Stop Procrastinating by “Clearing to Neutral” | Hacker News Reader

Stop Procrastinating by “Clearing to Neutral”

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104 pointsmattraibert51 comments

A variant (I think) of this idea that I've been using for years: when I stop coding, I jot down what I was doing, whatever problems I was dealing with, and what I felt my next steps were going to be in a little Emacs buffer.

It would probably be even smarter of me to take 20 seconds to figure out exactly the right set of Emacs tabs/frames to keep open alongside them, so when it was time to start up again, I'd get sucked right in.

Even though I have not used it myself (yet - I should probably try it as well) - shouldn't the Emacs desktop mode just store all open tabs and restore them for you when activated: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Sav...

A related trick I find valuable is to do the exact opposite of what the article suggests. Never finish anything at the end of your workday. Leave yourself a small mess to clean up, or some simple and finite wrapup task that you can afford to postpone. Bonus points if it's going to be fun or interesting to work on.

The idea being, it'll be much easier to get back into the groove the next day if you aren't confronted with the proverbial empty screen or blank sheet of paper the minute you walk in the door.

After you spend 30 minutes wrapping up the work from yesterday, you will already be in the zone, and it'll be easier to move ahead to the next big thing on your list.

I do this, and I find it's invaluable. If it's the end of the day, and I have a writing or coding task to do that is small in scope and I'm looking forward to doing, I put it off to the next day.

I think of it as leaving work "hooks" for myself to pull me into work the next day. Work hooks are small in scope, and satisfying to accomplish. The next day, not only do I know exactly what I'm going to do, I'm looking forward to it.

This is a trick Hemingway used when writing.

"The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start."

I often create fun little mini-projects for myself to do and store them for later. I find that completing a small and fun project motivates me to work on whatever actual task I should be working on.

Yes. My coding trick for this is to clean everything up, except that I write the next test that I want to pass. Then when I come in the next day, everything is shipshape (which, as the article explains, makes it easy to start). Except that one red test, which drags me right into the red-green-refactor loop.

YUCK! ...this is one of those things that works great for a group of people bu completely sucks for another group: for me having "a blank piece of paper" in front of me is the most motivating thing ever (I always have a zillion things in my head or on my lists that I want to work on, so the only problem is ordering them and trying to do as much as I can with my limited time, physical energy and for some tasks money). Sometimes I even literally take a blank piece of paper and stare at it while meditating because it's exactly what puts me in the mood to start working on things. and I literally LOVE an almost empty desk or a completely empty desktop with no programs open.

...but I know there are the opposite kind o people, like fellow programmers that love debugging but are just "stuck" if they have to start from scratch (I'm the opposite, I hate debugging and working on projects started by other people, but I'm incredibly productive at starting from a blank whiteboard or imagining things from nothing)

I use old-fashioned paper and pen. Keep a todo list on a page; each day-end I add/subtract and when it gets full, copy it to a new page. This makes me revisit each item, which may create associations to newer tasks that are related.

When I start from neutral, whether at start-of-day or after finishing a task, I check off what's done, then review the list to find a ripe task to launch into.

This is related to what Kent Beck calls the "Red Test Pattern". When doing Test-Driven Development, don't stop when the last test is green and refactored; commit/push your code, and then write that next test, the one for the next functionality you want to realise. Check that it fails. Then shut down.

Next day, you'll be sucked right back in because of that damn test failing.

For me, it's also a good way to keep habitually doing TDD.

Nice hypothesis, but where's the lab result?

I highly encourage people to think skeptically and scientific as well using the self quantitative approach to self improvement, even when they're certain when their theory is right.

For example, I am measuring blood pressure, steps count, weight, blood sugar level, awake and sleep time everyday. I also just recently concluded that walking 10K steps have almost no effect on my weight or very subtle one.

http://kibabase.com/articles/self-quantification#interventio...

In the future, when I finish my analysis, other people might decide to replicate my experiment or comes up with their own conclusion based on the data I gathered.

Although how one could test the idea proposed in the blog is unclear to me. I like the idea of having a clean desk or clean environment though. The ugly environment in my house doesn't appears to deter me from getting things done, though.

