Ask HN: Can't concentrate to focus, until it's last minute or later

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivit...

"Why" is difficult to answer. For myself, I guess somehow I can't really recall how bad the previous last-minute rush was, so I can't motivate myself hard enough to avoid it this time around. Or maybe I just enjoy the adrenaline rush, who knows.

1. The work is complex and not actively "doing something" lets it simmer on the back burner of my brain.

2. I'm not overly busy.

3. I'm too busy.

4. The work isn't really interesting at a deep down level.

5. The work is so interesting that it sparks curiosity about related topics that might help me do it better.

6. I'm burned out.

7. I'm not in the habit of working on problems that require that particular way of thinking.

Which is to say that if the work gets done and done well, then it's not really procrastination it's just that the process isn't particularly straight forward. Of course, that's not to say that what I do and how I do it is a particularly great model to follow. It's more about understanding myself in the way Torvalds shows in his recent TED interview...and it's an interview not a talk because Torvalds knows his own personality. And if you watch it, you'll probably understand why Torvalds does what he does and why it's sort of fruitless to compare one's own life with his.

Good luck.

No one will be able to prescribe a single solution for listlessness because it is a symptom of many smaller problems, and it may be some time before you find the right combination of changes that effect a total positive outcome. That said, I'll try to make some suggestions.

Never underestimate the importance of physical health. Our cognitive ability is tied very closely to our breathing and heart rate variability, and our moods are swayed more by diet than we'd like to believe. I've found a combination of ketogenic diet and weight training to work well, but your own mileage may vary.

Consider setting clear boundaries in your day for work and leisure. It becomes easy to confuse these things when we dedicate so much time to code, but requiring a clear delineation of yourself will help you separate your unconscious response, which is a start.

Distance yourself from the keyboard, screens of all kinds, and especially notifications. When was the last time you sat quietly by yourself with only your thoughts to keep you company? How long did you do so? If not long, try it for a couple hours and see how you fare. This can be a nice stand-in for meditation (unless you like the idea of practicing zazen; it isn't for everyone).

Over time, with practice, I've come to enjoy sitting in the open air with just a pen and a notebook, and it helps me to clear my head, organize my thoughts, and return to the keyboard more eager than before.

Failing that, I break my current task into smaller and smaller steps until I can finish the first little step. Then I try to finish the second little step, and the third. Eventually, the restless I feel is supplanted by a desire to organize these small tasks I've made into more efficient task bundles, and I soon go on to make real progress. When my success subsides, I force myself to scrutinize the current obstacle awhile before taking a break and starting all over again.

I hope you find a set of tactics that work well for you. Good luck!

https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_mas...

Maybe that was in high school or college, or during your first few years in your career. Ask yourself: What was different back then? What was your daily routine? What did you eat? Did you play sports or stay active?

A lot of people suffer from low dopamine levels. You've essentially trained your brain to crave short term reward vs long term reward, which affects your attention span and ability to focus on anything that doesn't provide instant gratification.

http://mentalhealthdaily.com/2015/04/02/low-dopamine-levels-...

Get enough sleep, exercise every day, clean up your diet, stop fapping, don't drink for a while, detox from caffeine, try meditation.

You want a radical lifestyle change to rewire your brain and fix any chemical imbalances and/or dietary issues you might have.

Attack from all angles!

Your life will change in a matter of weeks if not days.

1) Figure out your MBTI type, and research it. I found that my own type (INTP) really described my work pattern quite well. I found it a bit liberating, as I can try to plan towards my strengths a bit.

2) Exercise can really help here. If you're procrastinating, you're not doing useful work. So work out instead. The exercise can help your motivation and focus substantially. Much more than coffee or red bull.

One such method I would suggest trying is 'timeboxing': dividing up tasks into smaller pieces and forcing yourself into 25 or so minute windows that are uninterruptible. This forces you to get into a flow state and also feel accomplished by the end, knowing that you've made progress on any given task. Given enough 25 minute periods, you'll have done more work than you may have otherwise.

