Things that aren't doing the thing

In the Viable System Model[0], "doing the thing" is System 1. Yes of course you need System 1 or the thing won't get done.

But in any viable system, you also have the "meta-systems", Systems 2-5:

- System 2: coordination between multiple Systems 1 (which includes prioritization, communication, and exceptional conditions)

- System 3: resource allocation and process development

- System 4: strategy and risk management

- System 5: values and holistic organizational design

As a human, you are also striving to be a viable system. You can't only just "do the thing", you have to:

- prioritize which thing to do

- take notes and keep records to communicate between past and future versions of yourself

- make sure you have the requisite resources for doing the thing

- construct your environment and processes for long-term success (habits not motivation)

- consider what happens when the thing is done and how it fits into your larger strategy

- keep your head and heart connected to make sure you're doing the right thing

None of these things are doing the thing! But they're also rather essential for getting the right things done well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model

> Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.

For some types of work, the work we call prep work is 90% of the work and most of what determines how well the finished product turns out.

Painting is a good example. You can grab a bucket of paint and paint brush and start “doing the thing” by slapping paint on the surface. Your paint job is going to be very poor and fail early relative to a professional who properly sands, cleans the surface, preps the work area, and does it right. You might save some time now by skipping straight to doing the thing, but you might also lose more time later when you have to repeat the job because the paint is peeling or you’re cleaning up a paint mess that spilled on to another surface because you didn’t prepare.

Right but I see this taken too far. Getting side eyed for creating a Jira ticket not doing it now. Dude, I am creating a Jira ticket because I have 100 things to do and need to actual priorise this! If I do stuff in the order of serendipity I will definitely be inefficient.

I see this as a kind of inspiration / perspiration thing, and I’m on Tesla’s side that you perspire less if you think more. I like to not do the thing for a really long time, and then do it quickly, having thought it through. I see some people that jump into things without thinking, and take what is imo the more difficult route, with worse results.

I know there are some things you need to start to really understand what’s going on, but as much as possible I’d rather mull over things a lot and gather information and clarify my thinking before doing the thing.

Wow this article is an amazing rorschach test! Each defensive comment here is a person defending what he thinks this article is personally attacking him on!

I'm inspired by this and want to extend it, perhaps telescopically, by discussing what the thing is.

Sometimes we see our task as being, "do C," and we forget the "B" and "A" that come before.

Maybe you can't do "C" without discussing it ("B") or researching how others did it ("A"). In these cases, we shouldn't simply think the thing is "C"—the thing must first be "A," then "B," and then, "C."

If we forget this, we're bound to think "C" is the only thing of value, that it should take an hour and not a week, or that people doing the "A's" or "B's" to enable the "Cs" must be doing nothing at all!

Meaningless platitude. All the things mentioned (visualisation, scheduling, breaking into smaller tasks, etc.) are proven to work. If you cannot do a task but you do the above things, you will eventually be able to do the task. You know what isn't proven to work? Willing your brain to "just do it" like this article implies.

I wonder what thing the author was avoiding when they published this thing ;)

Marketing is absolutely doing the thing; ignore this to your peril. I don't think reality is quite as binary as this post suggests.

I have a print out of this on my wall. I also have pretty bad ADHD. It's been on my wall a year and I still haven't done the thing (really a series of small aversive, timeliness and administration heavy things). I oscillate between trying to do the thing, and trying to treat ADHD or at least not regress (sleep (difficult), exercise, nutrition, intoxicants socially only, stay away from digital dopamine sinks (really hard)). Then I have a burst of panic that trying to improve executive function is itself not doing the thing.

I think the transition between things being done is maybe a bit more interesting.

"Build a house," is a thing, but at which point of the dreaming, designing, planning, permitting, architecting, financing, contracting, acquiring, installing, verifying, reworking, coordinating, inspecting, styling, unpacking, cleaning, landscaping, repairing, upgrading, and waiting, are you doing it?

Perhaps each discrete thing is itself a thing, and when you do a thing, or transition between things, is the matter needing clarifying.

If you are coordinating on how to do a thing, you are doing the thing, as long as the thing is coordinating on how to do the next thing. This "coordinating a thing" is a discrete thing we should not confuse for any other thing.

TFA's examples are unforgiving in that they suppose there is only ever one thing and all else should be nothing.

Related: "Do the Real Thing" by Scott Young (2020): https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/05/04/do-the-real-thin...

LinkedIn is over there.

