How to motivate yourself to do a thing you don't want to do
ashleyjanssen.com
ashleyjanssen.com
> Combine the task with something you enjoy. You know what makes cleaning out the garage a lot better? Some good tunes.
This motivational advice is deeply misguided. These are very clear examples of "dopamine stacking". The idea is that by combining a stimulating activity (eg watching show/music) with a motivation-requiring activity (eg working out/cleaning) you can get an initial boost in motivation to accomplish the hard task. It works (initially) because the stimulating task (show/music) is giving you a dopamine increase which feels like motivation to complete the hard task. The problem is that if you repeat this behavior with any consistency, your dopamine system quickly adjusts the high activity-combo level of dopamine as a new baseline. Soon not even the dopamine you get from the combination is sufficient to motivate you to accomplish the task. At this point people often seek another short lived dopamine-increasing stimulus to combine into the mix.
You can see this pattern in people who exercise only with some combination of pre-workout, caffeine, music, phone scrolling.
The off-ramp is learning how to derive dopamine (aka "motivation") from the actual activity itself.
further reading: 1. https://youtu.be/PhBQ4riwDj4?si=n-afP-Rj_k7qfATz
Any ways, a lot of studies have shown your body has a variety of methods that attempt to counteract excess calories burned, like reduction in non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
My disagreement is that I think exercise should not primarily be about calories - it should be about fitness. And almost all of the fitness gains from exercise persist even if you replace the calories with a donut.
Exercising for 30min and then relacing those spent calories with donuts is FAR better than not exercising and forgoing those extra calories.
Of course this assumes that in addition to the single donut the rest of your diet is decent - if you're eating shit all day then you are asking for an injury
the aerobics build up muscle that will always be burning calories by merely existing. a donut here and there won't make a negligible difference, as long as the weekly aerobic activity level is maintained.
Tell that to all the lean 150 pound / 68kg runners stuffing their faces with high calorie foods all the time.
Do you think they want to lose weight?
You can't outrun a bad diet is a common saying around my parts.
As for muscle, a pound only burns 11 calories/day. You'd have to gain 20 lbs of muscle, basically become a bodybuilder, just to offset a KitKat. The math is pretty depressing.
Gaining 20lbs of muscle, which would be quite a visual change, would only burn about an extra candy bar.
That extra food in fact does include cakes and treats.
So, just start liking the things you don't like? Sure, ideally that's the solution you want, but it's not exactly actionable advice.
As a more concrete example, as soon as you learn to enjoy learning as an activity, it becomes fun, whatever you are studying. So you only need to learn to have fun while learning. Start with simple things, make it a game, find beauty in what you are learning.
When my friend randomly suggested that we try a very ambitious hiking route, I knew it would absolutely suck if I didn't train for it. I got a gym membership and told myself I'd at the very least set foot in the gym 7 days a week for the first few weeks, just to build the habit of going. I was motivated to make sure I didn't slack off and ruin the hike for the group by being undertrained. A few months of that and the hike went great.
When we got back, though, I found it felt weird to not go to the gym in the mornings before work (as a decidedly NON-morning person my friends and family looked at me like I'd grown a second head when they heard me say I was working out before work). I started running outside on days the gym was crowded, and it felt good! In the nearly eight years since then, there have been only a handful of weeks where I didn't go for a run—I genuinely really enjoy it, no motivational tricks required.
Another thing is that we must distinguish between listening to music and eating a donut as reward. One helps people foucus while the other makes you gain weight..
But sometimes the problem isn't motivation. Sometimes it's energy. Sometimes you really do want to do it, to the core of your being, but you're just too fucking tired. That's a very different problem.
Listening to music or a podcast while you work or exercise is a completely normal, non-dopamine stacking, thing to do. In the past, before radio and recorded music, people daydreamed or sang to accomplish the same goal.
I remember before I learned the basics of cooking how hard everything was, and how much I had to concentrate. These days I'll spend 20 minutes cooking something, plate it and go to the bathroom, and have forgotten what I cooked before seeing it again. I remember when I was learning Spanish, and every successful paragraph I read merited a celebration, and now I sometimes can't remember whether something I read was in Spanish or English an hour after I've read it.
My biggest improvement in writing came after I stopped listening to music while doing it. Get it over with, then listen to music. Once you get into the habit, it's like taking a nap not having a party. I remember a factory I worked at in my 20s where I got up to doing 76 hour weeks with no days off because I was so good at what I was doing, I entered a timeless place. There was no time to get bored in. I'm sure I might have hummed, but I wouldn't remember. I certainly wasn't thinking about anything important; those machines could have ripped my hands off.
