Ask HN: I've done absolutely no work since December 15th | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I've done absolutely no work since December 15th

27 pointssubmarine34 comments

The last day I wrote any code for my app was December 15th. I fell into one of my usual anxious and depressed modes , and I was surprised to not resurface after a couple of weeks.

It's now been 4 weeks and 1 day that I have done absolutely no work on my app. I graduated from school in May, and since the 15th of last month, I've spent almost every day in my office rental doing nothing but walking around, eating, going to work out, surfing the web, and going back home. I've tried working from home, but no luck. The distractions kill me, and it's lose-lose either way.

I never wanted to succeed so hard, but I can't get myself back up. This has never happened to me before and it's really bad.

Everyone is asking me how I'm doing, and I've been lying through my teeth. There are a few clients waiting on me to finish up, and apparently that's not enough for me to get cracking.

Is something wrong with me?

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This is going to sound a little crazy, but you need to take a break. Give yourself a one week vacation, and go do something fulfilling that doesn't involve working on this app.

What do you like to do? It doesn't have to cost money, per se. Go visit some friends for a week, or go on a hike, or just go do something around town you've been wanting to do but haven't. However, try to have it involve other people, and not just be by yourself.

Right now, you're working" every day, but getting nothing done. There is probably a lot of fear that your app won't work, that no one will use it, that you are wasting your time and will have nothing to show for it at the end. Of course, there is the possibility that I am just projecting on you, as I have had all of these feelings and displayed some of the same behaviors, but I guess that is for you to decide.

The purpose of the break is to get some perspective. Life is not all about this app. Even if it goes down in flames, it's really not a big deal. You're smart and you'll find something else you want to do and do that. The self doubt and fear of failure is what keeps you going to the office every day, but getting nothing done.

By taking a break and clearing your mind, you can reassess where you're at with fresh eyes, tackle the big problems keeping you from moving forward, and create a solid plan of action to move forward.

That's just my two cents, having had similar issues...

I have a pretty sure fire way to solve this problem.

Step 1. Call your local Manpower or Kelly temp work office.

Step 2. Ask to do the most unskilled rote industrial labor intensive job they have.

Step 3.

Do this for a full 40 hour week.

If after the entire ordeal you're not inspired to quit the temp agency and go work on your project you should probably quit both.

Problem solved.

Postscript: All the people telling you to go on "vacation" after you just said you haven't done anything for the last month are in a haze imho.

I agree with this. If you haven't been doing anything in past few weeks, go do something, anything. More mundane the better but it would help you a great deal if you do someone a favor. When I'm burn out I just do the chores around house. I will deep clean my house, my car or just organize my stuff. Send letters, photos to my family. May be not the most productive tasks but it tells my subconscious mind that I'm doing things and this just carries over into the real work. Suddenly I'm back in swing of doing the things that matter.

Well, maybe not a vacation, but stepping out of the office for a few days might be a good idea. I know once in a while I'll get overwhelmed on my project, and I'll start spending days thinking about it day and night, while staring at the mountain of work that needs to be finished. After a few days, I've accomplished absolutely nothing, but I feel burnt out, and mentally exhausted. Going into the office every day and trying to focus on your project isn't a vacation. Take a couple of days off. Don't go into the office, and don't think about work. Go focus on one of your hobbies, go bike riding, take a short road trip, do some work on your house and paint a room, etc.

When I find myself escaping to HN/Reddit and trying to pass the time, I know I need to go offline, and clear my mind.

How is that going to solve the problem? The procrastination comes from a fear of failure. Your suggestion is to go take a mindless, shitty job, thereby suggesting this is what's going to happen to him if he fails? First, that's probably not the likely outcome of failure, and second, it's not going to help the fear of failure.

Call it a "vacation", or a "break", or whatever you want. But you have to step away sometimes in order to clarify your thinking. Startups are a marathon, not a sprint. Despite all the lean startup craziness, nothing truly gets built in a day, a week or a month. If he has literally made no progress in a month, then something needs to change. Personally, I think the most effective thing is a change of environment. His office has become a toxic place to go during the day and procrastinate. He needs to get away from it and do something else for a bit, and then come back to it with fresh eyes.

Here are some further suggestions for what he can do to regain some balance. http://zenhabits.net/the-10-essential-rules-for-slowing-down...