If you have no idea how to do the thing, isn't reading about how others did the thing doing the thing?

At the core, doing is paramount.

But doing the wrong thing, poorly, is also not doing the thing. To avoid that, you need to do some of the things that the post mentions.

That concludes my morning dose of Zen.

Sometimes not doing the ‘thing’ (in the sense of not jumping into a goal or project) is actually a deliberate, healthy choice — resting, recharging, being in a better mental/physical state. That’s not laziness or procrastination; it’s recovery or self-care.

That text is describing my life since 10 years or so. I am in my 30s and lost the capability to do the thing, _any_ thing, with the exception of going out with friends/family/my partner to do social activities. Everything else is literally impossible for me to do.

I’m currently kicking off my second attempt to fix this by talking to a psychologist about it. But I am not very hopeful. Still searching for the root cause. I have all the ground works set to having a good life, except that I am incapable of moving to start that damn thing.

Where is my interest in stuff gone? Why do I prefer my couch over just typing "git clone" and play with some new tech? Why is my 3D printer sitting dusty in the corner even though I was one of the first adopters? Why is the act of hand-craft wood working, that I am dreaming of since forever and would now be able to do, impossible for me to start?

My motivation is high. My brain thinks whole projects through. I start fixing things in my head. But I am not even capable of dumping all that planning into an speech-to-text-LLM to build an actual design document out of it.

It feels like I played everything through already, so no point in starting that thing.

What the fuck is my problem?

It's amazing how many people utterly missed the point. I think the first 6 or so top comments just totally wiffed it.

There is nothing wrong with planning/scheduling/marketing/whatever. But a LOT of people use all that as excuses and never actually do the thing.

If you are the kind of person for whom which those are useful, great. Or if you have the self-displine/self awareness to do all that stuff and still follow through, great. But some people just need to do the fucking thing or they never will.

Source: I'm one of those people.

It doesn't matter how fast you are moving if you are going in the wrong direction.

Nonetheless, these are good points.

Granted the humorous intent, it's a reductionist outlook. If we were to embrace the premise, then life would be about spawning replacements, or, as is sometimes said, "A chicken is an egg's way to make another egg."

When expressed that way, I must differ. Reproduction per se is the least interesting part of human life. Talking about reproduction is much more interesting ... wait, I think that's called "literature."

Having a meeting about doing the thing isn’t doing the thing

For me, sometimes encouragement that what I'm doing is in support of Doing the Thing has helped me not feel so discouraged that I actually just give up on Doing the Thing altogether. Other times it has felt like a cheap excuse that allows me to delay. I'm not sure the function of all the ancillary activities, relative to Doing the Thing, is actually fixed.

This gives very strong War of Art (Pressfield) vibes.

As simple as it is, just remembering this is enough to make me go do the thing.

And on that note, back to the thing.

It is certainly a truth that many people have a fear to cross the threshold of doing something for real. That fear is usually a fear of committing to a potentially substandard result or a fear of getting started on the meat of what feels like a herculean problem. In short it is the fear of failing.

As an university level educator that helps students with mostly technical projects (so stuff neither I nor them have ever done): This fear is very common. But what I dislike about this advice is that preparing the thing is often in fact a necessary step of (A) deciding whether the thing is feasible and worth doing and (B) a part of what is needed to do the thing. Drafting the general layout and data flow and UI for your software can save you hours later. Having a good and fleshed out concept for a game may tell you if it is even worth putting years of your own time into it, what resources you will need, a research essay on different ways to detect motion may e what makes or breaks the result of your interactive art installation etc.

So preparation is necessary, but true experience only comes from going beyond the preparation phase. Feel it is impossible to start? Usually that means there is something that you feel insecure with. E.g. your game might need an inventory system and while you have a great idea how it should look and work, you have no idea how to actually program it. And if that small part of your task looks impossible, it makes the whole task appear extra-impossible.

The best way to deal with this is usually tackling the problem head on and make it a proof of concept. The problem is you can't program that inventory, and there are many ways to go at that particular problem, but if you can get a draft inventory going that means your biggest worry is taken care of. That means dealing with the hard part first, even if you tell yourself it is just a proof of concept that won't land in the final thing is a good approach. Divide and conquer. The whole thing seems impossible? Break it down into smaller steps thst seem more managable.

I was just reading about Ron Jeffries' disastrous attempts to write a Sudoku program because he dogmatically refused to do any preparatory work--including spending any time at all thinking about the nature of the problem and what sorts of data structures would be suitable for solving it.