This is such a case study of a HN comment.
And other times for really menial tasks like cleaning I'll zone out cause my mind can truly wander during those moments (cause putting the dishes away is full autopilot, where things like... writing some tests might be a bit more... autopilot, a bit of thought, autopilot, etc). There is an absolute ton of value in letting your brain wander.
And finally, for certain tasks, it's either very quiet classical or none at all cause it's just fully focused thought about larger problem spaces that need to be fleshed out.
And I think, if you listen to the same library or playlists a lot, your brain may start to associate it with working. But I really have no idea what I'm talking about, so who knows!
Had a eclectic playlist where I would start with some quite chill Mozart because I would always start too fast and needed to pace myself for example then after the 2/2.5 hr mark is when I'd usually start to fade and some prog rock would come on to boost my spirits.
Funnily I have banned listening to classical for most coding but that's a me problem because I end up listening too closely and analysing the music and performance too much. But that's just because I'm a classical nerd
New startup idea!
I've never worked 76 hour weeks though.
OTOH, watching a TV show (or listening to music) really helps with exercising (both starting, and pushing myself).
YMM (and probably does) V.
Wow. I couldn’t disagree more daydreaming for me is very powerful and actually too entertaining.
I can space out on a ten hour flight literally only daydreaming, no media needed.
(Although now I at least hold an iPad as a few people have remarked upon how creepy it is me starting into space hahaha.)
It’s my favorite activity and actually a bit maladaptive.
That's not even remotely true. People also do it for entertainment and are entertained when they do it, like all the time.
Call it pain avoidance or dopamine stacking, they're probably both apt, but there's a difference in degree between the level of control and personalization and dependence between humming a tune or listening to a stationary giant radio and the current state of not being able to do anything remotely unstimulating or arduous like standing on a train or going to sleep without a distraction; how normal it is seems like logical fallacy, It's also pretty normal for people to spend 5 hours a day looking at their phones, not have made any friends in adulthood outside school, or have any romantic prospects.
I find it funny/depressing that I've been asked at least 3 times why I don't wear headphones at the gym. If you can pull a lever or click a button and take your mind of something you've never let become less painful, how important is the distinction?
> You can see this pattern in people who exercise only with some combination of pre-workout, caffeine, music, phone scrolling
Where do you see this pattern? I would wager nowhere, even if it sounds like it "could" happen. I've worked out with a lot of people. I listen to music while working out, as do many people. I would enjoy working out less without it. But I'm not in some Dopamine spiral where I need to stack more stuff on top just to keep working out. I've been doing it for years.
I've noticed a lot of health influencers like Huberman, who need to make content frequently, have been honing in on gut-feeling conclusions derived from novice science facts you can expect anyone to know about. He casts a wide net with a Psychology Today level concept, and he builds an audience of people that can't separate the lazy conclusions he makes from the objectively true but elementary facts he bases them on.
Look at the comments, where people are accusing each other of being dopamine hijacked because they eat and read at the same time. Give me a break. Your reward system is not a fragile thing that is easily broken. The actual causes of dopamine hijacking are things like spending all day playing video games, not having a coffee before working out.
I think this is a major issue with so much of the "creator community". When you make this thing your job, you can't just not show up to work for a few months at a time. But, if your content is "information regurgitation", like reading health studies and reporting them to your audience, is there really enough out there to make it a full time job? Doubtful. So, you'll end up either rehashing yourself over and over (your viewers will get bored and leave), or start going to the fringes of your field where there is far less basis for your statements than what originally brought your audience in.
On the other hand, while I didn't follow Tom Scott particularly closely, I always enjoyed his stuff, and when I learned that he called it quits, I was legitimately happy for him AND his followers -- better to quit while you're ahead than to wear out your welcome.
tldw You're basically forced to structure your thumbnails and titles that way if you want your videos to actually be seen. Blame YouTube's recommendation algorithm, not the creators.
This can take literally days and the first thing they are told is don’t listen to music they enjoy while doing it, because they will never again be able to listen to that music.
If I don’t want to do the task, that’s fine. I’m allowed to sit at my desk and do exactly nothing for as long as I want. No hackernews, no snack breaks, no bill paying, no online shopping, etc. I just sit there and do nothing.
Eventually the thing I need to do becomes the most interesting thing in my orbit and I do it. Sometimes I sit there for 15 minutes doing nothing before the task I don’t want to do becomes interesting enough.