The point was that it lends contrast. If you are forced to live without a hot shower for awhile it makes you appreciate it when you have one.

Don't feel bad for not coding. The truth is, this industry can make people feel really bad for not coding constantly. The mantras of "Get Sh*t Done", "Great Artists Ship", "Always Be Coding", "Hack your life", "If you're not coding your competition is" and many other lousy, empty and ultimately meaningless statements just serve to make anyone who's not constantly coding feel like something is wrong with them.

Chances are you're like most people and have a wide variety of interests and hobbies, and so trying to keep up the pretense that you just care about your startup or current project can be emotionally exhausting. It's basically lying to yourself.

I don't really have a concrete answer for you in how to break this funk. Funks can happen. The advice all people here have given you is spot on, I will just add that all that advice should be tried and discarded if not useful, it's what worked for them, might not work for you. I personally also suggest include avoiding online content and getting outside. I also suggest you figure out some way to learn to make peace with tedious work, it happens in almost all client work.

Good luck friend!

:) I think I understand your position, because I'm living it right now. I've found that at times like this, what helps is:

* Actually take a day off, don't pretend to be productive, actually walk away and don't feel guilty about it. Everyone needs a break.

* Get some perspective. Take two steps back, and remind yourself why you're doing what you're doing. Screw, 'becoming a success,' there's a bigger reason that you're making something. Tumblr has fan mail posted all over their fridge [http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4f0e2ff7ecad04b0640... ] and, I've printed out and stuck up some positive facebook comments and emails from our users. It's a lot harder to procrastinate when you know that you have an audience.

* Start over something. There's mixed opinions on this, obviously you should try to get it mostly right the first time, and iterate rather than scrapping and restarting at a whim, but sometimes the invitation of a blank canvas can get you over the wall.

* Embrace your ritual. There could be something, some process that you use when you need to get started on something... As counter-productive as it seems, whenever I'm about to start a big project, I sit down for a night and clear my harddrive, and set up a fresh installation of my Linux distro... the act of 'cleaning out my workbench,' frees me up to start working again..

And finally, I'd point you at [ http://hellenroxx.com/fighting-cam-burnout/ ] which I found yesterday... it's slightly NSFW, but surprisingly relevant to our problem.

Good Luck,

Jean-Le

I'm an app developer, I've felt the same for the past few months. I noticed a few things directly affect my productivity and interest in my work:

1) Exercise: I need intense, mentally engaging exercise to feel fufilled. I get this through my martial arts training (muay thai / jiu jitsu). I had to take a few months off after moving to the city, and I felt pent up and frustrated without a physical outlet.

2) Music: A short term mood improver is to put on some high energy music, preferably stuff you can dance and move to. Music gets the brain juices flowing.

3) Sunshine/vitamin D: Being a night owl, it goods to resync to a daytime schedule every quarter. Getting to walk in the sun for a few minutes and observe daily bustle is refreshing.

4) Most importantly, working on challenging and interesting projects: My last few apps were largely clones of previous successes. This means I didn't have to think up anything new, or creative. I was unmotivated to work on it because it was mostly "manual labor", with no new programming riddles to solve. So obviously, when it was time to get shit done, I just didn't care, I already knew the answers. I suspect your freelance work is uninteresting to you.

Over the past couple years, I learned that my mood and productivity pretty much looks like a sine wave. High intensity creativity and motivation, followed by weeks of leveling out. Perhaps this is the nature of self employment.

I can relate a bit too much.

You probably won't meet anyone more ambitious than me. Yet, I'm paralyzed. I can't do anything. I have the skills, I have the passion, but I just can't do anything. I'm not sure why.

I've been at it for 1.5 year. I overcomed all my excuses (you need a new computer, you need a better chair, you need a better framework, you need a cofounder), and yet, nothing worked out.

I finally decided to get a job, which I hope will help me gain good working habits and hopefully give me back some of the confidence I lost in that 1.5 year of being useless.

I'm not sure how I can help you (maybe we share the same "niche"/interest, I too can't find many people excited by it), but I wish you luck.

Hey, I am too quite depressed over my zero output since 3 months. Almost all my day is wasted over reddit, and hacker news. I despise over how even with my skills I am able to achieve nothing at all.

Drop me a mail, if you would like, hoping there could be a possible solution for our sheer waste of time.

