Ask HN: How Can I Be More Hardworking?
I have a very productive workspace; own room, fast equipment, good workflow. I eat healthy, sleep early, wake early, get enough exercise.
I've tried all the major productivity tips - meditation, Pomodoro, gamification, watching motivational videos, RescueTime, nootropics, plain grit, keto. They help for about a week, but then I build immunity to them.
I can easily cold turkey something like Facebook but this just ends up replaced by something else like breadmaking or reading books.
I tried working full time. I can work 14 hours/day full time just fine. But when I'm done with it, I still go back to working minimum hours.
I like my job and I have above average motivation and discipline. I have no willpower issues otherwise.
What else is a good way to increase my work rate?
52 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 90.1 ms ] threadYou want to maintain progress and improve your output, but not at the cost of compensation or burnout. This is very hard to answer without those contexts.
From your post I think you're going about this the wrong way. External acts like meditating or "optimizing time" are easy ways to burn yourself out doing stupid things and end up flat out not enjoying your life. I tried this during a gap year I took to work at a startup in college while I was considering dropping out and one other time after I'd graduated.
Genuinely wasn't worth it.
My best simple advice is to just focus on work while you're at work or set 4hrs aside each day to really focus. Otherwise, live your life. In time if you follow these simple rules I think you'll find surprising gains.
Productivity is a self-destructive idea. Forget climate change; if the bug numbers are correct, we're going to lose the pollinators within a few years, and all your money won't another minute buy.
We all need to do the absolute minimum necessary to survive and stop reproducing until our numbers and lifestyle return to a sustainable level. This is now a dire and desperate matter of survival of our species.
It almost seems as if they are generated by a neural net, and not a person.
The only thing that motivates me is the EXTREMELY interesting work.
So I'm starting thinking that I don't need the tools to improve my ability to work harder, instead I need the work I want to work harder.
If not - then I should not worry about this.
I used to keep all these thoughts cluttered in my head and then they became blockers because if I did one I'd be thinking about the other.
While I use it to organize my thoughts and put plan to action, some may use it just an outlet for whatever.
It's actually pretty productive at baseline since I can do the things that do matter lightning fast, so if you're like that, just try to do more things/more varied things (for example start a class not related to your job or get a second job not in the same field). (Also different/more intense physical activity. I don't know if you're like that but I'm a standard issue adrenaline junkie in addition to having selective motivation.)
However, the bottleneck is just doing more work. I do secondary less paid jobs like teaching and mentoring for events, where I can work 10 hours per day just fine, because it's mostly physical/social. But it doesn't help things and makes me too tired to be productive coding, which is where the real money is.
At 10h/week I'm assuming you're a consultant. Have you tried accepting more jobs than you feel you can do (not a lot, a little more) and then giving the client a deadline? It's not usually recommended because it's stressful but you're essentially having issues not having a boss and as a freelancer the clients are your boss.
It seems like your efforts to work more are very self-directed (working on ideas you had vs things customers are asking for) -- in my experience some clients will definitely bring you metric tons of coffee and breathe down your neck for hours if you'd let them, so doing client work may be easier (and well, more lucrative). Smaller clients are more agile(/annoying). Clients who are local are more likely to engage in high-pressure behavior to remind you they're important, like, pick up the phone.
You are in the enviable position of being able to work for just 10 hours per week to support your quality of life. Perhaps you could pick a new hobby and dedicate your free time to becoming a master woodworker? Perhaps you could find a cause you care about and volunteer your free time to helping in some capacity? Perhaps you want to learn to paint or travel or meet new people or, hell, just sit in the park and feed the ducks.
Or if you really do want to do more income generating work, what do you want to work ON? Just saying "I should work more" isn't going to cut it.
> It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about? - Henry David Thoreau
If you don't agree with that the poster is trying to do just don't answer instead of undermining their motivation.
You get top answers advising the OP to work less because some of us lived through the same problem and in the end realized what a colossal mistake it is to waste your life living to work instead of working to live.
How many people have laid in their deathbed complaining how they didn't spent more time at the office pushing some paperwork? Hoe many complained they didn't spent enough time with their loved ones?
Yes, the top answer is always "work less" because that's alwayd the right answer.
Furthermore, I know for myself I feel like shit after a lot of social activity or leisure, and feel actually really great after working for a long amount of time. The only hard part is starting.
If OP's question was "How can I become better at coding", or even "how can I code for more hours of the day before feeling burnt out," I think the responses would be quite different.
Working double the hours more than doubles my income, which is nice, as I can do things like have a nice dinner or bring my kids to Disneyland.
But I do enjoy the things I work on, and I don't enjoy the period where I'm idling in preparation for the thing I intend to do. It sounds a little strange, but it's a lot like flipping through channels on Netflix before actually watching any shows.
Have you considered changing your routine a bit? Maybe try working from a coffee shop, or rent a co-working office for a couple of months.
Coffee places tend to cut the internet after an hour, which straight up kills flow. I have issues starting, not continuing work, and this limited time brings enough dread to not start at all.
So I’d explore these thought patterns “I should work more” — maybe use Byron Katie’s “the work” process?
Now I have a question for you. How did you end up in a situation where people will pay you for ten hours of work a week instead of forty?
muzani isn't asking to be talked out of working more hours, everyone.
Anyway, my suggestion: it sounds like you work alone. Maybe try working with other people, for a day or two per week. (I don't know if that's compatible with your line of work, or if you'd consider taking on a different one.) The camaraderie may help you make a habit of it.
Also, a formal commitment to turn up each week is likely to work much better for you than a take-it-or-leave-it arrangement.
I mean it would be like asking "how can I deep clean my house every day" and then explaining that you never have visitors, you find your house fine as it is, you have had no health or sleep issues, and you really only go a week between cleanings. It's a caliber of problem where I guess there's drugs for that, but it's also not really a problem in the first place.
Oddly enough, it is quite reassuring that there are not a lot of helpful responses, because it means it's a problem that nobody has a solution for.
If you're committed to work that's fundamentally just you working alone, there's probably not as much value in my suggestion as I'd hoped.
Even so, perhaps finding some way of turning your planned extra-work-day-per-week into a formal commitment, would help.
Assuming it’s to have a purpose in life, then the answer is to find that purpose.
Alternatively there are plenty of open source projects that need a maintainer.
But just having a purpose is not good enough, as a good purpose tends to be intimidating. If a man wants to climb Everest, they still need to build up the stamina for it.
Like others have said, a lot of it is just developing the habit of doing it. Habits are defined by cues, so you want to be in an environment that is associated with work, so you should avoid trying to work at home or any place you have associated with leisure.
Now coming to the main question - You need to have something to work for. I did the mistake of wanting to work more without having a solid goal. Unless you have a pressing deadline or a challenging goal, human mind always tends to slack off. Think by asking yourself this question - "What is the problem you want to solve?" and then work backward and allocate time to things.
That would probably range from something that's so easy you just want to drop the hammer and knock it out to a massive problem that you'll spend months or years chipping away at. Either way if you really are interested in working on it you'll think about it in the background and approach solutions from multiple angles. When you're excited about working on the problem you'll have no issues with working more than 10 hours per week if that's what it takes.
Everybody is different but I've found that when a problem is actually fun to work on "productivity" techniques don't really do much. It's mostly making a plan for what to do, working a bit, learning more, and either solving or starting the work cycle over again with new information.
So I think you probably need to work on more problems that you're actually interested in.
You're probably right in that productivity techniques don't work. They treat the symptom but not the root.