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Comment by tejohnso | Hacker News Reader

> Your brain is telling you that it is not interested in the current task. The question is: Why?

I think for a lot of us it's something like: Because it's nonsense busywork that I don't care about. Procrastinating isn't going to help, and it is absolutely bad because it leads to uncompleted tasks and that leads to financial distress. I need to get it done regardless of whether it's going to provide a dopamine hit or not. Best thing to do is to stop thinking about it and get it out of the way so that I can focus on the things I want to do. I'm not overworked, I just don't want to do this task. I am interested in exploring something else but that's not a choice that I have right now. I don't have the privilege of doing whatever I feel like doing. Pain of failure? No, it's not at all something that I'll fail at. It's drudgery avoidance. Unfortunately there's plenty of drudgery that has to be completed.

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I find that shutting off one's brain and just slogging through a task leads to work quality on a par with AI slop.

So if one really is as uninterested in the quality of the output as you suggest, perhaps it might actually be better to dump the problem into Claude/Gemini/Cleverbot and just copy/paste/act upon the results verbatim and then mark the checkbox as "done" and move on.

For me personally, the pain of such efforts is ordinarily from making sure that the output is correct when the input is largely guesswork or speculation that always leads to hunting through a morass of poor documentation of some library or seeking a workaround to some irritating problem or rolling the dice on what the risk to various decisions might prove to be over the future: "eh, duct tape this and it ought to hold".

And most notably that doing more of this work correlates to an exponential rise in the volume of similar work that will be required down the road to maintain the same results.

Those are often exactly the time one would be best served by taking a step back and questioning the entire framework that supports the busywork in question. Perhaps starting from scratch or making some huge change would reduce the garbage portions of the effort and keep them from further proliferating?

While I don't disagree with this approach, it only works for some digital tasks. AI won't clean my house or exercise my body or engage in obligatory social interactions. In these cases, just getting it done by shutting off your brain is often the best way to get it going.

Also, it's not all or nothing. You can decide to engage more in the task as it's ongoing, which could contribute to higher quality output. The hard part is usually starting.

Yeah.. for awhile I tried exercising by walking/jogging on a treadmill with headphones watching youtube to keep my brain entertained through the drudgery.. but yeah, one constantly drowns in the noise of being jostled.

For me completely shutting down the brain (when/if I'm even capable of doing so) is just a function that activates sleep. While I haven't tried this while exercising in particular, I have more than learned my lesson from trying it merely standing up and the result is very much falling down.

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