>Another trick to start sloppy - you might have high expectations of your finished work.
>You want to write a great book, not just a good one. Or create a stellar artwork, or start a great business.
>All those expectations can put more pressure on you than you can bear, leading you to avoid it by procrastinating.
>Instead, you can escape those expectations by starting deliberately badly.
I use this one a lot. I always heard it called a 'vomit draft'. It really works. It's easier to see how truly terrible thing could be improved than it is to just start working from a blank slate.
This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote:
"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
Maybe this works for potters but I don't think it'd work for developers. If a compSci lecturer suggested one group would get an A for writing a perfect, bug free app and the other group would get an A for writing 50,000 lines of code, I wouldn't expect the group writing as much code as they could to make the best app.
In this hypothetical scenario, instead of counting final lines of code, maybe we should count lines of affected code: take each commit and count how many lines were added, modified or deleted.
That matches "the quantity trumps quality" idea above more closely in our industry.
In the pottery example Group A were marked by weight ("fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on."). Making a single giant pot could get you an A if the lecturer wasn't pedantic about the meaning of "pots".
Consider someone with little to no experience with programming trying to build a single app and planning it out and refactoring and refining it continuously, compared to constantly creating and archiving multiple toy prototypes of the same app and then considering the best among those.
(The app's size and complexity should be commensurate to a single clay pot in a ceramics course.)
It requires the students to actually try to make something of quality, sure, but only to the same degree that the students in the original (apocryphal) story did- after all, those students could easily have shown up with a pile of baked misshapen clay instead of proper pots.
I think if doing this I would have a group split so one has to create an app that's finished (defining that would be fun) and one that has to write one that's code is 'clean' (again, fun defining that).
I say this because I've worked with a lot of inexperienced developers that commonly have a stack of half finished projects, or things they've re-written half a dozen times to get the architecture right. I'm my experience you learn a lot by finishing things, and being constrained by previous decisions.
Bonus points if you can get customers relying on your work, nothing motivates like support emails.
I think it does work for developers. You also learn programming by doing it, rather than by thinking about it. Write 50 apps, and your 50th is bound to be better than if you start out trying to write the perfect app on your first try.
Knuth suggests, in TAOCP, that the best way to write a program is to write it once, scrap it completely and rewrite from scratch. Very much in line with spending an entire semester making one perfect program vs spending a semester writing and rewriting new programs from scratch.
I used this extensively for code assignments in university, but for a different reason. We had to do most things in C, which can be very painful for prototyping and experimenting with new approaches. So I would solve the problem first in Python, try different approaches, and then after I was happy with the solution I'd write it again in C. Saved me a lot of time in the end.
A better approach in my experience is to grow the whole system from a “skeleton” implementation, refactoring the architecture and code as your understanding grows. With the key use cases being your guide.
in the extremes, neither of approaches work, if you are just fighting yesterday's bugs or paralised by choice and perfecction, both are bad ideas.
It's like order and chaos, what you want is to find a balance that allows you to explore, and leave things a bit open so they can also be extended, but also sound and precisse enough so that it actually works, and does the job.
I don't find it now, but I've read that anecdote is made up. And I don't think it make sense. Except for when you are an absolute beginner, you won't improve if you don't put in any effort in the quality of your work. See deliberate practice etc..
I understand the point they are trying to make, but I still think the anecdote is harmful. It gives the impression that it is more important to put in the work than any real effort. The only thing you’ll be good at after producing 1000 crappy pots is producing crappy pots.
It's also tinted by the fact that learning a skill is usually logarithmic. If you are a student with no pot-making skills, those first few pots are gonna give a lot of XP. I think it'd be a different outcome if done with more experienced potters.
I think you are over-simplifying the situation. Malcom Gladwell's book Outliers popularized the notion that a person needs on average 10,000 hours of practice to truly master a given task. A lot of people took this to mean, "if you put in 10,000 hours of practice, you will become a master." This is not true. The 10,000 hours of practice is necessary, but not sufficient. The practice has to be _intentional_, guided, goal-oriented practice. Not just playing the same song or making the same shot over and over.
That was exactly my point. It is harmful to believe that mindless practicing, or pottery, will make you a master just because you put in the time or prescribed number of pots. How am I oversimplifying?
No, the point of this anecdote is that you get good at quality by pursuing quantity.
It's an appealing idea because it's counterintuitive, and here on HN were are absolute suckers for contrarian ways to outsmart the herd. But we have been given no reason to think it actually works.
Well, in writing terms, it seems to have worked for Ray Bradbury:
> The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.
... incidentally, also Neil Gaiman's advice in the Masterclass lectures.
The reason it works so well for writing is, as Neil Gaiman points out, that if you work for a year on one story, you've probably practised starting a story 52 times. But you've still only practised finishing a story once. And getting into the habit of finishing things is one of the most important habits to get into.
I can’t remember the name of the ceramicist, but hearing him interviewed on Radio 4, his apprenticeship in (China|Japan) involved every pot he made being deliberately smashed at the end of the day for a year. A way to get over a fear of failure and to learn to keep repeating the process of learning.
David Bowie and Tin Machine used this technique on their album Tin Machine.
>The Sales’ also pushed for a punishing first-take philosophy, which Bowie found enticing. No overdubs unless necessary for guitar solos, no synths (the old Queen boast), and most of all, no lyric rewrites. The band would go to lunch and return to find that Bowie had written out a complete provisional lyric for whatever song they were working on. But that was as far as he was allowed to go: he was forced to keep to his first instincts. Sometimes this worked out, sometimes it didn’t (see “Crack City”).
>Given these strictures, Bowie and the band stuck to music “that didn’t have too much orchestration about it,” as Bowie said in a 1989 interview. “If it got too chordy and arranged, it wouldn’t be anything what we wanted to do. The structure had to be as loose as possible so that we could improvise.” Rather than reworking songs, they just kept cutting more, with as many as 35 to 40 pieces coming out of the sessions. So most of Tin Machine is basic blues-centered rock, with the average song having no more than five chords: it lacked the harmonic ambiguity and structural games of Bowie’s older work. While the record often worked on a song level, with 14 tracks on the CD version, the album was a wearying listen. Few records are as exciting in miniature and as draining as a whole as Tin Machine.
I also like how they mention marathon. Indeed, you don't start training for marathon by running all 42km on the first day, are you? No, for some of us in our current shape even running 5km is hard! So we should start with smaller things - those we can do - and tell ourselves that we have achieved something - and that tomorrow we probably will achieve slightly more.
It's often easier to add to something that already exists than to start something new from scratch. And when you're the one who created the thing in the first place, it's that much easier to make the improvements.
Even if the initial thing is so terrible it needs to be redone completely, at least you figured out what you don't want. All while getting into the habit of doing the thing.
I stumbled upon this when trying to get started with my master thesis. In frustration, I threw a bunch of buzzwords and random thoughts at LaTeX and then stashed it for a day or two. After that, I picked it up, looked at it critically and went "well, this paragraph is obviously wrong, here's what it SHOULD say..." and two hours later I had a very rough draft finished.
Write out the whole thesis as headers and fill all the sections with Loren ipsums until you have the page count you want. Then, start filling in the real text
I agree a lot with this. A blank page is the worst - I find it hard to get started. But if I just put something (probably something bad) it is much easier to just continue improving it.
For me it's different. It's easy for me to start a project. I get overly excited over a week, banging a lot of code. But as soon as I get stuck, I often get stuck forever and never come back to the project.
Or I decide to "refactor" a piece of code, and then spend days thinking about how I'll "refactor" it, rather than just doing it or not doing it in the first place.
> Start in a way that you could enjoy.
Start doing in in a way that you could have fun, even if it's not as efficient as other boring/normal ways, so that the fun itself is the motivator.
Many people do! This is the 'architect' vs 'gardener' debate. A lot of writers start out with the notion of a story, then let it develop in the writing. If I remember correctly, Stephen King writes this way.
>Does this mean that, for instance, if you're writing a novel, you start without a structured outline?
It could, but there's no reason you couldn't start with a terrible outline instead of diving right into prose. The point is just that when you see something your brain will stark noticing all the ways it sucks and it gets things going.
Make it work, make it right, make it fast [1]. This has helped me tremendously in my programming career and especially in my side projects, where I have very limited time and energy. Its a solid strategy for breaking down complex work.
Reminds me of an idea from Ira Glass's lecture circuit: as you learn a craft, you develop the taste to recognize that your own work is crap long before you get good enough to satisfy your own standards. You just have to push through and trust that it eventually ends.
As Ernest Hemingway never actually said, "write drunk, edit sober". Which I don't take to mean literally getting drunk before you start working on something, but do it as if you were drunk, i.e. with little to no inhibition.
Thanks, I have two projects I'm avoiding right now, and even though I've started them a few weeks ago, if I drop them for a few days I feel like I have to start back again. The "screw it, let's do it" and "what's the smallest step you can take right now" approach would work in my case. The first is nice because I sometimes convince myself that I'm too lazy or unmotived to work on it. But am I? Or do I just think I'm unmotivated but would actually put several hours into the job if I started right now?
One of the best ways to get yourself to take a small step on a project is to put some parts of it in places where you will stumble upon it. Eg when you put your computer to sleep have that project be at the front or leave your notes about the project in a place where you're likely to run into them etc.
You deserve to be at the bottom, because how dare you!?
It is known that buying and going through the 4 week anti-procrastination program from deprocrastination.co instead of doing real work for 4 weeks helps you not procrastinate. Dothraki choir: "it is known".
Anyone tried using a chain calendar? I used an app that tracked how many days in a row I meditated and that's the first time in my life I was able to do a good habit consistently for 15 days straight. I didn't want to break the chain!
Later I used the same idea for studying every day, started with a few minutes and worked it up slowly. Eventually, I was able to concentrate for long periods of time. That sense of momentum and progress is very encouraging.
I thought about doing the chains, but I was always held back by the thought of having to break the chain for legit reasons. For example I'm currently practicing guitar, so I'd create a chain for that. But there are legit reasons why I can not play at a given day, I might not be able to access a Guitar because Im in a Hotel in a different country, or a myriad of other reasons.
So cheat! If you use a physical calendar, you can mark those days with another symbol, like an arrow to show that the chain carries on. If you use an app, you can mark the day anyway, knowing that you had a legitimate reason to skip it.
Think of all the benefits you would get from practicing 95% of the days marked, compared to a much lower percent without the chain. Don't let the 5% or 1% stop you.
As an aside, this is my view of veganism. When I talk to people who say they can't go vegan because they'd miss cheese too much, or kebab, or whatever, I suggest they go vegan and keep eating cheese or kebab. 95% is a lot better than nothing!
That said, I can't do chains. I get anxious after a while carrying a long streak, and will either conveniently forget a day and mess up the streak (and feel relieved), or decide during a streak that I'll stop at 30, or 100, or whatever, just to give me permission to get off the treadmill. I don't like when enjoyable things turn into a chore.
Some apps are nice and let you go back and add marks even if you forgot to do it on the day. Some apps, like Duolingo, let you unlock tokens that protect your streak if you miss a day. But some apps are really strict, which can be annoying if you finish something after midnight and realize that you just broke the chain. My wife had that with a writing app where she finished exactly at midnight, which counted for the next day and her streak was broken.
So if I did a chain, I'd use a text file, or a paper, or send myself an email a day logging that I did the task. I wouldn't trust an extremely rigid app, because, as you say, there can be legitimate reasons why you miss.
>As an aside, this is my view of veganism. When I talk to people who say they can't go vegan because they'd miss cheese too much, or kebab, or whatever, I suggest they go vegan and keep eating cheese or kebab. 95% is a lot better than nothing!
This is pretty much how I'm doing veganism, every meal I make at home is vegan. But I eat the occasional cheese and kebab. But I find myself replacing those with vegan/vegetarian alternatives more and more.
Also do vegan > vegetarian > normal food when going out. Without it becoming annoying. It's really uncommon to find a restaurant with vegan options around here, but vegetarian is pretty common.
I personally don't do chains either, as I really prefer being able to do things spontaneously. I approach the tasks I set for myself that way as well, so I end up doing things like squats when I have some dead minutes to fill in a day.
Basically doing anything is better than doing nothing, and often times you find yourself doing more than what you set out to do.
Duolingo has streaks built in but it allows you to buy a "Streak freeze" with a virtual currency that you earn by just using the app. When you skip a day, the freeze will be automatically consumed and you have to buy another. You also can't have more than one.