It can be a single word or a instruction that crashes your program at the location that needs to be worked on.
Leave a syntax error for getting started quick tomorrow.
Write down what needs to be done before it leaves your head (but don't make it perfectly structured and clean, a few words on a paper on your desk will do).
edit: For instance, you'd possibly want to fix the missing "n" in this comment. Make this feeling a tool against your procrastination.
edit2: ah, and get the hell out of HN, too.
1) reward/incentive/expected good feelings
2) effort/displeasure of doing the thing and the result
One way to increase #1 is to make it more socially involved. If you're working on a project solitarily, start going to events and talking about it with people, or write about it online. Humans are massively socially motivated.
For #2, one way to address this is with emotional processing. Often something is unpleasant because it reminds of something we didn't like from the past. So really digesting those emotions can allow the expected displeasure to fade because we kind of integrate it into our brains/bodies. But the key for this is that it has to be emotional processing, not intellectual processing.
Probably not a healthy outlook!
Perhaps you don't have compelling enough reasons to do things.
For $100 million I would probably just learn to put on the scuba gear but for instance my mind would go to "I should make my own scuba gear". So for a personal project I start on something and decide I need something else, so then I want to make a tool to help me make that thing and so on. I think it's probably related to a shorter attention span so I'm working on that.
Actually do it? That's a lot less certain than you would expect.
I would probably start. Since this hypothetical is a pretty simple one-off, I might even manage to generate enough executive functioning to follow through.
What I can tell you for certain is that I am still very excited to work on a custom keyboard project that I started 4 years ago. I have all the parts and equipment readily available at home, and plenty of free time. I have not worked on it at all over the past 4 years.
Is it fun/interesting? Can I make it fun/interesting? Does it make me or save me money so I can do something fun/interesting?
If the answer is no to all of these questions, I'm going to have a bad time. Unfortunately, I'm that simple. I've gotten better at number two over the years, though.
Scuba diving sounds fun. I'd probably do it for less.
1) you're talking about ADHD which is a disability. It's like asking someone with no legs if they could sprout legs if the reason was compelling enough. The answer is still no.
2) If you were to counter the above by saying that, if you were compelled enough you might devote a small fortune and a few years training yourself and researching how to develop and use bionic legs, we then run into problem no 2: exceptional incentives / circumstances are not scalable, and the logic cannot be applied to problems of daily routine.
Back when I was a med student, I was expected to attend a clinic which started at 9. Unfortunately the local bus always arrived at that stop at 9:05, and the line was known for its flakiness. The route was 1h and 5min long, and I was about an hour's walk away from the stop myself. So in order to be at the hospital at 8:05 instead of 9:05, I aimed for the 7am bus, meaning I woke up at 5:30 to get to it. Except the 7am bus never showed up. So I waited another hour and got the 8am one, which inevitably arrived at 9:05.
When I got to the clinic 5 minutes late and got told off, I explained what happened, and the consultant said exactly the same thing you said: if there was a pot of money waiting you'd have been on time.
Yes except there wasn't, and I have to be at clinic every day, there was no way of knowing the first bus would not show up, and I can't afford to wake up at 4:30 everyday to get two buses ahead of the 8am one, just because some idiot thinks an imaginary pot of guilt-trip money would have instantly solved the problem.
This confused conviction is the real problem. There is no other you to convince. The same you that you are bargaining with to do the thing is the same you that's doing the bargaining. You can at any moment just do it.
Write down the problem. Think really hard. Write down the solution.
Afterwards he had money to work on other stuff he was passionate about (rockets, VR, etc.) in his own terms.
It's much harder to draw motivation to meaningless work.
If you do that, you will become a different person.
Do you have anything that's not tautological?
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Sleep, diet, and stress are like "system dependencies".
Also the role of dopamine cycles has a big effect on proactiveness.
A self-help guide about language wholly distinct from thought.
My initial pet theory was that is going to be more uniform as a result, but now... I am not so certain.
So a small team of us stuck together since and we've been unraveling, decrypting how that initial audience craving might work out as a next language.
In retrospect it now seems obvious, how the path led here, but then in 2001, it was a complete mystery.
As a person with ADHD, this struck me. I have an easy time continuing something. But an impossible time starting and finishing something. Obviously I am not mentally healthy. But who is this person who is mentally healthy? And what am I missing to being the same way?
I think it boils down to being yelled at and penalized and being unable to handle this feedback well enough. I don’t know exactly what I am fearing here. It will be an exploration.