The biggest pattern amongst productivity methods is to predetermine a calendar or pattern to stick to for when you do work. In general, when it comes time to doing work without a plan, it's quite easy to get distracted by a quick fix activity instead. Extrapolate this over a long enough period of time, and you'll feel like you never get anything done until the last minute.

Reward yourself afterwards with a banana.

As far as I can tell there are two ways to deal with it: The first one is to remove every distraction from your live: Install a browser extension that allows you to block specific websites when you're working, close your Twitter client, check your email only once a days, etc. This doesn't really work though because most of us need all this stuff to do our work.

The second way is to learn to focus your attention. Here[1] is a nice introduction to mindfulness/meditation that Jon Kabat-Zinn gave at Google and here[2] are some guided meditations you can use to practice on your own. It works really well and has other useful consequences as well (e.g., stress reduction).

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nwwKbM_vJc

[2]: http://health.ucsd.edu/specialties/mindfulness/programs/mbsr...

Firstly make a list of all the tasks. Then of the big task you're putting off, split it into loads of small component tasks. Smaller the better - even if it is is 'make a GitHub repo'.

I then find that I do the first small component tasks and after marking them off start ploughing through the rest of the stuff.

That serves two purposes -- you get to futz around with something before doing work, but you can also set deadlines for each task to give yourself some urgency.

http://www.seeker.com/how-electronic-heroin-is-affecting-chi...

Now do the easy things to shrink the list.

Now work.

That said, there are things that I want, and since I want them I take the steps toward achieving those things.

Here is an example:

Goal: I want to eat. Steps: 1. Get money. 2. Get food. 3. Make food. 4. eat it.

However, each step may need to be broken down as it is accomplished. 1. Get money. a. Look in couches; b. Look in floors. c. Try to get gigs on freelancer. d. Apply to McD's. e. Apply to YC. f. Sell WoW gold, items and services with Bitcoin.

Either way, once you know what you're doing and why you're doing it, it makes it a lot easier to do it. If you don't know why you're doing something - or more importantly - can't figure out why you CAN'T do something, it might be pertinent to explore what that something is and if you really want to be doing that something.

Lastly, one word of advice, every day when you wake up and every time you go in the bathroom or are in front of a mirror, look at yourself and say:

I get it in. I get it done. I am a champion. I am a winner. I am beautiful. Everyone loves me. I love everyone. I am a billionaire. I am so smart. I never procrastinate.

If you say that to yourself every single time you're in front of a mirror, you'll slowly never procrastinate. You don't even have to believe the things you're saying either. Just say it to yourself anyway everytime.

Hope someone finds value in this comment. Going back to WoW now.

edit: if interested, im hanging out in goldshire. im horde. ;)

1. Programming is a completely mental/brain activity as you know, requiring no real physical exertion. So it should be easy to work on code problems all day right? Wrong.

2. The body requires physical exercise of some sort, it is literally how we are architectured, and if you don't move about then the immune system can't function properly [1]. This can quickly cause feelings of anxiety, depression and a lack of wanting to do anything. And because our brains are inference machines, you instead associate these bad feelings with your current thoughts ('need to get this coding work done'), leading you to where you are now, unable to face the problem out of fear of the bad feelings.

3. The solution I have found is Yoga! You can buy a mat for something cheap, and can keep it unrolled in the house. Then every time you have feelings of stress, go and do some poses on the mat. Specifically downward dog [1] [2], also Cobra Pose. Ideally watch a yoga video that goes though a set of poses and then pick the ones you feel most comfortable with and do those throughout the day.

4. The productivity increases I have got from this are ridiculous, and this all stems from me feeling relaxed. Programming can be full of frustration, and letting it build up can cause real physical problems. But once you incorporate yoga, and take care of your body, suddenly those challenges will no longer feel insurmountable, and instead of worrying about everything, your brain will work on finding solutions instead.

