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Ask HN: Does anyone else struggle with procrastination when learning something?

4 points by flyGuyOnTheSly ↗ HN
I don't know is wrong with me...

I've literally wasted a week here trying to dive into learning D3.js

I read a few paragraphs into the documentation, and then it's on to something else.

I have this massive sense of dread even thinking about planning to learn it later.

It's not difficult to read, I have read through plenty of dryer documentation sites in the past.

I think part of this all stems from the fact that I tried to play around with D3 a few years ago and gave up on it rather quickly.

I seem to do the same thing with movies... if I start one and don't finish it for whatever reason... it's basically guaranteed that I will never finish watching that movie.

My mind has simply been made up that "it's bad enough that you stopped before, so why bother continuing?"

I don't really expect any response to this, it was cathartic enough writing it all out.

Thanks for reading if you did this far!

10 comments

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fforum
For me it's so important to be able to play with what I want to learn right away, especially with programming. If you want to learn D3 for example, maybe find a live version of D3 on the web where you can see it modify and change right away. You need to see results almost instantly as a beginner to stay motivated, unless you intuitively KNOW how good success shall feel.
mikece
By far, the most effective motivation to concentrate on and learn something is being assigned to debug/add features in a language/stack I’ve not used yet. While this certainly lights a fire and gives me the concentration I need to learn how to get the task done I do wish I had more time to follow up with “now that I’ve done X in language Y and platform Z, I’d like to loop back and actually learn language Y and platform Z — but I have a new assignment...”
topmonk
I have a similar problem. I think I need external motivation, like a job or being a member of a team, to really be motivated to do something. Since I retired early, in my mid 30s, though, I don't have this kind of environment.

When I work alone, just a trickle of productivity comes out, unless I really push myself.

Once, I forced myself to work 4 hours a day for months to push a project out. I was able to accomplish this, but I was quite miserable when I was working.

Before I retired and was working for a company, I was able to push out 10 hours a day including a day on the weekend, and felt fine.

I keep thinking if there was only some way to create a team like environment I'd be able to accomplish a lot more, but I'm not sure how to do that. Reporting my results to others who aren't invested in what I'm doing doesn't seem to work. So, I don't know.

flyGuyOnTheSly
It's not working in a team exactly, but venturing out into your local community and rubbing elbows with like minds daily certainly helps with the boredom of being a dev who works alone at home.

I've been one for over a decade now... and I didn't know how bored and depressed I really was until I walked into a yoga studio earlier this year and began practicing daily.

I've even met a few other developers there to shoot the shit. Turns out there are a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands... usually because they're well off financially and working on their own things... that visit these kinds of places.

topmonk
That'd work if I lived in a tech centre, but I'm an expat out in the boondocks and moving isn't really an option for me.
mavsman
Amen to the team/peer accountability stuff. It just so happens that I'm in a similar situation with wanting to learn D3. Email me at bradydowling at Gmail if you want to chat and we can come up with some kind of plan for learning together or holding each other accountable.
flyGuyOnTheSly
I just might shoot you an email tomorrow!

(Winding down for the night now and don't want to open it up again...)

I have decided to plunk myself down and watch this youtube video in it's entirety over the next week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8V5o2UHG0E

I have had great experiences learning through freecodecamp in the past, and am thinking that perhaps the onslaught of a 13 hour video and a creeping progress bar might make it easier to digest.

The first 10 minutes have been great so far, and the comments are really encouraging.

Also finding this page was a real lifesaver https://github.com/d3/d3/wiki/Tutorials

mavsman
I'm curious how you've been doing since then. I've been dabbling a little bit but I haven't found a really good guide or documentation.

I feel like most guides or tutorials are outdated or incomplete and it seems like documentation isn't very detailed. I think I understand the basics (create or select an SVG, add elements to it, apply attributes, etc) but lots of functions still leave me wondering what they do exactly and how I can change them to meet my needs. Curious what your experience has been and if you have any projects to show off.

PopeDotNinja
I think it's okay to procrastinate through something that's s really boring. For the last week I've been wrestling with Webpack because I've told myself that I should really be better at frontend stuff, and Webpack has been blocking me in just including stylesheets, JavaScript, fonts, and including a third party theme. It's not that hard, but it's really boring & frustrating to figure out, and the documentation for static assets in the web framework is quite stale. When. I do start working on it, my attention span wants to go elsewhere pretty fast.

After a week of chipping away at it as I had time and interest, today it clicked and I started to get it. Sticking with it was key. You have to decide for yourself whether whatever you want to learn is worth the pain, but I think it is useful to learn to stick with things long enough to figure them out.

PopeDotNinja
P.S. sucking at something doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It means your ambition to achieve has outpaced your present ability to implement. When you learn to channel that energy you're dumping into negative thinking into just learning it slower than you'd like, you'll feel so much better.