Take a look at your task list and find the smallest possible thing you can do. Something that you can do in under a minute, doesn't matter. Make that first on your list.

Do that thing.

After that on your list, put the next smallest thing.

Do that thing.

Then just snowball from there. It's all about momentum. Showing up is most of the battle.

I get caught in ruts like that all the time. The thing that helps me the most is timeboxing, so mapping out my day in 30 minute chunks. I'm actually designing a web app for exactly that process because I'm not satisfied with existing solutions.

Give it a shot, it might work.

Also, don't be hard on yourself. Take REAL days off, where you don't feel guilty about not working. It helps a ton.

I've been in that place. It's really tough, I know your pain.

My tips:

- Don't make it bigger than it is. Your only job is to write the code. Whether it's great or awesome or shit is not your problem, other people will decide that when you ship it (and you can change it later if you agree with them then). For now, you just have to get it done as best you can.

- Your inner critic will be running rampant, telling you that it's never going to be successful, that you're crap at coding, that you should just go and get a job. You can't shut it up, but you don't have to listen to it. It might be right, in that what is says may be true, but it's not helpful right now. Try to disregard anything that isn't helpful, even (especially!) if it's true.

- Creating new things is really tough. Go gentle with yourself. Don't beat yourself up for not getting stuff done, but give yourself some credit for creating something new. Each day you manage to create something is a day well-spent, so try and clap yourself on the back for that instead of beating yourself up about how much more you've got to do.

- As the others have said; give yourself some time off. You know the point each day where you start having to push yourself to keep going. Don't. Stop there, and do something else (I do odd bits of leatherwork, woodwork or bonecarving, or play video games if I don't feel creative). Gradually, I've found that the amount I can do each day is naturally extending without me having to push it.

- Socialise. Friends' encouragement is good motivation :) Be honest about what you're facing and how hard it is (and don't be tempted to bullshit). You'll get a positive response and the support you need.

Good luck, it's a nasty hole to dig yourself out of, but you can do it.

Assuming you're in the northern hemisphere, this is a horrible time of year for depression. Short days, cold weather, etc. You can fight this with exercise, diet, getting outside, getting as much sunlight as you can (or using those full-spectrum lights), etc. So that's one cause.

Then there's the general case of getting stuff done. I try different things and a few have worked for me. Go work somewhere else. Like I go sit at a McDonalds or a sports bar and I can focus on just code for an hour or two. That's not enough to get stuff done but it gets me started again. When I'm stuck I like to find small tasks and just start completing them. No matter how small, the act of crossing anything off of my list feels like progress and I can get going. Then I also like to end my day by writing down small discrete steps for me to do first thing in the morning. Not big "build a new version" stories but small stuff like "fix X bug" or "resize icon Y".

I don't know at what point in the lifecycle your app is but I often have these breaks in development when anxiety about what I am building subconsciously creeps in. This often happens over vacation breaks when I've had time to process and suddenly start doubting the idea, the execution, the potential etc. It's as if by not completing it, I won't have to face the failure of it not selling.

As an engineer, I also find myself less interest in a project when its main technical difficulty has been solved. It's as if my brain says: "great, we've built it, it works...was fun...I am bored with it now". Reaping any financial reward from the work doesn't really seem sufficiently motivating to keep my brain interested.

However...both of the above scenarios are often solved by the slightest hint of a challenge. I.e. Could I squeeze 10% more performance out of module X by Y...or...how many signups will I get from a tweet...?

Simply posing myself some challenge to which I truly don't know the outcome often gets me right back in.

You are burnt out. A vacation will do wonders. We all have been there, and its hard to believe if this is your first time, but its true.

Actually, i had this some times. I always got far into creating an application and then i just stopped. It didn't interest me no more.. Nadda..

Now, some guy of a sport club wanted a member application and i created one (it's still in beta though and in dutch (membershipmanagement.azurewebsites.net Demo:12345678). I have never gotten this far in 2 month (added payments, user management, rough frontend and positive feedback (= it's finished for him))...

The advice is simple, take a vacation for 3-4 days. And as suggested in other comments, just do your tasks. It's really that simple. According to what you've said, you're only going to get more in trouble if you put everything on halt.. You could find a fellow dev for some clients if you have a writers block and don't add more tasks at the moment. You're going to get some anxiety for not being able to finish...

PS. I have a full time job, so i'm not rushing stuff.