> you are both pleased with yourself and a little annoyed that it took you so long to deal with.
I am never pleased at the end of a project. I am blame full why I could not do it before.
There's a lots of one can do to overcome and accommodate it, but one of the first steps is to approach neurotypical productivity advice with substantial skepticism: they aren't fighting the fight we are; don't even know that our fight exists.
The only thing that works for many people is to skip the motivation part and embrace the rather uncomfortable principle of "action before motivation."
The flow state will come. I believe it arises independently of motivation. Motivation just tricks us into believing that everything we do should bring joy.
It will — but not right now; we need to dive in first.
Before you start, it feels daunting, and the prospect lingers in the back of your mind. You know it needs to be done, but you really, really don’t feel like it. You leave it until it starts to loom larger and larger.
When you finally convince yourself to start, it’s not what you want to be doing, but it’s generally fine. It’s often not even as bad as you thought it would be, and it feels good to make progress.
As you near the end, you can even push yourself a little to wrap it up and get it off your plate.
When it’s over, you feel relieved, like a weight has been taken off your shoulders, and you are both pleased with yourself and a little annoyed that it took you so long to deal with."
If it's something I really don't like doing, even when I'm doing it I hate it every step of the way and it just gets worse and worse overtime.
Otherwise I would want to do it to at least some extent. In which case, yeah I would eventually be able to muster motivation and push through.
The 2 I listen to are: HOR Berlin and secret rave on YT
Lifting weights... imagine the stronger person you will become. Studying for that exam.. picture the career you aspire to. Avoiding that donut... imagine the healthier you.
Habit stacking helps to remind one of the task to do. To avoid the struggle of doing them, picture the desired outcome.
>Imagine and focus on the reward of these tasks.
IME if you have ADHD those two things are basically the same. Sure, don't think of the pain, but you could ended up stuck in daydreaming about the perfect future where you're healthier, stronger, happier, etc. You can trigger executive dysfunction (mental freeze) either way.
This seems extremely relatable.
Except instead of "I'm healthier, stronger, happier etc." it's more like "I've accomplished all the things I've thought of accomplishing" (each of which seems well within my grasp, if I could choose).
When I read 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' well into my adulthood, I cried.
If you focus on the end-goal you can easily get frustrated once you don't see any results, specially on such long-term goals such as graduating, improving your career or becoming buff by doing exercise.
Supposedly it's actually better to just try and find meaning and joy in the process itself, enjoy lifting/studying regardless of the end results.
Obviously none of this is an exact science so each person might think different.
And you know, doing something hard when you know you’re going to get the high isn’t so terrible. But at some point it went away and since then I could not ever reach that.
I thought it was endorphine or dopamine kicking in, but why it would suddenly stop is weird.
That was years ago, still doing lot of sports and tried a few other since then, some I liked more, some I liked less, no difference whatsoever.
I’m thinking maybe I’m not pushing myself hard anymore but last summer I climbed Mont ventoux on bicycle 3 times during the same day. As a year old cyclist it was absolutely exhausting yet nothing at all. Just glad the suffering ended.
Also checked my hormones, everything fine.
That’s weird but I’m just wondering if that happened to someone else.
One thing that certainly helped is that after a couple of months, I really started to feel the impact. My back muscles in particular felt like steel cables at some point, and my posture significantly improved.
Then Covid hit and now I'm a weakling again. I'm trying to get some regularity in going to the gym at least twice a week. Monday was my first time in months. But the biggest step is making it part of your routine. Make it something you do without even having to think about it. Once you allow yourself to question it, the discipline breaks.
1. Think about the ultimate goal and why you want to do it. If there isn't a compelling reason, there is no reason to do it, especially if there is short-term pain or annoyance.
2. Take at least one small action towards it per day. This often puts you in the mindset to do more things.
It's a bit counter intuitive, and while your environment needs to be conducive to work. Among the other factors, you dont just gain motivation by having a clean desk.
I use Vyvanse.
1) Remove friction. I am also an enthusiast cyclist, but gearing up and getting my bike ready takes time which gives me plenty of opportunities to reconsider that 50 mile ride in 90F heat. In contrast, getting ready for a run takes me 5 minutes so there’s no much time to find excuses.
2) Get it out of the way first time in the morning before breakfast. There’s this extremely positive feeling when you achieve a goal early. I think it makes the rest of your day feel much easier particularly at work.