I find this system very effective without being frustrating. Even when you skip a day, you have to at least open the app to buy a new freeze.
By the time you really care about breaking long chain, you might find that you no longer need it as you actually enjoy what you are doing or developed a habit.
Rather than creating an unbreakable chain, I have a big calendar on the wall with a big X on days when I exercise. Some weeks I travel (or get lazy) and there is a gap, but I find that gap to be as motivating as the Xs are. I'm on year 3 of doing this and it's still motivating to see the Xs fill the calendar.
Something I learned in, I think, Atomic Habits that helped me with this sort of reasoning:
It's not about that first day to fail to do the thing. It's about the day after.
That is to say, of course your chain will be broken. And probably for entirely rational reasons! The trick is really internalizing that inevitability and not beating yourself up over it. You have to learn to say, "Yes, I got derailed for this period; that's OK, and now I'll get back on track."
We built an app* for this and use it ourselves - it's very effective. I have tasks for working (even a token amount) morning or night on a side project, working on the biggest roadblock task I have, and things like that. The app splits tasks into a "front six" and "back six" so I have six focused on work/business and then six focused on home (reading, trying to learn a language, etc).
I remember at one point having 'walk x steps' and 'read x minutes' as daily tasks, so I'd often be walking around the house while reading just before midnight to make sure I kept my streaks alive.
Came here to suggest Streaks, I've been using it for a few months now. My favorite features are:
- Streaks that track Apple Health data. Really nice job with the integration. I use this for tracking daily calorie, macronutrient, and workout goals.
- "X times per week" streaks. I take rest days from working out, so it's nice to have an abstraction that doesn't treat them as failures or breaking the streak.
I guess I should go give you guys a good app store review now. Thanks for making this!
Thanks! From the start, I found that having an easy-to-reach automatically-tracked Health goal (x,000 steps/day) was a good way to keep you feeling like you were accomplishing something. Went some way towards keeping you on track.
I wish they'd open up the screen time tracking because I'd like to have a Streaks task of keeping my daily screen time under a certain level.
I use the small wins trick a lot. I start with the smallest win, which is writing down a small win on my todo list.
Then, when I see the small task, I feel motivated to do it just so I can have the pleasure of checking it off my list. By that time, I'm usually on a pretty good roll and keep working.
Same. I do it when the dishes have piled up. Tell myself I'll just quickly do the easy ones, and then next thing I carry on and decide to do the biggest remaining dishes so the bench looks cleaner, and from there it's downhill and easy.
With a counter full of dirty dishes, I tell myself that I'll just quickly fill the dishwasher with the easy stuff and start it. I'll leave the rest for later. But when I've started the dishwasher, there's usually only three items left, like a soft plastic lid or a tea mug that can't go in the dishwasher. So I wash those by hand. Now the counter is empty, but stained, so I might as well wipe it so that it's clean for next time I cook.
It all starts with the lazy "I'll just throw the easy stuff into the dishwasher", but momentum takes over. Listening to interesting podcasts help!
This procrastination is actually probably useful. If I go on other social networks the probably of usefulness or random items that an Algo targets me approaches zero
Make sure the thing you have to do is something you want to do. While you can procrastinate on the things you're truly interested in, ultimately you're more likely to follow through with the things that interest you than the other random tasks that require doing.
Writing that design doc, report, or review at work? Meh. I drag my feet until I'm the last person in the office and I have to finish.
That obscure side project that really interests me? Hell yeah. It's called hyper-focus, and those with ADHD know what it's like.
Check out my Github streak. I think I've got the world's fastest faster-than-realtime CPU-only neural TTS and Voice Conversion (VC) systems with multi-speaker embeddings outside of Google. And I wrote an entire data ingestion, cleanup, and curation engine to build massive data sets for training. A year ago I didn't even know what any of this stuff was, and now I can't pull myself away from it. Building is magnetic and addictive, but it's not the thing I need to do.
Sometimes you can pivot the energy you have from a desirable task into an undesirable one. I tell myself I can't work on the fun thing until I get the mundane one done. It's a hack that doesn't always work.
I want to structure my life around things I want to do to the exclusion of all else. I think I'm starting to get there. I've trimmed a lot of unnecessary things from my life.
My dream is to get rich enough doing desirable side hustles that I can pay people to take care of all the undesirable tasks. Delegation to achieve efficiency.
I can work like there is no tomorrow on random side projects. I just wish I could redirect all that focus and energy at will into the areas that need them.
I don't have an ADHD diagnosis, but I struggle with procrastination.
Does it help you at all to have external recipients of your work, or does it not factor in at all in what gets done?
It helps me if I tell someone else "I'll send you the report today", because it makes me more accountable. I'll probably delay it until panicking at the end of the day, but I will at least hammer something out and send it off. Or worst case finish it tomorrow morning, after having started, but having to leave work the day before, which is still better than postponing even longer.
For me to do tasks, I need to reach the "Screw quality and completeness, I need to send _something_!", which usually turns out to be plenty good enough based on feedback. I just need to find someone to promise sending the result to for my more important tasks.
This does have a downside. Sometimes you associate that anxiety and negative feelings with the person that would inquire about it. This can make you just want to avoid them as much as possible, even if it costs you elsewhere.
>Sometimes you can pivot the energy you have from a desirable task into an undesirable one. I tell myself I can't work on the fun thing until I get the mundane one done. It's a hack that doesn't always work.
It can even backfire: sometimes you end up just browsing reddit or doing some other nonsense thing for hours just so you can avoid doing the mundane task. At the end of the day you wonder how you wasted an entire day without doing the fun side project or the mundane task.
>My dream is to get rich enough doing desirable side hustles that I can pay people to take care of all the undesirable tasks.
Hiring somebody to do the cleaning at home seems to help quite a few people. People in tech probably earn enough to be able to afford to just hire someone to clean the apartment/house once in a while. It's probably a better option than to either hate yourself for it or to just not clean for a long period of time.
Your post resonates with me greatly - often I'll find myself making up _new_ side projects to take the place of the things that actually need to get done.
How do you push yourself to get the right things done now, that is, until you get rich enough to do otherwise?
I wish we could switch. I had the same maker drive but something changed in me as I've gotten older and now I struggle with tasks. I could easily spend the rest of my life writing/reporting/reviewing/etc and never get any actual work done ever again. I know, it's crazy.
My trick is between point 2 and 3. I try to find something, anything interesting in the subject I can play with. It can be really small or minor part of the project, but if it starts to interest me it just drags me to the whole work mindset.
I'm basically conning myself into liking the task :)
The last two weeks I made it a goal to run 5km every morning. A few times, particularly today, I felt lazy and run down, but I got out of bed anyway and told myself that I'll at least walk. The next thing I know I'm running and feeling amazing and on to set one of my better times.
The point: When you tell yourself "just one more game" or "just one more post", or "just one more video" and end up doing 3-5 hours more, do that with your other tasks too! "just one line of code", "just one tutorial", "just one rep", "just one line of reading/writing".
We all have this amazing mental tool that we've been honing for years, the tool of self deception. Time to use it for good and not evil.
This is a good reason to break your tasks up into smaller chunks too. One more thing checked of the list is easier when its something like "add a button" and not "implement entire feature".
I used to be sceptical that the concept of overtraining was a thing, but it definitely is. Just saying that running every day consistently might not necessarily be good for you in the long run. Listen to your body.
Agreed, "listen to your body." is really important advice. I've been running every day without exception for 1252 days now, and there have been really slow, really short (2k) runs whenever I felt my body needed a bit more leeway for recovery. It takes some practice and it's not for everyone, but daily/streak running can be transformative (and was/is for me).
Very correct! I love the thought. We have to replace the lazy tasks into the active ones by telling our brain just "one more time". And I have realized that whenever I tell myself to do something which requires getting out of bed and be active, the thought is itself exhausting. But ones you do that you feel amazing and your day just go right! You just have to push yourself for that one time again and again.
It doesn't always work, but at least you've done the one task. That's one thing you can tick off the to-do list, regardless of how productive your day has been otherwise.
As a lifelong realist (= pessimist) this is one of those things I struggle with too.
I toyed with this feeling. Not to repeat the dopamine theory we see everywhere.. but it feels that most of the web really ends up in the low hanging easy pleasure of our brain, and any moment of struggle will tickle that reflex. And when you ignore/fight it for a second... You (at least I) can sense blood pressure change in my brain and then the thinking side of my head goes back into rhythm again. Thinking is a pleasure too, but it's requires a bit of patience.
Can relate to that ”moment of struggle”. Thinking about stopping the use of any dev tools that don’t have instant feedback, as having to wait a few seconds for something (currently deploying to google app engine mostly) makes me instantly alt-tab to reddit.
It will block the time waster websites you configure and will block them for you until you've ticked off the list. It's simple but effective for catching that mindless ctrl+t -> reddit reflex.
Trivial inconveniences are huge. For years, I could not get myself to floss. I had no problem with the brushing habit. So then I tried using those floss-picks instead of the reel. Bam, flossing rate went from about once a month to every other day.
> My strategy has become: Just do one task today, that's all. Doesn't matter how small. Leave the office feeling like you've done something productive.
I feel like this is just a way to make yourself feel better about doing basically nothing. Before you implemented this, were you really at risk of spending an entire day doing absolutely nothing productive whatsoever?
It reminds me of William McRaven quote: "If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed... If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. And by the end of the day, that one task completed, will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter. If you can't do the little things right, you'll never be able to do the big things right. And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made, that you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better."
I know its not the point of the quote, but I can't believe I'm the only one who feels less comfortable in a made bed. Tightly tucked sheets feel so constricting.
For me, "made bed" just means re-aligning the sheets/blankets/pillows so that nothing is tangled or crumpled up, but never any extra nonfunctional things (no tucking, no tiny decorative cylinder pillows that no one ever uses, etc.)
This is a technique often employed to help people suffering from anxiety, you can always break something down into smaller tasks and eventually you'll get to a point where the task feels doable.
But equally something being fun or worth doing doesn't mean you won't procrastinate doing it. Cleaning the house, for example, is definitely worth doing but many people procrastinate doing it, and it's actually a really good time to apply this technique:
You don't have to clean the whole house, you can just clean one room. You don't have to clean an entire room, you can just clean a bookcase. You don't have to clean the entire bookcase, you can just clean one shelf. You don't have to clean the entire shelf, you can just put one thing back in it's place. You don't even have to put it back, just go over and pick it up. ...
You can keep on going if none of those seem doable, right down to something like wiggling your big toe, but most people would probably at the very least find putting a single thing back doable.
And I've used an example of something that is worth doing but most people don't find fun, but there are plenty of examples of things that are both fun and worth doing that people still procrastinate (probably mostly occurs in mental health sufferers, but that was the entire point of my original comment).
I damaged my shin bones because I was running too much too soon and currently taking 2 months break. Side note, I used to run 20k every week, then stopped.
Be careful of the problem on the opposite side of the spectrum: your body might not be able to keep up with your motivation.
I think this could do more with your running form and listening to your body than your will that kept you going. It might be worth checking out your form with a running coach. Either way, wishing you a speedy recovery.
You can absolutely injure yourself by running too much, even with perfect form, and before you would notice anything is wrong while "listening to your body".
Yeah, people say "listen to your body" like this is simply a settled issue and all you have to do is make a decision to be more responsible. Researchers have barely even begun to properly unpack variations in interoception or RSI susceptibility, let alone the interactions between them.
I think you missed the point. Regardless of if their form was good or bad they ran through the pain. Shin splints and pantar faciticus are really bad to do that with as the recovery takes forever and you just can't do anything during it related to that area.
I think your getting downvoted as you answered x when they were discussing y.
Couch to 5k (a.k.a. C25K) is a popular way to build up slowly and steadily.
Once you're up to running 5k three times a week (which is roughly where the plan leaves you) you can limit both volume and max distance increases to 10% per week.
I used to run 5-6 times a week with a usual volume of 50k/week so adding in another 1-2 gentle 5k recovery jogs to do a minimum of 5k every day wouldn't be difficult at all. But that's an entirely different prospect to just going out and trying to run 5k every day (although some people do exactly this and get away with it) with minimal existing running fitness or conditioning.
In my (totally unprofessional) opinion, C25K progresses too quickly for most people. It think the "None to Run" variant is better (and emphasizes that repeating weeks is normal, and even expected)
Agreed. I joined the military out of HS and got hurt in a car accident. Nothing serious but enough to keep my from PT-ing for a little. They had me do something like C25K as part of rehab -- lots of run a lap, walk a lap, repeat x 10, with increasing amounts of running as I progressed. Worked okay, got back to reasonably fit in a couple of months.
