
So you are probably right saying that the internal type of extrinsic motivation doesn't require prior success. But, once you start doing it, the perception of success (whatever that means in a given context) will greatly contribute to shifting your dominant motivation either closer to the intrinsic motivation (i.e. you'll start enjoying) or towards amotivation (opposite extreme side).
Perception of success is mostly a "competence" part. That's how the coach might choose the right level of challenge for the athlete, to keep their motivation growing (or at least not falling). And if you really want to build intrinsic motivation, you absolutely need it.
And yes, not every task require intrinsic motivation. But it would be also true to say, that every task will benefit greatly if people performing it are intrinsically motivated. There are two main reasons: efficiency and... people happiness.
An intrinsically motivated person will require less pressure/incentives, will keep doing the task amid hardships. Which directly translates into economic value. It also directly linked to the feeling of wellbeing and vitality (aka happiness). It might not be very important for whoever needs task to be done, but a society where autonomy is inhibited and extrinsic motivation is dominating is very different from society with high level of autonomy. It's like, people are just happier.
The "seminal" books like Self-Determination Theory (Ryan&Deci, 2017) and new The Oxford Handbook of Self-Determination Theory (Ryan, 2023) are really deep, but might be a bit academic and aren't suitable as a good intro into SDT. I usually recommend free course on Coursera by Ryan. But if Deci's book is an approachable intro, that would be nice!
IMO in today's world, Deci's SDT on Intrinsic/Extrinsic Motivations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory) and Gary Klein's NDM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_decision-making) and RPDM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recognition-primed_decision) should be a must study (just understanding the basics/overview is often enough) for everybody in any organization.
I didn't downvote but I wanted to comment that your explanation doesn't work for a lot of "unmotivated" people. It just moves the difficulty/mystery to a different set of words in an attempt to describe it.
E.g. "How do I get that intitial urge?/trigger?/spark?/agitation? ... to start the activity that creates post-activity motivation?"
Which of course, the answer always ultimately ends up with a variation of ... "You Just Need To Start". Ah yes, "just start".
And thus, we circle back to the same Mt Everest of difficulty for a lot of unmotivated people. They're still stuck and can't get started.
I think the issue is that there are well-meaning people who honestly think they're "not motivated" and then "just force themselves to get started on acting anyway". Now, being in the groove of acting can then become the self-reinforcing "motivation". They then think this personal experience of cause-&-effect of acting-precedes-motivation in their mind can be transferred to other people. But it does not work on a lot of unmotivated people. So, those who are still struggling look for any mental hacks that might work better than "just get started instead of waiting for motivation".
and on what basis have you determined that the article is about "that type" of motivation, as opposed to the other type which you acknowledge is necessary to actually do anything?
It's like being tall. You can see if someone else is tall, or short, but you yourself don't experience your own height, you feel the same size as you did when you were a child. You can see it in a photograph or a mirror, of course, but that is seeing yourself as though you were a different person. Your height is not part of your subjective experience.
Likewise, these other forms of motivation do not have a subjective experience associated with them, they are properties observed in others. Feeling encouraged or discouraged to perform an action, however, is a subjective experience. We can experience in ourselves, but not observe it in others.
'Just do it' (tm) does not work in those cases.
After a while i just google 'how to get out of a rut' and that works after some undefined amount of wasted time.
Another trick to fall back onto, is changing jobs.
Not motivated to pay your bills? You do it anyways because not getting services cut off is actually the motivation, or that “I always pay up“ is motivating you
My life started working out okay when I started relying on discipline. Doing things even if I don't want to.
I mean realistically if someone was attempting to get you to confess to something and they were torturing you by having you perform all these things you know you should be doing but don't really feel like doing today, it surely wouldn't come even close to breaking you? You've been made to book a dentist appointment to deal with that aching molar and forced to clean the oven and weren't given a cake for desert and now they want you to wash the car as well; if you're begging for mercy surely it's to escape from rolling at the floor form the laughably ineffectual torments.
To achieve stuff you have to have something that enables you to do it. Call that motivation/discipline or whatever but the ‘ball has to roll’
For me anything I do is because I am motivated to do it.
Close is a complicated person but the quote holds up.
Exactly that. I guess the hardest part is to close the browser tab of YT/HN/...
I also like "addressing the pain" - a bit too much. I seek out pain just to build tools that address it, because that's almost always more fun than the task itself.
If someone paid me just to build things that improve people's personal workflows I'd take the job in a second.
And of course my deep fear is I'd find that perfect job and nothing about my habits would change.
I had this and after many years of treating myself that way, I treat myself kindly. It's a toxic approach and the easiest way to burnout. It's OK not to do anything.
Even though it wasn't a lot of money, it was a very rewarding feeling.
In my case it often backfires in the form of a sudden decision, right or wrong, that yesterday-me made a bunch of bad decisions about something so they all need to be revisited. Before I know it, the thing that was 90% complete is now 60% complete.