3) The Pareto principle. 80% easy effort and 20% intense/hard. I am not completely sold on the science but definitely works for me. I don’t get injured often and I recover faster, which allows me to exercise more often. I guess 70-30 would also work but the idea is the same, just go easy most of the time, you’ll get the same benefits without being sore or in pain.
4) Once in a while (twice a year for me) sign up for an event, a 10K, a half iron man, a bike ride, whatever, and tell everyone about it. Some relatives and friends will held you accountable for it.
5) Find a fitness buddy. Ideally it would be someone you spend lots of time with, your spouse, sister or roommate. In my case is my fiance. This also allows for accountability and moral support because you drag each other on those days you are not feeling like exercising.
6) Track your metrics besides weight. Weight is not the best feedback for motivation. There better feedback metrics like Vo2max and HRV. Get a good tracking device that’s reasonably accurate and easy to use and provides you good history. I use Apple Watch but other ones like Coros are good too.
7) Go to bed early. This is the most difficult one for me. I’m trying to put away my phone by 9 pm and switch to reading in Kindle, but man it is hard!
8) Gear. Don’t buy shitty gear to try out an activity and see if you like it. You won’t like it because you are using shitty gear. Invest in gear that is safe, comfortable and of decent quality. It will make the experience much better and you’ll have more chances of sticking with it.
It is a lot easier to control when you wake up over when you go to sleep. Set an alarm, always get up when the alarm goes off and eventually you will be tired earlier at night and fall asleep.
If only life were so simple.
Equivalents for sleeping are things like head trauma and drugs.
Is the argument the alarm can just be ignored? But even in that case up your alarm game. Lol I must be missing something super obvious
I'm someone who rarely ever wakes up with an alarm (usually I wake up before it and turn it off). I never snooze an alarm either. Alarm goes off, I get up, even if it's hours earlier than usual.
Clearly there are people who simply can't actually do this, for whatever reason.
For me, the "opposite" holds. The only times I've ever gotten up past 7am regularly are when I had jobs that had shifts that ended past midnight.
Otherwise I absolutely cannot stay awake past 10pm consistently.
As habits, staying up late for me appears as impossible as getting up early is for my wife.
I made the mistake of assuming it's not willpower or whatever you want to call it.
Basically I know there are lots of things I should be doing for my health but don't for whatever reason and this one is no different for some folks so it would be hypocritical not to recognize that.
Thanks!
But more importantly, if your sleep schedule is shifted you might not actually be able to fall asleep when you need to, even if you haven't had enough sleep. After a few days you will be exhausted, fall asleep in the afternoon and take a nice 4 hour nap, leaving you unable to fall asleep until very late, after which the cycle continues.
Exercise helps you be more tired, setting an alarm for the same time every day helps you stay more consistent, having a pre bed time routine that doesn’t involve screens helps your brain slow down. There are discrete actionable things which are proven to help with sleep.
My natural tendency is to stay up to 2AM and sleep to 10AM, but with conscious effort — and an internally driven motivation to change — I now get up at 6AM every day.
It was hard and I didn’t get there right away, but lots of worthwhile things in this life are hard.
Honestly I think there is something wrong with either our environment or how we raise our kids, because I see so often that people lack executive function and any ability to manifest change for the better in their life. I don’t blame people for having issues as they stem from their parents, I have lots of personality issues that stemmed from how my parents raised me (the business end of a belt) but I would like if society could take a step back and figure out how we can raise humans who are better in control of their own destiny.
Why? You have 24 hours in a day no matter when you sleep. How did it help?
For me it still feels terrible long after I start. It takes much longer than few minutes before I stop feeling like somebody was tearing away my skin.
“This morning I made an omelette, but I forgot eggs so I had to go to the grocery store. On my way to the store my mom called and reminded me of my cousins birthday coming up…”
“Now that you’ve read all this, you should be able to sum up the importance of planning ahead!”
And, yes, the extent that tasks start from intrinsic motivation, you're ahead of the game. For me, this is making habits (personal example: eating less). Habit frees you (mostly) of the need for any sort of 'motivation' - it's just Habit.
I totally get things like I have a job and there's a task that needs to get done. But what about outside the job life?
The only thing that matters for me nowadays is this: before I start the task, I admit to myself that it is going to be hard, but I am doing it anyways, so why do it like its a drag? It's pointless and it's a waste of energy.
There is a myriad of things that can be invented to avoid or cope with the pain, but if I am going through this anyway, there is no reason whatsoever to make it more painful that it will already be.