Few years later I'm a softbody IT guy looking to shape up, and decided to follow the reddit C25K sub -- it killed my shins. Bad splints, had to cut out running for a while. I got there eventually but I think 60 minutes of biking or eliptical + leg workouts did more for me than the C25K (as written) did.
None to Run looks great! The slower the progression the better for beginning runners in my (also totally unprofessional) opinion too.
As a general comment, shin splints is the classic beginners too-much-too-soon running injury. Experienced runners get a whole range of other injuries, but rarely shin splints. The only time is after they take a break and try and come back too quickly (notice the pattern).
Yep, with running as an absolute beginner, you really want to start slowly, both in terms of tempo and in terms of distance. The key is regularity and persistence.
By running slowly a lot, your body has time to learn how to run efficiently and safely simply by trial and error. By not overdoing it, you give your body time to recover from any errors made during the "trials", without injury.
Incidentally, lot of slow running is also a great way to build up base endurance, so it is not wasted time, and you will "recoup the investment" later, when you start running longer distances.
Shin splints suck, though. Even experienced runners get them from time to time. Probably best to switch it up a bit, include swimming or bicycle instead of some runs every now and then.
To quote an amazing motivator, Jocko Willink, "Good". Now you have more time to do cycling or strength train or some other exercise instead of running.
That's a fascinating idea, our bodies may not be able to keep up with our motivation. I've been pondering a lot about how our minds can live in a fantasyland of imagination that can hold long runs of time never being put to the test. Physical reality is the great check and test for many things.
I had to stop playing basketball with the guys when my knee couldn't keep up with my joy of playing.
I like the idea and I'm glad it works for some people but I tried it and often I would get out the door with all my running gear on and then turn back around and give up. Something about thinking about it like this made it easier to give up.
I recently started mountainbiking, and I often excert myself way too much to the point of having to get off the bike and just resting. After watching the tedx talk "How "normal people" can train like the worlds best endurance athletes" I made it a thing to go out on the bike and _be slow_. Just go as slow as possible up the hills instead of almost collapsing.
Now I feel like going out almost all the time instead of thinking "ooh, wow I was sooo tired the last time I was on the trail!". Made it much much easier to keep a routine of getting out regularly. Also my pace is much more even, and actually not much slower in total on my "slow" runs, since I never have to stop and rest.
Learned helplessness is a particularly insidious form of this. What's fascinating is that in the studies, some animals never get it, they just keep fighting it. I wonder if that trait can be tapped in to, I doubt it'
an all-or-nothing parameter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
This is why I advise gym newbies to quit and go home while they're feeling pumped, and not to stay so long that they feel exhausted and cranky. It's more important to create the positive subconscious association with the gym.
I mean you did not start the activity. This trick works only when you have already started the activity.
I suggest that next time you become serious about it: There is no way you could let yourself not doing the minimum activity BUT you can leave after you have done your minimum.
For example: Your minimum activity is going out and running for a minute. You do it, period.
Your mind will try to put excuses, like "I don't have time", but because the activity is minimal you don't have to think about that, you spend less time doing it than thinking about it.
Another suggestion: Only complete minimal activities first, and feel good about it,until you get used to going out each day.
Going out for running just minute over 30 days is much much better than running kilometers one day, being exhausted, feeling pain( and guilt) the next.
After 30 days you will have established a routine. It becomes harder not going out each day than staying home.
> PS: Now , After you have already run for a minute, it will sound ridiculous not doing one more.
Unless you don't work like that. Maybe I'm weird, but if I promised myself "just one minute" and I trick myself into doing more minutes, I'm going to remember that next time I'll tell myself "just one minute". I might say "just one minute and then see how you feel". But again, there shouldn't be anything ridiculous about it if I just do one minute, because who is being ridiculous next time they say "just one minute" ?
I should've expanded on my original comment a little more. I'm currently on a run streak of 130 consecutive days, including a motorcycle crash and international long haul flights.
One of the most frustrating things is I have no idea why I have managed it this time but not before.
The other failure mode I have is procrastinating leading up to the activity. Yesterday I woke up at 6am with the intention of going for a run like I had managed to do for the past 2 weeks. After much procrastination I finally managed to go at 3pm.
I think I've been quite successful over the years in doing exercise but the lack of insight into my habits and motivation is maddening....
That sounds like me. No matter how hard I try, I just can't seem to get the time from wearing normal clothes to running to having showered and wearing normal clothes again, down to less than 2 hours if it just includes 25 minutes of running. Trying to do the "just one minute" approach when you don't feel like running, still becomes a "just 1h36" problem. Or indeed sometimes, quite randomly, worse.
If you can pull it off and restrain yourself, there is this trick of leaving one easy bug (or task) open, to get a nice start of the next day. You could start looking out for that task or bug half an hour before quits, maybe?
There is a company dedicated to tricking (voluntary and conscious) people from procrastination to actual sport, see https://www.squadeasy.com/
The main idea is to leverage the brain's sensitivity to cooperative team goals or competitive goals, plus some gamification. And it works!
Disclaimer: the main founder is my brother, I was involved in the very first steps of the project, and I'm currently on a freelance mission with the company. And the team is looking for a freelance or a permanent Typescript coder in Paris.
Then tell your brother that they need to work on cheaters because my company uses Squadeasy and every year it's just a disgraceful experience.
I know it's tough, especially when a giant like Strava that gamifies the hell out of sport barely does anything, but for the sake of giving an example, a cheater from my company basically took a tcx from someones marathon and uploaded every other day with shifted timestamps. I know it because they used Strava and with summit I saw the gpx from their workouts and the lat/long data was always identical. Also from averaging like 10k a week, he shot up to 200k, magically.
At least I managed to get some people's points revoked because they tagged each other on Strava for every workout even if only one/two of them were actually working out.
Now if I couldn't stalk on them on Strava there's absolutely no transparency on Squadeasy and I wouldn't have been able to point anything out to the team. These guys for sure are setting their profile private next year to prevent people from calling them out (since they did mid competition last year, actually).
> Typescript
So frontend, it certainly needs work too. If there's any work foreseen in backend, especially crushing cheaters, let me know.
Thanks for reporting. Yes, detecting cheat is one of those numerous cat-and-mouse games. Whatever you do to detect, will deter more cheaters yet with diminishing returns.
Squadeasy already deals with a number of scenarios, though not exactly this one. Thank you for your concise yet insightful report. I keep these ideas: cheating with multiple uploads of time-shifted TCX, transparency in third party trackers helped.
I just opened an issue in the internal tracking system with your text and a few lines. The team will notice it tomorrow morning (it's 10:30pm here in Paris), yet we have quite a backlog already so don't hold your breath.
To answer your last sentence and Typescript, the freelancer or new hire will be working on both front (user profile web-app) and back (bugfix, toolset migration, API evolution). Any contact welcome.
I did this last summer. Simply walking early to get some bread. It quickly turned into an automatic alarm clock, gave me a good 30 min of "warm up" walking that also let my brain coast while watching the woods. You come back both refreshed and all warmed up blood wise. It was very very beneficial altogether.
If it wasn't for the wrong job I took next and winter killing the morning sun I'd still be doing this. Actually now that spring is here, I feel the need. The need for .. walk.
Sometimes I have a really hard time to start working on some tasks and I think it is linked to anxiety and stress, not mere laziness. As long as there are no big expectations (like when exercising), I have usually no procrastination issues.
On my last contract, working with very competent people, I got struck with one of the biggest procrastination wave I ever experienced. Thanks to a bit of introspection and awesome support from the team, I Realized this was just anxiety due to the imposter syndrome.
Sometimes I'm kicking myself that I should really start work on this now, and it doesn't work, and I get more and more anxious.
Upon reflection (sometimes I get to that point sooner, sometimes later) the problem is usually that the task is too vaguely defined to start working on it.
Yes! Exactly! I had a issue that I wasn't sure how to start, and didn't understand too well, and it was killing my productivity.
I ended up just doing something, anything, even if it's wrong. Then I could correct it and do it properly. But sitting there fretting about it being hard and vague wasn't making any progress
Very apropos for me as I went to the doctor yesterday for increased anxiety about getting stuff done.
I was promoted to a team lead position in Autumn of 2019. Things went well, if hectic and stressful, for the first couple of months. But the slower period in December really did a number on my motivation and focus, and my anxiety kicked in big time.
Now I have a huge problem doing actual work, and so often get distracted into spending hours on technical, interesting tasks that aren't work related. It doesn't help that I have a million different interesting projects that I'd like to mess around with.
And the work to-do list gets longer, and longer. And my anxiety gets worse and worse.
I hope you find a solution to your issues. Good luck!
Totally. And I find it already helps tremendously to think and come up with the first/next action to start working. Sometimes, I need the first two, but any more again ends up in procrastination land. Unless the entire plan just crystallizes like that, in which case it was probably something else holding me back.
I’ve dealt with this as well, particularly with programming. At least with programming, what I usually wind up doing is raising an issue on Github about the feature I’m trying to implement or the bug I’m trying to solve. It helps me actually start working, keep track of my thoughts, and define the problem well enough that I can ultimately begin working on it.
With other things, usually it’s best to run to google, or send an email to your boss or professor, or just pull out a notepad and start jotting things down. Sometimes it also helps to take a quick break - exercise, take a shower, etc - and then come back.
Although the irony is that I’m typing this comment out as a form of procrastination when I should be pulling out my laptop to do some remote work...
Anxiety is an emotion that you feel when you expect something bad to happen in the future.
Anxiety can be measured, your body segregates hormones in order to change the state of your entire body in order to prepare for this danger.
Unfortunately danger for primitive humans are different than current society dangers.
It usually prepares you either for a fight or a flight (running away as fast as possible).
If you get too anxious for example fighting for your life or your children, you can break your bones and don't feel pain.
But this natural response is of no help if you feel that you will lose your job, or break your relationship...
In fact some work can't be done at all under these hormones influence, like intellectual work. Your body prepares you for action, not for reflexion.
I've faced that issue. Not totally solved it. I found some help in a YouTube channel on ADHD in a couple of videos from "How to ADHD" titled "wall of awful." That gave some good ideas to make it past that point and start.
Just waking up at the same time every day and kickstarting yourself (practically no matter what time you end up going to bed) seems to work absolute wonders.
> A few times, particularly today, I felt lazy and run down, but I got out of bed anyway and told myself that I'll at least walk
This is also used with people who suffer from some kind of limb paralysis. You first start to tell them to wiggle the extremity of their finger (or toe). Then part of the of the finger. Then the whole finger. And so on.
Basically the concept is the make every single effort leading to the end result as effortless and frictionless as possible.
I wish I had this written down somewhere, but I don't; perhaps it's well known enough that someone else can correct my mediocre paraphrasing:
A Marine once told a civilian that everyone is programmed to believe their 80% remaining is their 0% remaining, and the courageous work of realizing that limitation is what unlocks the extreme feats that someone so well physically and mentally conditioned can undergo.
I'm not military, don't know anyone military, and have no particular leanings, but I have always been absolutely invigorated by the apparent, quiet force that service members project. It's inspirational even devoid of agenda.
It's primarily because in the military you get used to the ideas that you are in big trouble if you are not on time and also that you cannot fail (failure may mean death). That plus the quiet confidence you gain in yourself and others helps add some of that extra sauce.
In general people have way more capacity than they believe. Our worlds are built around immediate, short term gratification. I find that doing something everyday that's uncomfortable helps me stay out of the short term gratification trap. Getting up early when the alarm goes off, exercising, intermittent fasting, BJJ, are all things that at times are hard and uncomfortable, but they are a constant reminder of the capacity that we as humans have to excel.
You just end up getting tired and going to bed early that night. If you can make yourself do it, it’s a lot more effective to fix sleep schedules by pulling instead of pushing.
> everyone is programmed to believe their 80% remaining is their 0% remaining
Of course. When I do my reps in the gym, I know I could do more if someone put a gun to my head. I stop because I don't want to hurt myself, not because I cannot do anymore. When I feel sleepy in the evening, I am fully aware that I could go 48 more hours without sleep if I really needed to. But would it be a good idea? No, it would not be.
And even if we ignore obvious health risk of pushing yourself to the limit, in general, I would rather be more comfortable than more productive. There are always things to be done, so why stress about doing a little bit more?