I feel like I'm in a rut, a bad rut at the moment I had ~2-3 week "Christmas holiday", but I spent most of that time moving my mother to a new house and setting up tech for her and while it was nice change from coding it was maybe even more stressful than the work I do and now deadline is approaching fast and I'm stuck on delivery. I'm not far away from delivering, but I have no idea how to even start to solve my problem.

Basically it's just trial and error at this point, I should just step up and start playing with the code, but it just feels too hard and frustrating at the moment.

I know this is pretty much off-topic, but I just have to 'vent' a little.

Opposite than other comments, I won't come up with a plan to get things done.

Take a break. Exercise. Are you on the northern hemisphere? Try getting more sun. When we don't have willpower/concentration to work, it's our body saying our battery is depleted.

Do you have a close friend you can talk to during the day or maybe just sit next to while you try to work? Does not have to be technical at all. That might help.

Are you in the bay area? Feel free to reach out if you have nobody else to turn to.

The secret is to stop thinking of what you have to do as being 'hard' or 'stressful' - and just start doing it. It sounds very simple, because it is.

Nothing wrong with you - you're experiencing a form of writer's block.

As a single contributor how is your project managed? Do you have a to-do list?

Yes I do. I've tried sitting down to work but never get past formatting my code.

My main worry is that nobody else will want my software, and even if they did I wouldn't know how to price it, market it, and sell it. All I really know is to code, even if it just barely passes programming convention and security checks.

I envision so much for what I'm doing, but I have no idea how to get there.

I'd suggest shipping something soon. Give yourself a deadline of a week or so to get something, anything out the door and in someone's hand. Any little feedback you get early on will be invaluable and validate/ realign your mission.

It doesn't even have to be all fancy and coded up. Any little thing would do once it demonstrates your idea.

You could try spending some time filling in your knowledge gaps. If you're not sure how to price, market it and sell it then try stepping away from the code and start watching presentations or reading posts on those topics.

This way you can take a break from your usual routine, learn something new that will probably help you in the long run and then when you have other app ideas you'll have the knowledge to program and market it.

This isn't exactly something you are facing in isolation.

I think a majority of people who write code and want to be tech entrepreneurs face this.

I myself call it: "Build it and they will not come".

I think I will dedicate a blog post to this issue and I will try to use some methods to resolve this issue.

Mainly though, from a philosophy I learnt from a career coder: I'm building it for myself to use or just for the sake of it

The above is a great way to churn out 'dumb' projects purely for the sake of building them out. Carry that momentum to the startup, if it fails, it fails.

This also makes me wonder about the mantra of some people in tech circles urging founders to "fall in love" with their startup.

This is actually a very interesting discussion. Kudos to you for being brave enough to admit that: I like to code but I just don't know what the fuck I am doing anymore.

Find a co-founder, he will encourage you and also help in "marketing, selling etc " which you think you are not good at.

It's a super niche market, nobody I've met is into it. The people that _were_ into it told me to make sales and contact them again.

Take it easy.

Exercise.

Sorry, that sounds like a simplistic, pat answer...but I know when I've felt either out of it, or even sick, just doing something as simple as a 5-7 minute workout can inexplicably shake me up in a positive way.

Of all the things that are within my power to just do (as opposed to wait for), exercising is the easiest. There are also purported health benefits to it, too.

This is great advice. I know it seems weirdly unrelated to your mood but it has helped me from the same sort of mood issues. Let us know if it helps=).

I'll give it a shot.

The really painful part comes from wanting to do so much while being paralyzed. People have told me to get myself checked out, but I was in therapy for a while and it turns out I'm perfectly healthy - just anxious, and mildly neurotic.

Having had those periods, thankfully brief, it's all too easy to fall into the spiral of "Another hour/day/week wasted, why a sorry sack I am", while not yet feeling, "I need an intervention". Maybe you (or I, or anyone in a down mood) really do need outside help. But while you debate that, exercise is, for the most part, something you can control. And if you haven't exercised in awhile (which is for me, basically any given day)...you can also benefit from the phenomenon of "well, something is being done, so things must be changing for the better"* (even though you're the initiator of the change). Really, the most important thing is that it's something within your control.

* there's a name for this...it's related to some study where researchers kept repainting the walls of a factory and observed workers becoming happier, regardless of what the color was...

The name is "Hawthorne effect".

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