Just counting steps isn't very effective. You need to walk for a good long while at a time to use up your glycogen (stored sugar energy) and make your body dip into fat reserves. So if you spread out getting your steps you are less likely to do that. Similarly, there are heart rate complications. If you don't walk fast enough or throw in some interval work to get your heart rate up, you aren't getting as much exercise...

I don't have the equipment to test your hypothesis, but I think I can test an easier one: running a mile a day in addition to doing 10K steps in a certain period of time around the neighborhood. Crude, but predictable.

Try doing your walking first thing in the morning before breakfast. Lot's of bodybuilders use this technique when they are cutting for a contest. It's also a popular method because unlike cardio, walking has almost no detrimental effect on weight-training later in the day. I'd love to hear your results after keeping track of this.

Buy a heart rate monitor, they are dirt cheap, or just learn to accurately take your pulse. Then ensure you get your heart rate up to a set level for a set period. Walking burns next to nothing, it's good for your body for loads of other reason, and it's great for getting mobile, but will have a nominal affect on your body weight.

You don't mention if you are tracking food, which seems to be a major metric to miss out. I simply track approx carbs, which I find insanely easy.

Lastly other cheap metrics you could track are body fat (callipers cost next to nothing) which is easy to measure ESP with a friend helping, you can also track maximum widths. So what it the biggest part of you arm, leg, stomach, chest, neck, etc. just tracking weight is misleading as you could be dropping fat and gaining small amounts of muscle from your increased mobility.

Personally, I do slowcarbs (like low carbs but with pulses and beans) while weighing myself daily and taking body size and body fat measurements once a week. I've lost 15kg like this and dropped from 19 to 12% bodyfat. To get that drop I did no additional exercise, though now I cycle daily.

> walking 10K steps have almost no effect on my weight

If you're going to change and track something to test its correlation to weight, please consider calorie intake instead.

10k steps is really not going to burn many calories (my marathon running friends use the "1 mile = 100 calories" rule of thumb). Additionally, many people starting cardio see an increase in appetite and if they are not already used to carefully controlling their food intake, end up _gaining_ weight.

Having known many people who have made the 50 lbs. fat loss goal you're looking at (and having cut 25 lbs. myself), a major diet change is likely the only thing that'll get you there. If you continue to take in enough food to sustain yourself at ~200 lbs, nothing short of training like Michael Phelps will get you down to ~150 lbs.

I thought that until someone explained to me that the 100 calorie figure includes ALL the calories burned during the time the run takes. If you run 10 miles in 1 hour that's about 1000 calories. But lying on your back burns up 100 calories per hour. So running only accounts for 900 or 90 per mile. and also the number of cals burned is proportional to your weight to some extent.

EDITED to correct some bad arithmetic :(

On the flipside, exercise increases your metabolism during the rest of the day, typically more than offsetting your math. This effect is well-correlated with exercise intensity. Also, 100 calories/mile at 6 minute/mile pace is quite efficient unless you are very light (e.g., 140 lbs).

>(my marathon running friends use the "1 mile = 100 calories" rule of thumb)

Weight also impacts how many calories are burned. (http://caloriesburnedrunning.org/; not sure how accurate this particular site is, but I've seen similar results from other sites). A 6'6" person with a healthy BMI weight of 215 lbs would burn around 175 calories per mile at an 11.5 minute mile pace.

Despite this, as a tall person who runs a lot, I've found that a diet change is still really important if one wants to lose weight. (But after this is done, it is nice to go for a ten mile run on the weekend to cut a half pound that can be used as weight loss or to allow more eating throughout the rest of the week.)

I did.

I once dropped 50 lbs in about three months solely from returning to my previous running habit. At least according to my calculations, I was burning closer to 1000kcal/hour (more like 100kcal/km). I wasn't doing competitive-style twice a day training, either. Just one run, six days a week, usually for 60-90 mins at a BPM of <150. Once a week I ran 800m sprint repeats all-out, and two or three times a month I did a long run (which was increasing by about 10 minutes each time until I got it up to 4 hours).