I had this Ah-Ha moment a while back when I was presenting on how to shorten cloud outage times, by aggregating impact into a list of details, and hustling around to make connections to support engineers and their customers and the poor backend engineers running around trying to make sense of it all. Putting a little bit of structure to it, so other people can realize they can make a difference in a large organization.

I had a colleague make a passive aggressive comment about it being really cool how I put together "obvious" stuff. Well, it is obvious. At the same time, I have never seen him do this "obvious thing".

Doing the thing is being a performer. Making the thing happen somehow is called leadership. It's all about doing the thing, and not just seeing and understanding the thing - that's the easy part.

I’m missing one: Scheduling a weekly status meeting about the thing is not doing the thing.

You know what? There is actually nothing to be called as "doing the thing". It is all layers all the way down. You keep peeling the layers, and there is nothing left.

When you do coding, you are only writing instructions for a computer about how to do something. So it is not actually doing something. When a computer runs your code, it is only telling some hardware to pass current through some circuits. Again it is not doing something. Current passing through circuits is not physically moving anything through the wires or metal. So again it is doing nothing.

> Reading this essay isn't doing the thing.

Writing “$thing isn't doing the thing” 13 times isn’t writing an essay.

That aside, I thought this was going to be about products that fail to fulfill their advertised purpose.

To be fair though, for any cool thing I've done, before actually doing the thing, I've also spent time doing the things that TFA says aren't doing the thing.

Helps me get pumped up or whatever

This hits hard, not in my programming work which it also hits but there at least I am sharpening my toolset by reading books, and learning things. This hits the hardest for me training Jiu Jitsu, where I do love the sport but I feel it's so hard to come back to training when I am in such a bad shape. So I say to people that I do Jiu Jitsu, I watch videos, I follow some competitions. Heck I even go with my kids to THEIR training but I only train myself once a month maybe at this rate.

I find this applies pretty well to creative work, at least from a general mindset perspective and helps those of us who are prone to procrastinating.

It also goes hand in hand with the Cult Of Done Manifesto really well: https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2f...

All true, but worth noting that sometimes making that to-do list is the first step to doing the thing because picking the first item off the list and taking 10 minutes to do it is doing the thing. If you aren't doing the thing because it's a monolith in your brain that is going to consume the next 6 months of your life and you're paralyzed by its enormity, salami slicing 10 minute chunks off the front of it can be a good way to get started.

I must add: discussing (or showing HN) To-Do apps or systems on how best organize yourself to do the thing isn't doing the thing.

> Reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing. Reading about how other people did the thing isn't doing the thing."

> Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.

Clearly defining and understanding the thing or, as they say, understanding the problem is half the solution. Real life experiences totally crash the OP statements.

I get the thrust of this; it's to help Virgos[0] stop procrastinating by over-preparing. But you do need some minimal level of preparation. So declaring that preparing to do a thing isn't doing the thing becomes almost a tautology, or a meaningless question of what the words mean in the dictionary.

[0] Please just let this slide.

Sometimes doing the thing is just doing a thing and then you get done with some milestone on the thing, you're like "why am I doing this thing. am I crazy for undertaking this thing?"

And yeah you probably are. Only in retrospect will it be knowable if it was worth it or not. Perseverance is necessary but rarely sufficient.

There is an extreme where you procrastinate on the real work, yes. But half the things on the list are not procrastination, but preparation. If you skip those you hit the other extreme where you are so focused on doing the thing, you waste your time because you don't know the background or context.

I agree with most of this but not the todo list part. I think more successful projects tend to have upfront planning and consider it a real part of the work. Even more successful projects will continue to revisit and update their plan as the project is ongoing.

As I like to put it: not having a plan is not a plan.

Problem with this approach is someone who follows it will find themselves doing something totally useless almost all of the time. "Just doing the thing" means that usually you are merely doing a hobby - most of the time, being unaware of that, believing you were building a business.

I am sitting on the toilet right now, and while reading this article, I am really actually doing the thing.

One day, when I get enough spare time, I will make the thing. I even have some components ready.

Until then I daydream of how I will make it and how it will fit together.

If I never get round to it then that time will have been wasted. But if I do, all that daydreaming will have been useful mental prototyping.

But was it «doing the thing»?

If you work with a bunch of people who “just do things” you very well may wish to spend a lot more time “thinking about things” before you do them. If those things are more complicated and nuanced than “doing the dishes” or “putting away the laundry”. Sure, in those cases, just do it.