Then it sounds like you don't actually believe you're at 0% remaining. What your parent is saying, and what I've observed myself, is that most people really believe they physically cannot (say) run any further.
> most people really believe they physically cannot (say) run
Do they? I would expect that when you "physically cannot run", it means you are collapsed in a pile on the ground unable to stand or move. People might say things like "I cannot run another step", but that is not the same as actually believing it. That said, unless you are very fit and very young, it might not be a good idea to get yourself to the point where you actually cannot run anymore. Unless there is a tiger chasing you or something.
Without getting philosophical about the definition of "belief," the point I took away was that people have a hell of a lot more left than they normally admit to themselves, even when the bar is merely "I'd be injured" rather than "I literally cannot." This may be more true for cardio than weights.
I have fallen over on the ground after 20 miles of running in both legs my quads and hamstrings were cramping. I got up and ran another 10 miles. Didn't have any choice, either run 5 miles back to the check-in table or 10 miles to finish the race.
A cramp is not being at your limits. A good stretch and your ready to continue.
This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKWWRS9CpTY is being at your limits. But I'm willing to bet that a tiger would make her body remember that maaaybe there is actually (a lot) more energy left to keep going.
Usually that %80 left at their %0 left is done with fairly horrendous form, which leads to injury. Try putting perfect form on that condition and most would fail soon after.
People ask me why I take cold showers regularly, post to my blog daily, and never miss my burpee-based twice-daily calisthenics over more than a decade (approaching 150,000 cumulative burpees).
Among many reasons, developing the skill to do what I said I would is tremendously valuable. Without these habits, I lacked discipline and thought to avoid tricks, which I thought of as short-term cheats. The habits developed discipline in me and revealed that developing tricks is the way to make habits work.
I have no doubt that the most accomplished people use tricks to do their most valuable activities -- athletes, politicians, business leaders, whatever.
Things like if I want to run but am feeling lazy, I put on my running shoes and clothes, which means I'll eventually run. To put on the shoes is trivial, but it works to get me on a run, however long.
Before I lift weights, I mop the floor since some of my exercises put me on the ground. Mopping is easy and makes lifting automatic. For some reason, once I mop, I automatically transition to lifting.
Starting my burpees took years of experimenting on what would avoid my standing there intending to start, but not starting. Counting down or up didn't work. What worked was committing to starting on the next breath. Now I pace all my calisthenics by breath.
These are examples of little things I found that if I do them, I do the big things. As far as I can tell, the way to find tricks that work is to keep doing the activity until a trick that works emerges.
For me that doesn't work because then I learn that "yeah you say just walking but we both know it will end up in running."
What works instead is I promise I will walk. And then I actually only walk even if I feel like running. That way you will trust yourself. If I say "ok i go to the gym 30 mins. just for a quick training." Then even if I'm in the flow at minute 30, I stop and go home. Next time I remember that and I know that if I say 30 it will be 30 and not more, that creates a trust in yourself that you're not trying to trick yourself into doing something you don't want to.
Huh? You have a weird "relationship" with yourself.
I never did not trust myself anymore if I did more reps than I "promised" myself before.
Would a child ever grow distrust against her parents if she changes her mind and wants to do more dishes than initially asked for and they allow her to do it?
I guess I'm in the middle. Sometimes "just walking" is actually just walking. Sometimes it turns into running. I have no expectations about where the initial push eventually leads, which makes it easier to take that initial push.
I prefer this approach as it ultimately results in a greater output than forcing myself to stop at some prior agreed point I made with myself but would now prefer to renegotiate.
This approach is interesting to me as it would have not crossed my mind.
I view goals I set myself as a minimum I of what I want to do. Doing more, because I feel like it, is a bonus that I think adds to the feeling of accomplishment.
I guess the main difference is that I actually want to do these things and just have to overcome the hurdle of starting while you describe them as "doing something you don't want to".
I think the problem you have is that you don't know which 'you' is making the decisions. Let's call the 'tricking' you 'You' and the one you are tricking 'Body-You'. Then here is how the conversation goes:
You: "Time to get up and run."
Body-You: "Oh hell no. I'm tired. Plus we did a good job yesterday. And we have a lot to do today. Also, we don't want to over do it do we?"
You: (sighs) "Fine. Let's at least walk for 30 minutes."
Body-You (sighs): "Ugh. Fine."
10 minutes of walking pass.
Body-You: "This feels great! Let's run."
You: "Okay."
...
First notice that You said, "at least." You is not lying. If, at minute 30, Body-You is like "Ugh, still no," You can capitulate.
Second, notice that it is Body-You that makes the decision to turn it into a run. In your version, Body-You never gets what it wants. Both times You has to control the situation. The first time, to start the run, the second time, to enforce a more-or-less arbitrary contract for the sake of the contract, even though both parties want a new contract.
I feel the same thing Valakas is describing. Which of the "you"'s is remembering the next time, "yeah but 30 minutes that's not how it went last time"?
(also, I don't think body-you would say "we have a lot to do today"?)
Body-You will say anything to get what it wants, including “We don’t have time.” I’m calling it Body-You but, at least for me, it’s really a collection of parts of my mind that are against the action.
As for the “lying”, Body-You knows it is not a lie but doesn’t care. If You believes You is lying, Body-You is more than happy to use that as yet another excuse.
Personally I call these two people the "Planner" and the "Doer". Neither of them start out with bad intentions, but only one of them has to actually do things in the present moment, so resentment can definitely build up between the two.
I’ve not heard of that perspective before however I’m not going to discount what you’re saying because everyone’s psychology is different.
For what it’s worth, most people I know feel pride and a sense of accomplishment if they’ve found motivation to do more than they promised themselves. But as I said, everyone’s psychology is different.
The verbal voice in your head is rationalizing. Don’t think. Just do.
(If you want a good resource that synthesizes a bunch of modern psychology research relating to that suggestion into a single, entertaining non-fiction book, see “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior” by Leonard Mlodinow [0]).
This is one of the most important empirical "truth" I've heard, now from several prominent people in the field¹.
You are, in effect, prioritizing (self-)discipline over short-term performance, learning or productivity gains.
I would surmise that your bodymind² has in effect realized, learned, that compound effect is the best strategy for long-term results; and/or that systems are better than goals. The invariant requirement of any long-term strategy is enough discipline to execute it.
“Never, ever break promises to yourself.” is the real lesson to learn and never forget. The usual rationale goes like this:
Imagine two people, one who always does what they said they'll do, and another who never does what they said. How do you feel about the first one? Trustworthy? Reliable? Someone you can count on? Now what about the second? Empty-worded? Unreliable? Unworthy of trust? Lazy, big mouth, etc?
Now consider how "you" (the "it", your third eye observing yourself) is going to feel about "you" (the "I", the one who carries all the emotional weight) if you behave like person #2 above?
You need to be able to trust yourself. And this is based on facts, not words, just like how you judge anyone else.
That's why it's important, critical, to pause and ponder before making any promise to yourself: make sure you won't break it, make sure you'll be excellent with your own word. Be person #1, the reliable, the trustworthy, for yourself. Give yourself the facts to back that belief, because words, well, they're empty, and you're the only one who can't lie to you.
[1]: Off the top of my head, you hear it from Stephen Covey in the 7 habits (honesty with yourself), you heard it from Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie well before that, you heard it more recently from Brene Brown (in Daring Greatly and her TED talk on vulnerability and courage). Iirc, don't quote me on these, check twice, but the gist is correct.
[2]: Bodymind = body + mind (no duality), i.e. "all of you", your being, your brain and all the things that connect it to the real world including its own, your entire body
Then get ultimately crushed by the world because actually nobody but you cares about the results if the gain is small.
Or you get a pat on the back, that's it.
Ultimately you might also find that the end result was totally not worth the effort sunk.
Or worse, there's no way to compare if you gained anything.
There are only relatively few ways that do change life significantly and most of them do not take intense effort or self discipline.
(I'd love you to provide examples to the contrary. I know of two: training new skills when they matter and training children and pets.)
> “Then get ultimately crushed by the world because actually nobody but you cares about the results if the gain is small. Or you get a pat on the back, that's it.”
You mean that the world will only care if the gain is big, if I achieve "a lot"? If so, I question:
- Should I condition my happiness to something external that I can't control? (what the world thinks of me, of what I do/did)
- How can I ever be satisfied if I only compare myself to others? There's always someone better than me. Shouldn't I compare myself only to myself, past-me against present-me? Shouldn't I be making gifts to future-me by doing now what will make me happier / better / whatever?
- Why does "nobody care if the gain is small"? Can't a small subset of the world, e.g. people close to me that I know and who know me, care about me as I care about them? Isn't that enough, most days of our lives?
> “Ultimately you might also find that the end result was totally not worth the effort sunk.”
That would be the logical reaction of someone who only cared about the end result, and failed to reach their goal. But what if you care about the journey, the mission, the doing? What if "the effort sunk" was welcome, what if it was pleasure, growth, a good bone to grind for you? What if it made you happy?
Then you would find that the effort is well worth it every single day, because it is its own reward, because there is no further expectation beyond today's step, or because you learned to decorrelate your happiness from the satisfaction of expectations that lie beyond your control, your actions, your thoughts.
> “There are only relatively few ways that do change life significantly...”
Agreed.
> “... and most of them do not take intense effort or self discipline.”
Strongly disagree, with every fiber of memory and experience I can find. You would need to substantiate that, because it's an extraordinary claim... If one puts neither "intense effort" nor "self discipline", very little happens, and certainly not "significant life change". Quite the exact opposite is required for growth IME.
One key to all this is to stop thinking in terms of "goals" and instead design "systems" whose outcome gets you closer to where you want to go. In effect, building a vehicule and giving it a direction (or rather, recognizing that you are a vehicule, and take charge, assume full control). Whenever you put energy into this thing, it goes that way, your way, and you along with it (i.e. personality changes, evolves). Even your happiness, it's not a distant or abstract "goal", it's a very real, very practical system that you design to fit your life, values and aspirations. It produces your happiness whenever activated.
The ultimate goals are superb and never attained. The practical systems are tiny Legos but they work every time, and become huge in time.
And when you die, a "happy life" is often judged by a dumb sum of all moments, of all the little things, little bricks... That's the compound effect we get to see, but only retrospectively, unless we're told about it and we train ourselves to see the world in 4 dimensions, before it becomes too obvious/late.
The grandparent didn't say, "I'll just walk", but rather "I'll at least walk."
Give yourself permission to only walk. That way, if you later feel like running, you can still get that extra benefit as well, without breaking some promise to yourself, and if you just feel like walking the whole time, no problem there, either.
Note that if this relationship of explicitly limited commitments with yourself is preeminent, your goal should be "go out exercising each day" rather than "run 5km each day".
> because then I learn that "yeah you say just walking but we both know it will end up in running."
And this doesn't motivate you? For me it's actually more motivating: I only have to muster enough willpower to start walking, not to run, but I'll end up having a good workout anyway.
That’s only a motivation if you viscerally believe running to be an enjoyable activity. I have found that when starting something new, the most important (and hardest) thing is to stop while I’m still having a good time so that I associate that good feeling with the activity instead of the pain that comes from overdoing it.
I've read in the book Atomic Habits by James Clear that the solution is to only do that much time and actually just stop right afterwards, even if you want to do more. Therefore, it's at most 30 min rather than at least. This teaches you rigor and in fact motivates you more because now you know it's not actually a trick.
"""
The Two-Minute Rule can seem like a trick to some people. You know that the real goal is to do more than just two minutes, so it may feel like you’re trying to fool yourself. Nobody is actually aspiring to read one page or do one push-up or open their notes. And if you know it’s a mental trick, why would you fall for it?
If the Two-Minute Rule feels forced, try this: do it for two minutes and then stop. Go for a run, but you must stop after two minutes. Start meditating, but you must stop after two minutes. Study Arabic, but you must stop after two minutes. It’s not a strategy for starting, it’s the whole thing. Your habit can only last one hundred and twenty seconds.
One of my readers used this strategy to lose over one hundred pounds. In the beginning, he went to the gym each day, but he told himself he wasn’t allowed to stay for more than five minutes. He would go to the gym, exercise for five minutes, and leave as soon as his time was up. After a few weeks, he looked around and thought, “Well, I’m always coming here anyway. I might as well start staying a little longer.” A few years later, the weight was gone.