[1] http://www.livestrong.com/article/422920-how-to-cleanse-lymp...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbJaj0Aqw5k

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFCIT1Y7HmI

One of the unavoidable facts of life is uncertainty. You don't know whether any particular course of action will get you where you want to go. A lot of times, you're not even sure you know where you want to go.

Let's call these two issues "uncertainty of effort" and "uncertainty of goals".

For goals, there are externally-derived goals, and internally-derived ones. You can put this on a spectrum. Your dad tells you you need to get a job, you know you need a job and independence and all that, but the fact that your dad is hounding you places this on the 'externally-derived' part of the spectrum.

Essentially, when you wait until the last minute, the goal is pushed all the way to the external side of the equation. What you want is the capacity to act on internally-derived goals, progress on these feels like you're "going places," and "getting your shit together," and all that.

Pushing goals over in the internal direction is all about finding motivation. The motivation to accomplish external goals is clear, it's outside of yourself, you know exactly what's going to happen if you put it off any longer, you'll lose your job / house whatever. The motivation to accomplish internally-derived goals has to come from within.

This is where I find the thinking behind Maslow's hierarchy of needs useful. Sit and meditate for a bit to locate where on the hierarchy you are right now. Do you need to eat something? Do you need social interaction? Treat this need as a box you have to fill and go fill the box with whatever it is you've just determined you needed. Congratulations, you have just accomplished an internally-derived goal. Finding life satisfaction is really a system of boxes that need to all be filled before you can check this one off.

You can sit and think and come up with various types of needs. You'll have immediate needs and long-term needs. Also needs where the path to getting what you want is clear, and needs where the path isn't so clear. List these all on a sheet of paper along with their classification. Immediate / long-term, clear path / unclear.

Lack of motivation derives from not satisfying immediate needs. Your very subconscious is resisting you, and it's always a bad idea to act against your subconscious. You need to identify what it is your subconscious wants and then you'll be naturally motivated to go get it. Something that nerdier types always neglect is social interaction. Also sunshine and activity. Once you've identified something that sounds nice, take the easiest and most available path to getting it. There's no point in challenging yourself if you have a lack of motivation, unless it's actually a challenge that you need.

Finally, there's effort uncertainty. Once you fix the motivation problem, you'll run into the next issue, that you have no idea what to do to accomplish the goals that you have. You have several tools for tackling this. The first and most useful that I reach for, I call fishing for lessons. You don't know what will work, but you will have a model of how the world works. That model is wrong in some way, keeping you from what you want. You just have to find out how it's wrong.

Root around in your brain until you come up with a statement like, "If I do X, it should get me closer to Y because of Z." Now you have a testable expression. You have 3 relationships there, between X and Y, between X and Z, and between Y and Z. One of two or all three of these relationships that you think are causal are in fact not related at all, and it's your job to find out.

It doesn't even have to relate to your goals. You can also analyze the reasons why you think you can't accomplish your goal. "If I ask Marcy out, she'll turn me down because she only likes jocks." My guess would be that last part of the statement is fal...

There's nothing wrong with you- your subconscious is doing its job. Procrastination is an unpopular but nonetheless effective method of time and task management. In fact, I'd argue it's the most effective.

Take a college class for example. Your instructor gives you a weeklong homework assignment. While a few type-A personalities may dive in right away and have it done by the following day's class, they run into two problems: one, the instructor may revise the assignment (you don't have to do problem 36, it's a typo in the textbook); and two, their subconscious didn't spend a week thinking about the problems.

Compare to doing it the night before it's due. You end up spending no more time doing the homework than is necessary (whereas type-A will have to go back and spend more time at it than you), and you've had the benefit of your massively parallel subconscious cranking through it for a week.

If you find your procrastination actually results in lateness (and actual detriment to your performance), then what you should consider targeting is better deadline management (change how you define "last minute"). I consider deadline management more an art to be practiced rather than a science you can be taught. Still, I find our subconscious gets short shrift when it comes to managing our time.

I may still occasionally instinctively kick myself for waiting to the last minute (anyone else still doing their taxes?) but it's probably healthier to procrastinate with awareness of its benefits than to procrastinate without.