For skilled, innovative, and complex work, all the things he says is not doing the thing: are part of doing the thing.

This post is foolish and self-destructive.

If I trace backward from the ideas that earn me money and prestige today, every one of them is rooted in playful or apparently unproductive behavior.

> Reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing

In my book, doing research/understanding the domain is a crucial part of "doing the thing". Often reading about how to do the thing makes you reconsider doing it at all.

There's a Romanian proverb: Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

Corollary: Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today, put off until the day after tomorrow, maybe by then it won't be necessary.

i'm pretty sure there is a "oh no!" comics (https://webcomicname.com/) saying the same but i couldn't find it

Oversimplifying doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.

Sometimes it’s even harmful to doing the thing.

But sometimes it’s exactly the right thing to do.

Know when you need to oversimplify and when not and you’ll know Zen.

And when you know Zen you’ll do exactly the thing.

Writing about what things aren't doing the thing is not doing the thing.

Ironically, sometimes the only thing that will get you doing the thing is explicitly not doing the thing (but also no other thing either), until there's nothing to do but the thing.

I'm trying to do the thing, but the thing is horribly documented and doesn't work. And nobody seems to know why. So am I still doing the thing if the thing isn't doing its thing?

>Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.

To be fair, for me, not making the list is even less like doing the thing, in terms of how frequently it leads to the thing being done!

Writing a thing about things that aren't doing the thing isn't doing the thing unless the thing happens to be writing a thing about things that aren't doing the thing

In other words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXsQAXx_ao0

Not doing the thing is a habit that's hard to break. Doing the thing is a powerful habit. Especially when you stop thinking about it.

Is asking an AI to do the think doing the thing ?

Doing the thing without preparing to do the thing is, depending on your exact definitions, either unwise or impossible.

Corollary: Doing the thing and not talking about it in a hammer tweet is also 'not doing the thing'.

> Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.

Don’t agree. Planning steps is part of doing the thing.

What about reading about the thing which is about reading a thing is then the thing of doing the thing.

It's wild how easy it is to get trapped in the performance of productivity

Did I just get trolled on HN? Reading the thing wasn't doing anything.

I am replying to this post without planning whst to actually say

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Doing the thing that nobody wants is doing the thing.

damn i was really excited to read about how my toaster wasnt actually intended for toasting bread or something like that

For someone without ADHD's `executive disfunction`, one of the code ADHD struggles, this post reads as nonsense. Thus only minority could relate to the post: the ones who have ADHD ones who think they understand ADHD.

Yes, holy shit yes.... This has been my sentiment for a while now. I see lots of people everywhere especially on social media talking about the thing and no one actually did the thing or is even attempting to do the thing. Honestly thats why i dont have youtube channels or write blogs or anything past casual posts here or reddit... i always think to myself why waste time talking about the thing when i could be doing it now... anyways ima go back to doing the thing. cheers. !

Obligatory https://youtu.be/mofRHlO1E_A?si=aEimHOsDYa3FkGYv

-Nike

What's the thing? If we're being shitty about systems neurodivergent people use to get their laundry done, stop. If you're complaining about the overhead it takes to manage a project with 10,000+ people, yeah no. If there are 2 ICs, 4 managers, a TPM, a PM, a other "P" PM, a UX person, an HR person and a lawyer, yeah you might have a point.

See also: "brain crack" (2006) https://archive.org/details/zefrank-theshow-080

I see lots of comments focusing on cases where there is necessary research still to do.

Which I think misses the point - which is there are times when you’ve already done enough research, but you’re afraid to act so you procrastinate. i.e. not doing the thing.

Here's my take, in no particular order:

- Ignoring that all people are different does not make you an expert in human psychology

- Discovering what procrastination is (and still failing to name it or provide actual coping mechanisms) does not make you an expert in human psychology

- Failing to recognize elementary human behavior does not make you an expert in human psychology

- Utterly neglecting the act of double creation (first imagine, then create) does not make you an expert in human psychology

- Being energetic and with only a few tasks at hand and writing off everyone else as lazy does not make you an expert in human psychology

- Writing a post about human psychology does not make you an expert in human psychology

I would continue my list, but gotta go. To do... , you know.

Y'all saying things like "but you still need prioritization and tracking, bro!" are not the target audience of this post.

And now we have a whole post about not doing the thing, which is also not doing the thing.

ok

Amen.

Now, let’s dream of doing some things!