"""
I have been experimenting with something similar, and in my experience how you think about "promising yourself" makes a lot of difference. If I thought that I'm going to row 2k instead of 5k, I am not telling myself that today I am going to row less, but that it's okay to just do 2k instead of 5k if I feel like it.
I did not make myself the promise of rowing less, but the promise of allowing myself of settling for less. That way, if I feel like doing extra 3k (or even an extra 0.5k) I can, but I don't feel forced. That seems to have worked very well for me, but I've also noticed that it works as long as I remain in the flow. After my vacation, for example, it took me a couple of weeks to bring me back to that mindset.
You need to be more truthful with yourself, then! :P
My "I'll just do 10 reps" always comes with an implicit "but I can do more if I feel like it." Then if I'm feeling strong and have another rep or two left, I'm allowed to do them.
Looks like most of use discover this rule one way or the other. I had a simple rule, where I would try not to give up for the smallest period of time I could hold on to a thing.
Often that is like the next 5 minutes. Like I just tell myself, we are not trying to do this the whole year or even years. Just the next 1 hour, and then tomorrow we will try again.
In 2014, I ran 5km every morning. 356 days. I hated every single one of these runs. I did get better at it, but I did not end up enjoying it. Certainly was never "feeling amazing".
Eventually dropped the habbit. Now spending more time in the Gym and on the Bike.
I'll go ahead and fire off a recommendation to find a muay thai gym that has dedicated conditioning classes and some cool people. I wish I would have discovered it 10 years earlier when I started running cross country.
Running, for me, was the Runescape of sports. Very grindy, with very little room for me to use my mind.
First, I'm not saying this would've helped you (I don't know), it's just a story and perhaps someone who is like me gets inspiration from it :)
If I hadn't created three excellent mix tapes (that I still use to this day!) when I started running 10y ago, I might have ended up in your boat. I didn't care much for the running, but having a burn out meant I shouldn't be on the computer as much, and I didn't know what to do with the time. In the beginning I was having fun with how far into the mix I could get before running out of breath (I didn't sprint or anything, just no physical condition to speak of), and adding to the mix as I got further. At some point I decided perhaps I needed another mix with alternating running and walking parts[0]. I adjusted the BPM to my natural running gait. Added a little intro for when I leave the house to when I'm on the street. Everything was chosen with the idea that I wouldn't get bored during running, so it was a sequence of the "best", most uplifting, powerful parts of each track, each lasting about a minute (or 128 beats maybe). Between runs I kept optimizing the mixes for a while, improving the splice points and crossovers etc. Unfortunately I lost the original Ableton project files to a fire. Thankfully I had shared the mixes to friends, who could at least provide me with the mp3 renders.
One day I'm going to add a fourth mix :) But I don't use pirated software any more, and not being a professional musician I can't really justify the cost of buying Ableton (or Bitwig, which at least runs on Linux). Unfortunately I've found no other free (or cheap) software that comes close to the ease with which you can simply splice and beat-match audio clips. Or just navigating and zooming a large audio file. Audacity is there when you really need something done, but it's hardly a smooth workflow.
[0] it's as if psytrance and psydub were made for this, one is exactly half the BPM of the other!
I read a book called 80/20 running, that pointed out that most of us run most of our runs too fast. It made a huge difference in my training, to run at (say) 60% of my pace most of the time instead of 90% as most of us do. I felt better, I enjoyed it more, it created less anxiety to start a run, I recovered faster, and I could log more miles per week.
I feel when you push yourself too hard it will make you look less forward to your next workout. Best to end on a good/interesting note similar to how TV episodes do - making you want to come back for more.
This helps me get to the gym every morning at 6am. I go every morning, even if I don't plan on working out and just stretching. The simple 8 minute walk to the gym is the main blocker, so once this step is done it's easy to start working out anyway.
Sometimes when you feel the worst when starting, your performance is best. And professional athletes have documented the reverse, ca. a fresh pitcher getting knocked out in the 1st.
Fitness routines and work are not the same thing. The former is IMHO pretty much a pointless waste of time (nothing bad will happen if you skip one day) and work usually just needs to be done eventually or there are serious consequences. The former thus needs self deception, while the latter just requires realization/visualization of its necessity and of the dire consequences.
Wow, that's some low effort post... I'm not lazy and I exercise when I need to wait/kill time or when I feel like it (e.g. I run instead of walking somewhere), I don't wastefully allocate extra time for it.
Your argument is a bit contradictory: I can skip one day of work just like I can skip 1 workout ("nothing bad will happen").
However, I am pretty sure there are dire/severe consequences to not maintaining your physical health over time [1], just like there are if you do not perform at work.
If nothing happens when you skip one day of work, perhaps you should work less or be fired. In important jobs, not working stalls processes and sometimes even endangers lives.
This feels like grasping at straws here: How do you handle acute illness? Do you just "push through" and potentially get your coworkers sick, all while cranking out sub-par work?
Further, should I be fired or reduce my schedule if I am hospitalized after a car-accident, or require a surgical intervention like the one I 'skipped' 7 days of work to have done?
...The logic of your argument just really doesn't compute, but I may just be missing something.
I have never in my life regretted working out, but I regularly regret not working out. It is so weird to me that, despite hundreds of trials of this dynamic, by brain still hasn't totally internalized this lesson and I end up having to tell myself "dog it if you want to, just show up", then proceed to have a great time.
I regret running all the time. There are wild swings in the difficulty of doing the same run depending on weather, hours of sleep, time of day, what I’ve eaten, and apparently just random chance. Digestive system tends to be unhappy early in the morning, and the times I ignored its warnings and went out anyway were the most physically uncomfortable I’ve ever been.
The lifestyle discipline required to make running consistently tolerable is overall a good thing. But on days when I know conditions are going to make it miserable, I don’t go. I’m not in it for competitive greatness, I’m out there for an enjoyable and sustainable habit.
It’s so amazing how making it easy to get started is basically priming your brain to complete the task.
I’ve gotten fit by hanging up a chin-up bar on a spare door frame. When I had a trainer, I was always amazed at what I could accomplish - even on days when I swore I felt dead in the morning - just by getting there and starting. I’ve gotten good at coding by keeping my IDEs of choice in the taskbar and working on small tasks during downtime. I study better and more often when I leave out my notebooks and calculator.
The lower you set the barrier to entry, for a given activity, the better a chance you give yourself to actually complete that activity later.
Without knowing the op’s condition (so take this with a grain of salt), I’d advise against running 5km each & every day as it could wear out your knees, specially running on harder terrain (as most do).
For amateur practitioners it’s good to alternate different activities so that certain muscles get to recover.
Agree but the point was to try a light version of the challenge and you may get the determination to do the full version. Sure, running or any high impact sport can do damage to joints.
Do you have some evidence to back that claim? I run long distances, and whilst I have been given repeated advice of this nature, I have never seen any actual evidence that this is a problem?
However the thing is the group is self selecting, people who experience joint problems stop running or do not run ultramarathons.
(Ex-runners in this study did not in general stop because of joint problems.)
Ultimately, the activity seems safe from standpoint of miles ran.
Crucially, when you tell yourself "at least walk" or "at least one more X" you have to allow yourself to sometimes just walk and not have it have to turn into a secret run.
One thing that really has helped me with e.g. writing an email that I dread writing is to just write a draft that I don't plan to do anything else with than use as a starting point when I write the real email that I won't write until tomorrow. Often the draft is good enough to send after only small edits. Or the writing of the draft have helped me to clarify my thoughts enough, combined with a night of processing, that writing the real mail the next day becomes relativly easy.
My trick to start emails is to add To and Cc last, when I'm happy with the email.
If I add them first, I worry that I'll click send by mistake halfway through my draft (and a secondary worry is that the draft will be full of inappropriate stuff and curse words, which I never add even to drafts, so it's not a rational thought). If I add the recipients first, it also feels like they sit there looking at me expectantly as I write, which makes it harder.
An email not addressed to anyone, but of course with the recipients in mind to adapt the content, makes it easier for me to treat the first version as a draft.
Sleeping on non-urgent emails sounds like an excellent idea, because your view of the issue may change.
This is a good strategy for contentious topics. That said, I would argue that the best thing in this situation to get the task done is to call the person. That way you can hear them, react to them, and the task is done at the end of the call. That said, I don’t know anything about your email, audience, etc so you do what works for you.
My underlying hypothesis is that too many people are afraid of making phone / video calls, but it’s a much better way of getting difficult things done sometimes.
Similar productivity hack that works, shared by Kevin Systrom (Instagram founder):
"If you don't want to do something, make a deal with yourself to do at least five minutes of it. After five minutes, you'll end up doing the whole thing."
Obligatory UT Admiral William H. McRaven Commencement Address[1]
Worth the whole watch, however it’s makes he makes a very compelling argument for making your bed in the morning. I’ll add cleaning as part of the morning routine is also highly effective to get moving.
Three advices given by the article - and many more - was given in "Rework" book (by creators of basecamp). Book worth reading, even though many advices are, well, obvious.
I'm needing this a lot right now for a massive project to deliver at work. I get so tangled up in the mess of trying to make it perfect or thinking that I'm not approaching the problem in the best way that I end up twiddling my thumbs for hours, pretty much doing nothing worthwhile the whole time.
I'll be trying these out tomorrow and see how deprocrastinated I can get before veering off again.
I'm in a similar situation right now, and I've been in this kind of place many times before. I try to keep the seemingly idle time to a minimum, but I also acknowledge that my brain is still thinking about the problem during those times, so I don't beat myself up about it and go for a walk when that happens.
The self-doubt is also normal, and I actively push against it by reminding myself that, while someone that has done this before can likely jump to a good solution right away, it doesn't mean that it's realistic to expect that of myself.
Being tangled in a mess of something you are not an expert in is a normal way to learn. I have to remind myself that this approach worked before and there is no reason to believe that it won't work this time.
I'm going to put these tips to good use today:
I don't know if this is the right module to use for this. It looks like it doesn't do X and Y. Screw it, I'm going to try to get Z working.
I can't figure out the proper way to pass this argument in? Let's just hard-code it for now to get things working and mark it with a TODO.
Pet peeve: when people take phrases intended for one thing and uses them for a slightly modified purpose. I take Branson's "screw it, let's do it" mantra as something entreprenurial, a call to break the rules (and stuff like that). Using it in this purpose feels more like "screw it, let's work even though I'd rather stay in bed", which is different emotionally, and kind of saturates the sayings power.
(Maybe nikes "Just do it" would fit better, but I get that its associations to big corporations isn't as well suited for the startup atmosphere we're surrounded by.)
Especially as the root of that phrase is in really wanting to do something, in the face of overwhelming external pressure to not do it (I think he coined it when launching Virgin Atlantic and noone thought the business plan looked solid).
Our focus on results (and in turn expectations) is completely wrong. The result is subject to million things which are not in our control. The only thing we can do is to do our part as well as possible and enjoy whatever the result there is.
This way one can be as productive as currently possible for him/her and at the same time have no struggles with stress or failure.
If you found the advice valuable, you may also like the two part series [0,1] on procrastination from waitbutwhy. The value there is the detailed analysis of the "just starting" part, why it is hard and how to still do it.
put a coffee on, start the project while the coffee is still brewing, have your first cup as the reward to push you into gear. Those 5-10 minutes will give your brain a chance to frame the essential challenge of the moment.
Here's something that I think works best: Detaching yourself from everything and writing things down. Either a piece of paper or a text document.
Start writing concrete things that need to be reinforced, that are easy to answer and can be connected together. Things like the goal of the software, core modules, what you're working on now, etc. Expand to things like what new features would be nice, how to implement them, etc.
This works better than vague solutions like "do one thing" because where do you start? Writing a line of code somewhere for the sake of it is pointless. Especially if it's bad code, that just makes me feel worse knowing I'll probably have to undo it later because that's usually what ends up happening based on past examples.
Detaching yourself from the work frees you from all the things tying you down that clouds your mind. Taking a moment to reorganize gives you a new thing to focus on, and arms you with purpose which makes it easier to work.
This is also important. Some type of work need to have certain kind of plan of 'What's Next'. Even a simple checklist will do. Maybe some kind of simple month/week plan.
Some may argue that it may leads to overplanning, but I found that randomly do something everyday just for the sake of doing it but didn't move into the direction of your goal made you felt empty in the long run, because all those time you've spent lead to nothing worthwhile.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] thread>Another trick to start sloppy - you might have high expectations of your finished work.
>You want to write a great book, not just a good one. Or create a stellar artwork, or start a great business. >All those expectations can put more pressure on you than you can bear, leading you to avoid it by procrastinating. >Instead, you can escape those expectations by starting deliberately badly.