Yeah, this one works incredibly well for me as well, and wasn't at all obvious until I saw it for the first time a few years ago.
But then I saw this great JaidenAnimations video about it and figured out how many of the ADD issues I have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0hL4mJInm0
Imagine not getting that message for a long time. Some people might say "that's encouragement to work harder so we get subscribers!", others "no one likes it, I should give up". It feels like this is much more powerful if you're already motivated.
I have tried it before though, it certainly works.
You can go one step further and focus on your breath instead of just sitting idle to calm your mind as well (mini-meditation). I do this instead of doom-scrolling and have experienced positive results.
What I dislike is when I'm stumped, puzzling over a bug or the correct implementation for a complicated feature. It's not always possible to resolve these situations by the end of the work day and they tend to nag at me through the evening. I don't like that and try to avoid it, rather than deliberately create this feeling ("leave things undone") as some sort of trick for motivation.
I learned this about myself a few years ago when I quit my job to build a compact piece of wearable hardware that measures metabolism through breath in real time. Even though I was burning through my savings, I spent close to a year working on this thing day in and day out. I had so many different "responsibilities" on my project and so many things to learn that motivation was never an issue, and I did finish a working device in the end. This is coming from someone who has dealt with motivational issues many times. That also wasn't the first time I quit my job to work on a project, though previous projects often ended early when I lost the motivation. At first, I thought this was a sign of a problem with myself, but in retrospect I think it's good that I lost motivation. Those ideas weren't that great and I wasn't as engaged in them, and it's likely I just would have wasted more time and money on them had I not acknowledged the writing on the wall.
In fairness, this outlook is easy to have when you aren't doing something for income. To some extent, we do have to manage motivation for day jobs. I can't honestly say that I'd be coding enterprise applications if I wasn't getting paid handsomely to do that. Even though I am paid, part of motivation is having a mission that's important to you, and it's easy to lose sight of your mission if you've been paid a regular salary for quite some time.
The author's "leave tasks unfinished" strategy plays into this principle at a very small level, but I think recognizing a greater ambition and keeping it in your consciousness can be important as well. A lot of people find the motivation to work harder and longer when they have kids, for instance. Since I don't have kids, I've found that regularly coming back to investing and retirement planning has been a good motivator for my day job because I get enjoyment out of making my money work for me; I loosely visualize what I want my life to be like in 20 years from now and strategize how to get there based on my current trajectory. I don't think about it most days, but revisiting this every few weeks reminds me why my day job is important. For others, perhaps owning a house and converting the garage to an art studio would be a goal to motivate one through their day job.
In short, I think motivation is more a form of measure than a virtue in and of itself. It can tell you whether you've lost sight of ambition or if what you're doing just isn't that great. "Hacks" will only get you so far.
That said, a "hack" that works for me is to just keep reminding myself to "keep up the pace." Even if I barely accomplish anything in a day, as long as I accomplish a minuscule thing on a daily basis, my frequency of accomplishment stays roughly the same. Going too long not really getting anything done is when motivating yourself to jump back in the game gets very difficult.
You're lucky not to have ADHD like the author then.
People with ADHD absolutely can (and will) procrastinate endlessly if they don't proactively use tricks to manage their motivation, even with interesting and pleasant tasks that they are also fully aware are critical to reaching their most cherished goals.
ADHD feels like a broken transmission gear between the planning/rational part of the brain (prefrontal cortex) that desperately wants the work to happen, and the "pre-actuator" part that actually gets to schedule your actions for the next 3 seconds.
Too often that part decides that, in spite of all the pleas from the rational brain, the best thing to do in this moment is to keep the finger infinitely scrolling down on X or to click on "just one more" HN link. That keeps the dopamine hits coming, which feels good and predictable, whereas stopping brings short-term discomfort and uncertainty.
The rational brain sees the clock showing 3am and the finger that keeps scrolling and scrolling. It screams and shouts in protest and powerlessly laments the self-sabotage and broken promises. But all this negative self-talk is annoying. What better way to silence this party-pooper than a juicy unread X thread or fascinating HN story ? So the pre-actuator votes for that, hits the snooze button on the rational brain one more time, which soon comes back screaming and shouting again, and so on and so on until exhaustion ensues and you finally give in and crash into bed (or start doing whatever you were supposed to work on). ADHD is a real curse.
> I believe that the need to manage motivation is usually a sign that what one is doing is at least somewhat off-course from the ideal of the individual.
was always true.
Even the most ideal tasks have things that are not fun or interesting. It is one of the differences between a job and a hobby, which can be self-directed to ONLY the things that are interesting, fun, and novel.
That said even if you’re working on something you love, there will be weeks where the work just isn’t fun, and that’s where this stuff comes in. I love the project I work on now, a chess improvement site, but sometimes I need to take a week to move cloud providers, or deal with App Store review, or work on marketing. Can’t always be fun even if the overall project is directionally aligned.
Step two; feel sad
Step three; hate your life choices
Step 4 repeat