All in all it averaged out to just over an hour of exercise per day, and the mental benefits more than made up that time in productivity. I didn't change my diet at all, except to eat a bit more after the long runs and possibly to eat a bit more cereal. And I lost just about every spare bit of fat on my body.

It's not just how far you walk, it's how fast you do it. Perhaps if you walked faster? Or ran?

"Weight loss" is not the same as "fitness improvement."

> The ugly environment in my house doesn't appears to deter me from getting things done, though.

The article is not very good at expressing its own point, unfortunately. This wasn't it.

Take periodic task A, such as making dinner or sitting down to work. You do this task on a mostly regular basis. Doing this task creates waste: a dirty sink, an unclean workspace, and so on. When you complete the task, it often seems like yet another task (B) to accomplish when tired to do the cleaning. Thus your workspace starts to degrade. The next time you need to do task A, you have to do task B first. You're psyched and ready to do task A, but you can't, because task B wasn't done. And task B is not what you're psyched for.

All the article is pointing out is that you need to do task B as soon as you're done with task A. That way, when you come back the next day to go for task A, you don't have a preliminary step to go through before you can really get started.

> Although how one could test the idea proposed in the blog is unclear to me.

Take any such pair of tasks and measure the time it takes to get started on the task pair over the course of a decent period of time, such as a month. Try to have a balance of which task is performed first. By "time it takes to get started", I mean the the delta between the time you say, "I should do task A", and the time you actually start doing either task.

Of course, that's subject to the observer effect: noting down the time at which you say you should do it will probably in itself incentivize you. Thus, it may be helpful to regularly schedule a task pair and note the offset from the scheduled time.

I found your article interesting. A quantitative approach to health worked very well for me. I used loseit.com to track calories, macro-nutrients, and exercise. By sticking to calorie limits, eating less than 20 net grams of carbs a day, and running three times a week with Couch to 5K I have lost 90 pounds over the last 11 months. My BMI went from 38 to 24.8. I have tried to lose weight many times before, but a quantitative approach made everything much easier for me. The real test however is going to be not gaining it back. I have just accepted that counting calories is something I will have to do the rest of my life because I am completely clueless about nutrition without numbers. I think you are on the right track. Health is different for every person, and unless people objectively look at what works and doesn't work for them individually, they will have a very difficult time finding a healthy lifestyle.

Anyway, good luck with your experiment!

Holy shit. That is very impressive. What calorie limits did you pick?

Regarding eternal counting, two things that may help:

Yoga and meditation have both made me much more aware of the experience of my body. Before I would eat long past the level that I now recognize as "full". Often because I just didn't notice. (Reading while eating made that especially easy.) Now I find it much more easy to keep stable.

The other trick is one from Carol Lay's graphic memoir The Big Skinny. She weighs herself every day. If she's within her goal range, she just eats without worrying. If she's above the limit, she goes back to counting. (Her system is simpler; she just tracks raw calorie numbers, not full food lists.)

The website calculated a calorie limit based on my weight. I subtracted 500 calories from what it chose to account for my habit of underestimating the calories in what I eat.

I am planning to try yoga. The trick from Carol Lay sounds like a good one. Thanks for the ideas!

This article got me thinking about places in my life where there's friction. My computer stands out as a huge source of friction. I already try to close unnecessary windows/tabs, but after reading this, I realized that, because I use it for so many different habits, my desktop fails as a friction free starting point for work.

So I've identified a few ways I use my computer and I'm setting up a user account for each one:

  * coding in Ruby
  * coding in Java for work
  * blogs and email (and hacker news)
  * personal and household maintenance

This way I can tune each desktop to the appropriate kind of work. I can eliminate clutter in the dock. I can leave the appropriate windows open without it distracting me when it's time to do something else.

If it goes well, I'll try to write it up in a blog post.

I would so love to see this written up, even if the experiment "fails".

Maybe you don't even need individual user accounts - today I noticed this app to start (and close) different groups of applications. While I don't need it, this may be an alternative to your multiple account approach: http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/foreman/

Thanks for this! It's a little buggy wrt hiding/showing applications from the popup dialog, but overall it's working pretty well and was worth the purchase. Hopefully future updates iron out the minor issues.