I use this one a lot. I always heard it called a 'vomit draft'. It really works. It's easier to see how truly terrible thing could be improved than it is to just start working from a blank slate.
"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
That matches "the quantity trumps quality" idea above more closely in our industry.
Consider someone with little to no experience with programming trying to build a single app and planning it out and refactoring and refining it continuously, compared to constantly creating and archiving multiple toy prototypes of the same app and then considering the best among those.
(The app's size and complexity should be commensurate to a single clay pot in a ceramics course.)
It requires the students to actually try to make something of quality, sure, but only to the same degree that the students in the original (apocryphal) story did- after all, those students could easily have shown up with a pile of baked misshapen clay instead of proper pots.
creating 1 pot using 10 tons of clay = writing 50,000 lines of code for 1 project
vs
writing lots of different projects = creating lots of different pots.
I say this because I've worked with a lot of inexperienced developers that commonly have a stack of half finished projects, or things they've re-written half a dozen times to get the architecture right. I'm my experience you learn a lot by finishing things, and being constrained by previous decisions.
Bonus points if you can get customers relying on your work, nothing motivates like support emails.
It's like order and chaos, what you want is to find a balance that allows you to explore, and leave things a bit open so they can also be extended, but also sound and precisse enough so that it actually works, and does the job.
The point is to get over that mental hurdle of achieving perfection, which blocks a lot of people from getting started.
It's an appealing idea because it's counterintuitive, and here on HN were are absolute suckers for contrarian ways to outsmart the herd. But we have been given no reason to think it actually works.
> The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.
From: https://lithub.com/ray-bradburys-greatest-writing-advice/
... incidentally, also Neil Gaiman's advice in the Masterclass lectures.
The reason it works so well for writing is, as Neil Gaiman points out, that if you work for a year on one story, you've probably practised starting a story 52 times. But you've still only practised finishing a story once. And getting into the habit of finishing things is one of the most important habits to get into.
>The Sales’ also pushed for a punishing first-take philosophy, which Bowie found enticing. No overdubs unless necessary for guitar solos, no synths (the old Queen boast), and most of all, no lyric rewrites. The band would go to lunch and return to find that Bowie had written out a complete provisional lyric for whatever song they were working on. But that was as far as he was allowed to go: he was forced to keep to his first instincts. Sometimes this worked out, sometimes it didn’t (see “Crack City”).
>Given these strictures, Bowie and the band stuck to music “that didn’t have too much orchestration about it,” as Bowie said in a 1989 interview. “If it got too chordy and arranged, it wouldn’t be anything what we wanted to do. The structure had to be as loose as possible so that we could improvise.” Rather than reworking songs, they just kept cutting more, with as many as 35 to 40 pieces coming out of the sessions. So most of Tin Machine is basic blues-centered rock, with the average song having no more than five chords: it lacked the harmonic ambiguity and structural games of Bowie’s older work. While the record often worked on a song level, with 14 tracks on the CD version, the album was a wearying listen. Few records are as exciting in miniature and as draining as a whole as Tin Machine.
from here https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/heavens-in-here/
> Plan to throw one away. You will anyway.
Even if the initial thing is so terrible it needs to be redone completely, at least you figured out what you don't want. All while getting into the habit of doing the thing.
Or I decide to "refactor" a piece of code, and then spend days thinking about how I'll "refactor" it, rather than just doing it or not doing it in the first place.
It could, but there's no reason you couldn't start with a terrible outline instead of diving right into prose. The point is just that when you see something your brain will stark noticing all the ways it sucks and it gets things going.
It's just an avenue for having a discussion about what we actually want to say.
[1]: https://wiki.c2.com/?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast
It is known that buying and going through the 4 week anti-procrastination program from deprocrastination.co instead of doing real work for 4 weeks helps you not procrastinate. Dothraki choir: "it is known".
* Just get started.
* Don't give in to "feel good".
* Use implementation intentions to put the trigger for action in the environment.
* Procrastination is an existential issue. One who is procrastinating is not getting on with their life.
* Approach goals are better than avoidance goals.
Later I used the same idea for studying every day, started with a few minutes and worked it up slowly. Eventually, I was able to concentrate for long periods of time. That sense of momentum and progress is very encouraging.
Think of all the benefits you would get from practicing 95% of the days marked, compared to a much lower percent without the chain. Don't let the 5% or 1% stop you.
As an aside, this is my view of veganism. When I talk to people who say they can't go vegan because they'd miss cheese too much, or kebab, or whatever, I suggest they go vegan and keep eating cheese or kebab. 95% is a lot better than nothing!
That said, I can't do chains. I get anxious after a while carrying a long streak, and will either conveniently forget a day and mess up the streak (and feel relieved), or decide during a streak that I'll stop at 30, or 100, or whatever, just to give me permission to get off the treadmill. I don't like when enjoyable things turn into a chore.
Some apps are nice and let you go back and add marks even if you forgot to do it on the day. Some apps, like Duolingo, let you unlock tokens that protect your streak if you miss a day. But some apps are really strict, which can be annoying if you finish something after midnight and realize that you just broke the chain. My wife had that with a writing app where she finished exactly at midnight, which counted for the next day and her streak was broken.
So if I did a chain, I'd use a text file, or a paper, or send myself an email a day logging that I did the task. I wouldn't trust an extremely rigid app, because, as you say, there can be legitimate reasons why you miss.
This is pretty much how I'm doing veganism, every meal I make at home is vegan. But I eat the occasional cheese and kebab. But I find myself replacing those with vegan/vegetarian alternatives more and more.
Also do vegan > vegetarian > normal food when going out. Without it becoming annoying. It's really uncommon to find a restaurant with vegan options around here, but vegetarian is pretty common.
I personally don't do chains either, as I really prefer being able to do things spontaneously. I approach the tasks I set for myself that way as well, so I end up doing things like squats when I have some dead minutes to fill in a day.
Basically doing anything is better than doing nothing, and often times you find yourself doing more than what you set out to do.
I find this system very effective without being frustrating. Even when you skip a day, you have to at least open the app to buy a new freeze.
It's not about that first day to fail to do the thing. It's about the day after.
That is to say, of course your chain will be broken. And probably for entirely rational reasons! The trick is really internalizing that inevitability and not beating yourself up over it. You have to learn to say, "Yes, I got derailed for this period; that's OK, and now I'll get back on track."
I remember at one point having 'walk x steps' and 'read x minutes' as daily tasks, so I'd often be walking around the house while reading just before midnight to make sure I kept my streaks alive.
* https://streaks.app/ (iOS only)
- Streaks that track Apple Health data. Really nice job with the integration. I use this for tracking daily calorie, macronutrient, and workout goals.
- "X times per week" streaks. I take rest days from working out, so it's nice to have an abstraction that doesn't treat them as failures or breaking the streak.
I guess I should go give you guys a good app store review now. Thanks for making this!
I wish they'd open up the screen time tracking because I'd like to have a Streaks task of keeping my daily screen time under a certain level.
Structured procrastination is also a good one:
http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
The basic concept is that work is procrastination of something more important.
There is nothing like having a big writing deadline to get the cleaning done!
Then, when I see the small task, I feel motivated to do it just so I can have the pleasure of checking it off my list. By that time, I'm usually on a pretty good roll and keep working.
It all starts with the lazy "I'll just throw the easy stuff into the dishwasher", but momentum takes over. Listening to interesting podcasts help!
At least I'm getting efficient at bad habits ;-)
I tend to do it with complete lack of thought.
Make sure the thing you have to do is something you want to do. While you can procrastinate on the things you're truly interested in, ultimately you're more likely to follow through with the things that interest you than the other random tasks that require doing.
Writing that design doc, report, or review at work? Meh. I drag my feet until I'm the last person in the office and I have to finish.
That obscure side project that really interests me? Hell yeah. It's called hyper-focus, and those with ADHD know what it's like.
Check out my Github streak. I think I've got the world's fastest faster-than-realtime CPU-only neural TTS and Voice Conversion (VC) systems with multi-speaker embeddings outside of Google. And I wrote an entire data ingestion, cleanup, and curation engine to build massive data sets for training. A year ago I didn't even know what any of this stuff was, and now I can't pull myself away from it. Building is magnetic and addictive, but it's not the thing I need to do.
Sometimes you can pivot the energy you have from a desirable task into an undesirable one. I tell myself I can't work on the fun thing until I get the mundane one done. It's a hack that doesn't always work.
I want to structure my life around things I want to do to the exclusion of all else. I think I'm starting to get there. I've trimmed a lot of unnecessary things from my life.
My dream is to get rich enough doing desirable side hustles that I can pay people to take care of all the undesirable tasks. Delegation to achieve efficiency.
I can work like there is no tomorrow on random side projects. I just wish I could redirect all that focus and energy at will into the areas that need them.
I can't. So I have to become what interests me.
Does it help you at all to have external recipients of your work, or does it not factor in at all in what gets done?
It helps me if I tell someone else "I'll send you the report today", because it makes me more accountable. I'll probably delay it until panicking at the end of the day, but I will at least hammer something out and send it off. Or worst case finish it tomorrow morning, after having started, but having to leave work the day before, which is still better than postponing even longer.
For me to do tasks, I need to reach the "Screw quality and completeness, I need to send _something_!", which usually turns out to be plenty good enough based on feedback. I just need to find someone to promise sending the result to for my more important tasks.
It helps, because eventually people will start to call you and inquire about the thing you promised them. This of course causes anxiety.
Eventually, after spending enormous amounts of energy on riding that guilt wave some work gets done, typically at night.
Basically all things ADHD has are downsides.
So true.
It can even backfire: sometimes you end up just browsing reddit or doing some other nonsense thing for hours just so you can avoid doing the mundane task. At the end of the day you wonder how you wasted an entire day without doing the fun side project or the mundane task.
>My dream is to get rich enough doing desirable side hustles that I can pay people to take care of all the undesirable tasks.
Hiring somebody to do the cleaning at home seems to help quite a few people. People in tech probably earn enough to be able to afford to just hire someone to clean the apartment/house once in a while. It's probably a better option than to either hate yourself for it or to just not clean for a long period of time.
How do you push yourself to get the right things done now, that is, until you get rich enough to do otherwise?
I'm basically conning myself into liking the task :)
The last two weeks I made it a goal to run 5km every morning. A few times, particularly today, I felt lazy and run down, but I got out of bed anyway and told myself that I'll at least walk. The next thing I know I'm running and feeling amazing and on to set one of my better times.
The point: When you tell yourself "just one more game" or "just one more post", or "just one more video" and end up doing 3-5 hours more, do that with your other tasks too! "just one line of code", "just one tutorial", "just one rep", "just one line of reading/writing".
We all have this amazing mental tool that we've been honing for years, the tool of self deception. Time to use it for good and not evil.
Copied from: [0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/cdir3g/trick_...
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-running-blog/20...
If run as fast as you can, I agree that you should take breaks.
Really transformed running for me. It went from something I was terrible at, which hurt and I hated, to something I merely hated.
I have found myself paralysed by procrastination at times (normally when whatever project I'm currently on has lost its initial zing).
My strategy has become: Just do one task today, that's all. Doesn't matter how small. Leave the office feeling like you've done something productive.
My thought process then becomes, OK, let's do my one task early then I can browse Reddit/HN/wherever.
And of course, what happens is that that one task gives the ball its initial push, and becomes 2 tasks, or 3, or more.
It doesn't always work, but it helps take the expectations and guilt off yourself, and gives you space to breathe.
As a lifelong realist (= pessimist) this is one of those things I struggle with too.
It also works for food crave btw..
It will block the time waster websites you configure and will block them for you until you've ticked off the list. It's simple but effective for catching that mindless ctrl+t -> reddit reflex.
I feel like this is just a way to make yourself feel better about doing basically nothing. Before you implemented this, were you really at risk of spending an entire day doing absolutely nothing productive whatsoever?
[0] - https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break-eboo...
It was very frustrating time because knew exactly that I wanna do it. Like I like doing something like it and saw clear benefits doing it.
I tried everything from the procrastinator handbook.
Ritalin helped immediately
(There are other effective ways to exercise and keep healthy than running. Find one that you find fun.)
You don't have to clean the whole house, you can just clean one room. You don't have to clean an entire room, you can just clean a bookcase. You don't have to clean the entire bookcase, you can just clean one shelf. You don't have to clean the entire shelf, you can just put one thing back in it's place. You don't even have to put it back, just go over and pick it up. ...