Doing hard things is hard, and that means I won't be thinking about the other stuff I have to do. I'm more apt to miss a text from my family when I'm running or writing a document than when I'm vibe coding, because the effort is all-encompassing. Subconsciously, that's stressful, so I steer away from it.
Habits help here, because with enough repetition, I learn that it's OK to disappear for an hour to do the thing. But the real issue is getting the meta-organization of my life right enough that I'm not scared to shut down my ambient executive function for that hour. This shows up as both "I'm too busy to do the hard thing" and "I'm too tired to do the hard thing."
Slowing down isn't the answer, but it's been pretty transformative to notice that that's what I'm worried about.
Last summer I went to a festival, and for a week I was unreachable, had no working phone, and had no chores. I could eat by showing my bracelet. I didn't even have the time. It was blissful.
By knowing if I don’t get this thing done, it doesn’t get done.
That for some tasks “want” doesn’t matter.
"3. Break it into smaller chunks"
Most of the rest seem like tricks to con myself, and I am really bad at that!
More often than not, the primary task I am not doing becomes a 'keylog' issue, I can't do anything else either.
Its just a death spiral.
It can make the actual work even more painful, because your mind is too focused on the reward, instead of trying to enjoy the hard work itself.
-Shia LaBeouf
But it feeling 10 feet tall is enough to make you avoid it entirely for a long time.
There are a lot of positive implications that become obvious when you say you want to be strong and lightweight. While "not weak" is a passive character judgement, "strong" is a constantly available opportunity.
A popular example would be sports if you're not very fit. You would obviously have tangible health benefits if you did it, you may look more attractive, you may have more energy both physically and mentally. But since you're a couch potatoe sports is demanding, exhausting and sucks. Would you do more sports it would suck less or you might even find it enjoyable, but you don't and that's where you are.
This puts you in the weird spot of wanting a thing but not wanting to do what would get you there, even if the reasons you don't want to do it would vanish if you did it.
You can only really overcome this mentally, e.g. by priming yourself in certain ways, or by creating situations where you don't have a choice, because others rely on you, etc.
I wrote about this (as a tangent, but anyway) recently. https://asemic-horizon.com/2025/07/28/julian/
TL;DR "akrasia", procrastination etc. are all forms of ambivalence that are not nearly as "psychological" and individual as usually presented. The nausea is in the world itself.
What I do is three things from the OP, and one extra thing:
- break down things into chunks (divide and conquer is what computer scientists are trained to apply)
- reward yourself (after each mini-step, I grab some chocolate, after certain time units, I will make a short break, and after the complete session if I'm satisfied with what I have achieved, I might order myself a book from my online wish list ;-).
- The third and most important part is start by picking a small and easy task. In many cases, the problem is easier to solve and less painful to complete than it appeared before starting to tackle it; once you're on it, things get easier and you may soon enter the flow and then things start to fly & rapid progress may ensue. I circle around the hard parts fixing a bunch of easy things that I know are easily and immediately solvable. Going around Mount Everest and depleting bits from all sides, suddenly it's not that big and scary anymore, and I have already understand bits from different parts, so my mental model of the problem as a whole approaches what's left of the real Mount Everest, not a huge mountain behind a wall of fog.
Curiously, I'm successful with that technique, and I have a friend whom I also consider successful who does it the other way round: he starts with the carved-out core problem, and once he knows how to solve that, the rest is just code writing approaching boilerplate-level. And before that, he does not bother with addressing all the other stuff, the "mere periphery".
I call my method outside-in and his method inside-out. In theory, I appreciate his method, but in practice, my method makes me more productive, because even on a very bad day (say, a zero flow, mega-unproductive day, which happens, but thankfully not that often), I can write a logger or a test harness, and once I've done any of these easy bits, the dopapine reward will motivate me to solve harder parts & because I've started to write code or whatever it is I need to do that I was postponing/dragging out, I'll be more likely in the zone and will be able to do the harder bits of it.
BTW, don't confuse the *order* of doing things with the kind of *abstraction* in software architecture (where I would consider myself a top-down thinking person that consciously combines top-down and bottum up approaches to ensure the pieces fits together and each piece can be build). The two are related, but not the same thing.
Don't do what u don't wanna do.
..
Or at least try, doing otherwise is crazy right?
Now, those who go out of obligation and have negative experiences may agree with you, but church services are some of what I miss most from leaving the religion.
I have many complaints specific to my experience of dragging myself to church, but the experience itself was incredibly neutral.