There's a free version on their website (scroll down a bit) if you'd like to try it. It lacks the toggle hotkeys, but it'll let you know if it suits you before buying.

This seems a bit overkill, like trying to prevent yourself from wasting time on a site by blocking it in your hosts file. I worry it would make "mental context switches" too expensive, which might help to discourage you from wasting time on HN, but also get in the way of your work. I imagine that if I tried to separate my activities into separate accounts, I would get tired of switching users and end up with a de facto main account very quickly.

Have you looked into a virtual desktop solution yet? I use virtual desktops for very similar reasons (tuck all the real time wasters away in one desktop, put music playing controls and such in another, and use every other one for a different task), and I find it does a very good job of keeping me focused on the task at hand without getting in my way when it's time to do something else. Each one of my desktops is just two keypresses away, but there's no indication that anything is even running in any other desktop but a tiny square in the bottom right corner of my screen.

A less radical approach is to use multiple screens/desktops, but all under one account. Under OSX, they're called "Spaces," and I can't remember what the Linux term is. I'm not sure if Windows has them.

They are called "desktops" on Linux.

I used VirtuaWin for about five years in Windows, it works excellently. Not as perfect as the ones in Linux, but close.

At the office, I do a physical variant of this: when I'm at my desk, I'm in work mode. If I want to spend time doing personal things at the office, I'll go to another area (eg a couch). If nothing else, it's easy for me to notice when I've been there for a while. And it keeps me efficient in either mode.

I recently split to two separate machines. My old laptop is my fun computer (which includes HN.) My new laptop is for being productive.

Physical separation has been great. It makes it much easier for me to remember which context I'm in, and it makes context switches obvious.

I think a lot of this applies to me, I have a bad habit of leaving windows open for things I am not actively working on even though I know this can really bog me down mentally. However, while I think there is a lot of value in clearing your workspace to remove friction, someone also gave me some really good advice to help with getting started in the morning that is a little bit contradictory. The advice is to leave something partially finished that you can easily get right back into it when you get back to work. Sometimes the act of starting something new can be too much to overcome first thing in the morning, and then you get sidetracked. If you leave something ready to go that you can easily do, it can help you get into work mode immediately.

I think leaving breadcrumbs for yourself can be a great way to reduce friction. The challenge for me has been when I wake up and I find that I've left myself a bunch of breadcrumbs for several different tasks.

Deliberately leaving some piece of low-hanging fruit at the end of a session so that it's there to pick up at the beginning of the next session is a really good idea.

Just do a code review in the morning to warm up, instead of hurriedly finishing yesterday's work and then tossing it aside to start something new.

The idea is to leave something fun but approachable ready to go to make it easy to get into work mode. I don't enjoy code review very much, so for me trying to do this first would be a recipe for procrastination.

Any tennis player knows this, always recenter. I think somehow the idea of automated garbage collection got to some of us programmers.

I've found the best way for me to jump into something is to leave vim open to the very project I'm on--even if I'm midtask. I wouldn't want to close all the windows, as that would make it harder to start the next day.

These seem to be all points for the ADHD/OCD set, which does not include everyone. Clutter doesn't bother me, not in my sink, not on my desk, not on my desktop. I can't work, because I have too many things in my home that are more fun than work.

I'm a big fan of Asian Efficiency, I read a similar article years ago (maybe it's the same one?). Clearing to neutral has definitely given me positive results.

Fancy name for the lesson "cleanup after yourself" I'm trying to teach my son. But still a good idea that I will try to make use of in my own life.

If you don't want to ahem procrastinate, then don't put a picture of slave leia up on your wall.

I'll clean to neutral just after I've done something I'd rather do.

It scares me a bit how close these pictures are to reality.

The effectiveness of these mind games tends to be fleeting.

Nike nailed it: Just do it.

This article is completely ignorant of scientific research into how procrastination actually happens.

I'd be interested, could you share some papers/articles?

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