You can keep on going if none of those seem doable, right down to something like wiggling your big toe, but most people would probably at the very least find putting a single thing back doable.
And I've used an example of something that is worth doing but most people don't find fun, but there are plenty of examples of things that are both fun and worth doing that people still procrastinate (probably mostly occurs in mental health sufferers, but that was the entire point of my original comment).
Be careful of the problem on the opposite side of the spectrum: your body might not be able to keep up with your motivation.
I think your getting downvoted as you answered x when they were discussing y.
Once you're up to running 5k three times a week (which is roughly where the plan leaves you) you can limit both volume and max distance increases to 10% per week.
I used to run 5-6 times a week with a usual volume of 50k/week so adding in another 1-2 gentle 5k recovery jogs to do a minimum of 5k every day wouldn't be difficult at all. But that's an entirely different prospect to just going out and trying to run 5k every day (although some people do exactly this and get away with it) with minimal existing running fitness or conditioning.
Few years later I'm a softbody IT guy looking to shape up, and decided to follow the reddit C25K sub -- it killed my shins. Bad splints, had to cut out running for a while. I got there eventually but I think 60 minutes of biking or eliptical + leg workouts did more for me than the C25K (as written) did.
As a general comment, shin splints is the classic beginners too-much-too-soon running injury. Experienced runners get a whole range of other injuries, but rarely shin splints. The only time is after they take a break and try and come back too quickly (notice the pattern).
By running slowly a lot, your body has time to learn how to run efficiently and safely simply by trial and error. By not overdoing it, you give your body time to recover from any errors made during the "trials", without injury.
Incidentally, lot of slow running is also a great way to build up base endurance, so it is not wasted time, and you will "recoup the investment" later, when you start running longer distances.
Shin splints suck, though. Even experienced runners get them from time to time. Probably best to switch it up a bit, include swimming or bicycle instead of some runs every now and then.
You should always consider starting again tomorrow, if it hurts.
You don't have to conquer the world in a day. This is a long fight. One needs to rest, recover and try again.
I had to stop playing basketball with the guys when my knee couldn't keep up with my joy of playing.
Now I feel like going out almost all the time instead of thinking "ooh, wow I was sooo tired the last time I was on the trail!". Made it much much easier to keep a routine of getting out regularly. Also my pace is much more even, and actually not much slower in total on my "slow" runs, since I never have to stop and rest.
We get as conditioned as Pavlov dogs. If every time you get out mountainbiking you suffer, you create an anchor mountainbiking = suffering.
if you do it a lot, it gets reinforced a lot, and your body subcounciously will oppose it.
I mean you did not start the activity. This trick works only when you have already started the activity.
I suggest that next time you become serious about it: There is no way you could let yourself not doing the minimum activity BUT you can leave after you have done your minimum.
For example: Your minimum activity is going out and running for a minute. You do it, period.
Your mind will try to put excuses, like "I don't have time", but because the activity is minimal you don't have to think about that, you spend less time doing it than thinking about it.
Another suggestion: Only complete minimal activities first, and feel good about it,until you get used to going out each day.
Going out for running just minute over 30 days is much much better than running kilometers one day, being exhausted, feeling pain( and guilt) the next.
After 30 days you will have established a routine. It becomes harder not going out each day than staying home.
The important thing is establishing the routine. Do not try too hard. If you do you will create pain and condition your body against it.
Unless you don't work like that. Maybe I'm weird, but if I promised myself "just one minute" and I trick myself into doing more minutes, I'm going to remember that next time I'll tell myself "just one minute". I might say "just one minute and then see how you feel". But again, there shouldn't be anything ridiculous about it if I just do one minute, because who is being ridiculous next time they say "just one minute" ?
I should've expanded on my original comment a little more. I'm currently on a run streak of 130 consecutive days, including a motorcycle crash and international long haul flights.
One of the most frustrating things is I have no idea why I have managed it this time but not before.
The other failure mode I have is procrastinating leading up to the activity. Yesterday I woke up at 6am with the intention of going for a run like I had managed to do for the past 2 weeks. After much procrastination I finally managed to go at 3pm.
I think I've been quite successful over the years in doing exercise but the lack of insight into my habits and motivation is maddening....
The main idea is to leverage the brain's sensitivity to cooperative team goals or competitive goals, plus some gamification. And it works!
Disclaimer: the main founder is my brother, I was involved in the very first steps of the project, and I'm currently on a freelance mission with the company. And the team is looking for a freelance or a permanent Typescript coder in Paris.
I know it's tough, especially when a giant like Strava that gamifies the hell out of sport barely does anything, but for the sake of giving an example, a cheater from my company basically took a tcx from someones marathon and uploaded every other day with shifted timestamps. I know it because they used Strava and with summit I saw the gpx from their workouts and the lat/long data was always identical. Also from averaging like 10k a week, he shot up to 200k, magically.
At least I managed to get some people's points revoked because they tagged each other on Strava for every workout even if only one/two of them were actually working out.
Now if I couldn't stalk on them on Strava there's absolutely no transparency on Squadeasy and I wouldn't have been able to point anything out to the team. These guys for sure are setting their profile private next year to prevent people from calling them out (since they did mid competition last year, actually).
> Typescript
So frontend, it certainly needs work too. If there's any work foreseen in backend, especially crushing cheaters, let me know.
Squadeasy already deals with a number of scenarios, though not exactly this one. Thank you for your concise yet insightful report. I keep these ideas: cheating with multiple uploads of time-shifted TCX, transparency in third party trackers helped.
I just opened an issue in the internal tracking system with your text and a few lines. The team will notice it tomorrow morning (it's 10:30pm here in Paris), yet we have quite a backlog already so don't hold your breath.
To answer your last sentence and Typescript, the freelancer or new hire will be working on both front (user profile web-app) and back (bugfix, toolset migration, API evolution). Any contact welcome.
If it wasn't for the wrong job I took next and winter killing the morning sun I'd still be doing this. Actually now that spring is here, I feel the need. The need for .. walk.
Realizing that really helped.
Upon reflection (sometimes I get to that point sooner, sometimes later) the problem is usually that the task is too vaguely defined to start working on it.
I ended up just doing something, anything, even if it's wrong. Then I could correct it and do it properly. But sitting there fretting about it being hard and vague wasn't making any progress
I was promoted to a team lead position in Autumn of 2019. Things went well, if hectic and stressful, for the first couple of months. But the slower period in December really did a number on my motivation and focus, and my anxiety kicked in big time.
Now I have a huge problem doing actual work, and so often get distracted into spending hours on technical, interesting tasks that aren't work related. It doesn't help that I have a million different interesting projects that I'd like to mess around with.
And the work to-do list gets longer, and longer. And my anxiety gets worse and worse.
I hope you find a solution to your issues. Good luck!
With other things, usually it’s best to run to google, or send an email to your boss or professor, or just pull out a notepad and start jotting things down. Sometimes it also helps to take a quick break - exercise, take a shower, etc - and then come back.
Although the irony is that I’m typing this comment out as a form of procrastination when I should be pulling out my laptop to do some remote work...
Anxiety can be measured, your body segregates hormones in order to change the state of your entire body in order to prepare for this danger.
Unfortunately danger for primitive humans are different than current society dangers. It usually prepares you either for a fight or a flight (running away as fast as possible).
If you get too anxious for example fighting for your life or your children, you can break your bones and don't feel pain.
But this natural response is of no help if you feel that you will lose your job, or break your relationship...
In fact some work can't be done at all under these hormones influence, like intellectual work. Your body prepares you for action, not for reflexion.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Uo08uS904Rg
This is also used with people who suffer from some kind of limb paralysis. You first start to tell them to wiggle the extremity of their finger (or toe). Then part of the of the finger. Then the whole finger. And so on.
Basically the concept is the make every single effort leading to the end result as effortless and frictionless as possible.
A Marine once told a civilian that everyone is programmed to believe their 80% remaining is their 0% remaining, and the courageous work of realizing that limitation is what unlocks the extreme feats that someone so well physically and mentally conditioned can undergo.
I'm not military, don't know anyone military, and have no particular leanings, but I have always been absolutely invigorated by the apparent, quiet force that service members project. It's inspirational even devoid of agenda.
Of course. When I do my reps in the gym, I know I could do more if someone put a gun to my head. I stop because I don't want to hurt myself, not because I cannot do anymore. When I feel sleepy in the evening, I am fully aware that I could go 48 more hours without sleep if I really needed to. But would it be a good idea? No, it would not be.
And even if we ignore obvious health risk of pushing yourself to the limit, in general, I would rather be more comfortable than more productive. There are always things to be done, so why stress about doing a little bit more?
Then it sounds like you don't actually believe you're at 0% remaining. What your parent is saying, and what I've observed myself, is that most people really believe they physically cannot (say) run any further.
Do they? I would expect that when you "physically cannot run", it means you are collapsed in a pile on the ground unable to stand or move. People might say things like "I cannot run another step", but that is not the same as actually believing it. That said, unless you are very fit and very young, it might not be a good idea to get yourself to the point where you actually cannot run anymore. Unless there is a tiger chasing you or something.
This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKWWRS9CpTY is being at your limits. But I'm willing to bet that a tiger would make her body remember that maaaybe there is actually (a lot) more energy left to keep going.
Among many reasons, developing the skill to do what I said I would is tremendously valuable. Without these habits, I lacked discipline and thought to avoid tricks, which I thought of as short-term cheats. The habits developed discipline in me and revealed that developing tricks is the way to make habits work.
I have no doubt that the most accomplished people use tricks to do their most valuable activities -- athletes, politicians, business leaders, whatever.
Before I lift weights, I mop the floor since some of my exercises put me on the ground. Mopping is easy and makes lifting automatic. For some reason, once I mop, I automatically transition to lifting.
Starting my burpees took years of experimenting on what would avoid my standing there intending to start, but not starting. Counting down or up didn't work. What worked was committing to starting on the next breath. Now I pace all my calisthenics by breath.
These are examples of little things I found that if I do them, I do the big things. As far as I can tell, the way to find tricks that work is to keep doing the activity until a trick that works emerges.
It is still self deception.
I never did not trust myself anymore if I did more reps than I "promised" myself before.
Would a child ever grow distrust against her parents if she changes her mind and wants to do more dishes than initially asked for and they allow her to do it?
So the trick I guess is managing which part of your inner monologue is the child and which is the parent.
I've been experimenting with telling myself "now that I'm at the gym, I'm really enjoying it, I'm really grateful that you dragged me out."
I prefer this approach as it ultimately results in a greater output than forcing myself to stop at some prior agreed point I made with myself but would now prefer to renegotiate.
You: "Time to get up and run."
Body-You: "Oh hell no. I'm tired. Plus we did a good job yesterday. And we have a lot to do today. Also, we don't want to over do it do we?"
You: (sighs) "Fine. Let's at least walk for 30 minutes."
Body-You (sighs): "Ugh. Fine."
10 minutes of walking pass.
Body-You: "This feels great! Let's run."
You: "Okay."
...
First notice that You said, "at least." You is not lying. If, at minute 30, Body-You is like "Ugh, still no," You can capitulate.
Second, notice that it is Body-You that makes the decision to turn it into a run. In your version, Body-You never gets what it wants. Both times You has to control the situation. The first time, to start the run, the second time, to enforce a more-or-less arbitrary contract for the sake of the contract, even though both parties want a new contract.
(also, I don't think body-you would say "we have a lot to do today"?)
As for the “lying”, Body-You knows it is not a lie but doesn’t care. If You believes You is lying, Body-You is more than happy to use that as yet another excuse.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/fire-light.html
Loong but great read
https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_mas...
For what it’s worth, most people I know feel pride and a sense of accomplishment if they’ve found motivation to do more than they promised themselves. But as I said, everyone’s psychology is different.
It might be better for your narrative to be that you're only gonna walk and see how you feel.
(If you want a good resource that synthesizes a bunch of modern psychology research relating to that suggestion into a single, entertaining non-fiction book, see “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior” by Leonard Mlodinow [0]).
[0]: https://psychcentralreviews.com/2016/subliminal-how-your-unc...
You are, in effect, prioritizing (self-)discipline over short-term performance, learning or productivity gains.
I would surmise that your bodymind² has in effect realized, learned, that compound effect is the best strategy for long-term results; and/or that systems are better than goals. The invariant requirement of any long-term strategy is enough discipline to execute it.
“Never, ever break promises to yourself.” is the real lesson to learn and never forget. The usual rationale goes like this:
Imagine two people, one who always does what they said they'll do, and another who never does what they said. How do you feel about the first one? Trustworthy? Reliable? Someone you can count on? Now what about the second? Empty-worded? Unreliable? Unworthy of trust? Lazy, big mouth, etc?
Now consider how "you" (the "it", your third eye observing yourself) is going to feel about "you" (the "I", the one who carries all the emotional weight) if you behave like person #2 above?
You need to be able to trust yourself. And this is based on facts, not words, just like how you judge anyone else.
That's why it's important, critical, to pause and ponder before making any promise to yourself: make sure you won't break it, make sure you'll be excellent with your own word. Be person #1, the reliable, the trustworthy, for yourself. Give yourself the facts to back that belief, because words, well, they're empty, and you're the only one who can't lie to you.
[1]: Off the top of my head, you hear it from Stephen Covey in the 7 habits (honesty with yourself), you heard it from Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie well before that, you heard it more recently from Brene Brown (in Daring Greatly and her TED talk on vulnerability and courage). Iirc, don't quote me on these, check twice, but the gist is correct.
[2]: Bodymind = body + mind (no duality), i.e. "all of you", your being, your brain and all the things that connect it to the real world including its own, your entire body
Ultimately you might also find that the end result was totally not worth the effort sunk.
Or worse, there's no way to compare if you gained anything.
There are only relatively few ways that do change life significantly and most of them do not take intense effort or self discipline. (I'd love you to provide examples to the contrary. I know of two: training new skills when they matter and training children and pets.)
You mean that the world will only care if the gain is big, if I achieve "a lot"? If so, I question:
- Should I condition my happiness to something external that I can't control? (what the world thinks of me, of what I do/did)
- How can I ever be satisfied if I only compare myself to others? There's always someone better than me. Shouldn't I compare myself only to myself, past-me against present-me? Shouldn't I be making gifts to future-me by doing now what will make me happier / better / whatever?
- Why does "nobody care if the gain is small"? Can't a small subset of the world, e.g. people close to me that I know and who know me, care about me as I care about them? Isn't that enough, most days of our lives?
> “Ultimately you might also find that the end result was totally not worth the effort sunk.”
That would be the logical reaction of someone who only cared about the end result, and failed to reach their goal. But what if you care about the journey, the mission, the doing? What if "the effort sunk" was welcome, what if it was pleasure, growth, a good bone to grind for you? What if it made you happy?
Then you would find that the effort is well worth it every single day, because it is its own reward, because there is no further expectation beyond today's step, or because you learned to decorrelate your happiness from the satisfaction of expectations that lie beyond your control, your actions, your thoughts.
> “There are only relatively few ways that do change life significantly...”
Agreed.
> “... and most of them do not take intense effort or self discipline.”
Strongly disagree, with every fiber of memory and experience I can find. You would need to substantiate that, because it's an extraordinary claim... If one puts neither "intense effort" nor "self discipline", very little happens, and certainly not "significant life change". Quite the exact opposite is required for growth IME.
One key to all this is to stop thinking in terms of "goals" and instead design "systems" whose outcome gets you closer to where you want to go. In effect, building a vehicule and giving it a direction (or rather, recognizing that you are a vehicule, and take charge, assume full control). Whenever you put energy into this thing, it goes that way, your way, and you along with it (i.e. personality changes, evolves). Even your happiness, it's not a distant or abstract "goal", it's a very real, very practical system that you design to fit your life, values and aspirations. It produces your happiness whenever activated.
The ultimate goals are superb and never attained. The practical systems are tiny Legos but they work every time, and become huge in time.
And when you die, a "happy life" is often judged by a dumb sum of all moments, of all the little things, little bricks... That's the compound effect we get to see, but only retrospectively, unless we're told about it and we train ourselves to see the world in 4 dimensions, before it becomes too obvious/late.
Give yourself permission to only walk. That way, if you later feel like running, you can still get that extra benefit as well, without breaking some promise to yourself, and if you just feel like walking the whole time, no problem there, either.
Note that if this relationship of explicitly limited commitments with yourself is preeminent, your goal should be "go out exercising each day" rather than "run 5km each day".
And this doesn't motivate you? For me it's actually more motivating: I only have to muster enough willpower to start walking, not to run, but I'll end up having a good workout anyway.
""" The Two-Minute Rule can seem like a trick to some people. You know that the real goal is to do more than just two minutes, so it may feel like you’re trying to fool yourself. Nobody is actually aspiring to read one page or do one push-up or open their notes. And if you know it’s a mental trick, why would you fall for it?
If the Two-Minute Rule feels forced, try this: do it for two minutes and then stop. Go for a run, but you must stop after two minutes. Start meditating, but you must stop after two minutes. Study Arabic, but you must stop after two minutes. It’s not a strategy for starting, it’s the whole thing. Your habit can only last one hundred and twenty seconds.
One of my readers used this strategy to lose over one hundred pounds. In the beginning, he went to the gym each day, but he told himself he wasn’t allowed to stay for more than five minutes. He would go to the gym, exercise for five minutes, and leave as soon as his time was up. After a few weeks, he looked around and thought, “Well, I’m always coming here anyway. I might as well start staying a little longer.” A few years later, the weight was gone. """
From https://jamesclear.com/how-to-stop-procrastinating
I did not make myself the promise of rowing less, but the promise of allowing myself of settling for less. That way, if I feel like doing extra 3k (or even an extra 0.5k) I can, but I don't feel forced. That seems to have worked very well for me, but I've also noticed that it works as long as I remain in the flow. After my vacation, for example, it took me a couple of weeks to bring me back to that mindset.
My "I'll just do 10 reps" always comes with an implicit "but I can do more if I feel like it." Then if I'm feeling strong and have another rep or two left, I'm allowed to do them.
Often that is like the next 5 minutes. Like I just tell myself, we are not trying to do this the whole year or even years. Just the next 1 hour, and then tomorrow we will try again.
Eventually dropped the habbit. Now spending more time in the Gym and on the Bike.
You clearly fell into the latter camp.
Running, for me, was the Runescape of sports. Very grindy, with very little room for me to use my mind.
If I hadn't created three excellent mix tapes (that I still use to this day!) when I started running 10y ago, I might have ended up in your boat. I didn't care much for the running, but having a burn out meant I shouldn't be on the computer as much, and I didn't know what to do with the time. In the beginning I was having fun with how far into the mix I could get before running out of breath (I didn't sprint or anything, just no physical condition to speak of), and adding to the mix as I got further. At some point I decided perhaps I needed another mix with alternating running and walking parts[0]. I adjusted the BPM to my natural running gait. Added a little intro for when I leave the house to when I'm on the street. Everything was chosen with the idea that I wouldn't get bored during running, so it was a sequence of the "best", most uplifting, powerful parts of each track, each lasting about a minute (or 128 beats maybe). Between runs I kept optimizing the mixes for a while, improving the splice points and crossovers etc. Unfortunately I lost the original Ableton project files to a fire. Thankfully I had shared the mixes to friends, who could at least provide me with the mp3 renders.
One day I'm going to add a fourth mix :) But I don't use pirated software any more, and not being a professional musician I can't really justify the cost of buying Ableton (or Bitwig, which at least runs on Linux). Unfortunately I've found no other free (or cheap) software that comes close to the ease with which you can simply splice and beat-match audio clips. Or just navigating and zooming a large audio file. Audacity is there when you really need something done, but it's hardly a smooth workflow.
[0] it's as if psytrance and psydub were made for this, one is exactly half the BPM of the other!
At 5k your body is only just about warmed up - I never really enjoy a run until after the 5k mark, it gets easier after that point
> lazyjones
Ya'll gonna take fitness advice from the lazy guy?
However, I am pretty sure there are dire/severe consequences to not maintaining your physical health over time [1], just like there are if you do not perform at work.
1 - https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/about-physical-activity...
Further, should I be fired or reduce my schedule if I am hospitalized after a car-accident, or require a surgical intervention like the one I 'skipped' 7 days of work to have done?
...The logic of your argument just really doesn't compute, but I may just be missing something.
Hopefully, you accept the negative impact on your work as reasonable under the circumstances.
If there is none, why do you "work"?
The lifestyle discipline required to make running consistently tolerable is overall a good thing. But on days when I know conditions are going to make it miserable, I don’t go. I’m not in it for competitive greatness, I’m out there for an enjoyable and sustainable habit.
I’ve gotten fit by hanging up a chin-up bar on a spare door frame. When I had a trainer, I was always amazed at what I could accomplish - even on days when I swore I felt dead in the morning - just by getting there and starting. I’ve gotten good at coding by keeping my IDEs of choice in the taskbar and working on small tasks during downtime. I study better and more often when I leave out my notebooks and calculator.
The lower you set the barrier to entry, for a given activity, the better a chance you give yourself to actually complete that activity later.
Indeed, same reason why some people sleep with their gym shorts on so they are already dressed for exercise in the morning.
For amateur practitioners it’s good to alternate different activities so that certain muscles get to recover.
However the thing is the group is self selecting, people who experience joint problems stop running or do not run ultramarathons. (Ex-runners in this study did not in general stop because of joint problems.)
Ultimately, the activity seems safe from standpoint of miles ran.
If I add them first, I worry that I'll click send by mistake halfway through my draft (and a secondary worry is that the draft will be full of inappropriate stuff and curse words, which I never add even to drafts, so it's not a rational thought). If I add the recipients first, it also feels like they sit there looking at me expectantly as I write, which makes it harder.
An email not addressed to anyone, but of course with the recipients in mind to adapt the content, makes it easier for me to treat the first version as a draft.
Sleeping on non-urgent emails sounds like an excellent idea, because your view of the issue may change.
My underlying hypothesis is that too many people are afraid of making phone / video calls, but it’s a much better way of getting difficult things done sometimes.
* be clear about what you are doing, ie. what is the desired outcome/end goal (especially important when delegating or receiving a delegated task)
* be very specific about the next(physical) action - break it down as much as you need, just to get started
There can be some unconscious emotional reasons for procrastination, but that's another matter :)
Similar productivity hack that works, shared by Kevin Systrom (Instagram founder):
"If you don't want to do something, make a deal with yourself to do at least five minutes of it. After five minutes, you'll end up doing the whole thing."
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/the-5-minute-hack-insta...
He is a black swan. Britain has only one Richard Branson and that is Richard Branson.
The only company closely associated with the US is Virgin Galactic, but it hardly a success. Yet.
Worth the whole watch, however it’s makes he makes a very compelling argument for making your bed in the morning. I’ll add cleaning as part of the morning routine is also highly effective to get moving.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pxBQLFLei70
I'll be trying these out tomorrow and see how deprocrastinated I can get before veering off again.
The self-doubt is also normal, and I actively push against it by reminding myself that, while someone that has done this before can likely jump to a good solution right away, it doesn't mean that it's realistic to expect that of myself.
Being tangled in a mess of something you are not an expert in is a normal way to learn. I have to remind myself that this approach worked before and there is no reason to believe that it won't work this time.
I'm going to put these tips to good use today:
I don't know if this is the right module to use for this. It looks like it doesn't do X and Y. Screw it, I'm going to try to get Z working.
I can't figure out the proper way to pass this argument in? Let's just hard-code it for now to get things working and mark it with a TODO.
(Maybe nikes "Just do it" would fit better, but I get that its associations to big corporations isn't as well suited for the startup atmosphere we're surrounded by.)
This way one can be as productive as currently possible for him/her and at the same time have no struggles with stress or failure.
[0]https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti... [1]https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/how-to-beat-procrastination.h...
Start writing concrete things that need to be reinforced, that are easy to answer and can be connected together. Things like the goal of the software, core modules, what you're working on now, etc. Expand to things like what new features would be nice, how to implement them, etc.
This works better than vague solutions like "do one thing" because where do you start? Writing a line of code somewhere for the sake of it is pointless. Especially if it's bad code, that just makes me feel worse knowing I'll probably have to undo it later because that's usually what ends up happening based on past examples.
Detaching yourself from the work frees you from all the things tying you down that clouds your mind. Taking a moment to reorganize gives you a new thing to focus on, and arms you with purpose which makes it easier to work.
Some may argue that it may leads to overplanning, but I found that randomly do something everyday just for the sake of doing it but didn't move into the direction of your goal made you felt empty in the long run, because all those time you've spent lead to nothing worthwhile.