Ask HN: Solo developer, what's your recipe to start working?

My biggest key for this is to work on something you enjoy. Find something that you feel is wrong, or too difficult or too cumbersome and solve it technically.

For example:

Problem: There was too much street light at night to sleep coming through my window, so I bought black out blinds. Then I didn't have enough light to wake up in the morning and always felt sluggish.

Solution: I created an arduino sensor to detect morning light (depending on time of year) and then using a motor on the blind cord, it opens my blinds gradually so I have a nice natural wake up.

And it's powered by solar. I literally never need an alarm clock again. (All thought I still set one, good developers always have a plan b)

The first think you might need to fix is your sleep, second is your environment and your eating habits / patterns.

You can only tackle motivation issues when you're not feeling bad.

My trick is to imagine the end-result of what I am currently working on, it pushes me to get the reward of seeing it finished.

Of course it works only if I expect to be proud of the result.

Sometimes the size of the project you’re working on — or looking to work on — can be daunting. At the day job, you have a manager to break down the work for you and pass it around the team in bite-sized chunks.

You have to be that manager yourself — breaking the app or product down into small components and working out what should get done first.

Build a list in a form you’re familiar with — even if it’s a form you don’t like such as Jira. Break it down into large chunks and smaller assignments. Then start on the small stuff, ticking them off on by one.

When you see tasks being completed and the list moving, it builds a sense of momentum and it gets easier to keep going day after day.

If you don't know what you're going to work on or haven't decided what to build yet, then stop what you're doing and work this out first.

My methods:

- Use focus app block every website which can distract me

- Leave a "low hanging fruit". I can start the day with a very small and simple task and have some success in a couple of minutes. Getting into it is easier that way

TDD was designed to get rid of the dread. You don't even need to write full tests, a checklist helps a lot. But proper TDD should work in seconds. Check out the book by Kent Beck, which explains it a lot better than many articles.

The basics of it is red, green, refactor.

Before you write the code, write the test. Autogenerate the code from the test until it compiles. It will be red (fail) because there's no code. This is how you test the test.

Then do the absolute simplest thing to make the test green (pass). Make it really hacky. Once it passes, refactor (clean up your code).

The positives of this is you don't even have to be in flow. It takes seconds to do a red, seconds to go to green, seconds to refactor. You can be interrupted at any time and not lose your train of thought. If you're writing some tough code, there's also some other techniques you can do, like write several tests for behavior and triangulate the code from that.

Backlog grooming.

That is, if you can’t focus, that’s usually (to me) a sign that the “work” available is currently too nebulous to focus on, and you need instead to focus on turning it into more concrete, atomic, actionable items, which you can then focus on doing.

sounds like typical case of burnout.

you could prob use 3+ months off if you can afford it.

you can work doing something else in the meantime if you can/need to.

Unrelated, but eliminating resources is an effective productivity/focus "hack" for me:

- Disconnect the laptop's charger and work on one charge. I used to have a laptop that had at most 2 hours and it forced me to really focus. The progress I made on some projects on a commute is amazing.

- Disconnect from the internet and work only with what you have on your machine. This means no search, no tabs. No distractions. This is great for proofs of concepts/prototypes where you get something done first, then you refine it later. It taught me to look at the code instead of documentation, and it taught me that as good as a documentation can be, there always are things that are not documented but are still there to use. It also made me more familiar with the dependencies of my projects. I never really used StackOverflow much when online (I instead rely on the code, docs, and issues of the project), so your mileage may vary when it comes to removing internet access.

It's also useful to reduce the "activation energy" for work. One of the ways to do that is to exploit the time you don't feel like working to play or explore. A directory named "musings" can help, where you scratch a few itches with snippets of code. If you're distracted in exploration of a new library or concept, make a new file and play with constructs, patterns, APIs, libraries, etc. Just play for play. It's low pressure. You don't need to ship something. It's not work, but it's fooling around and more often than not, it tricks you into getting in the zone without even realizing. The other benefit is that day in and day out, you're building a "corpus", a set of snippets that very often will come in handy when you actually need to do something "work related". When that time comes, you won't perceive the task to be daunting or be clueless, because it's déjà vu. You already fooled around with that concept/library/problem and you have something in your back pocket. It won't be "How on earth am I going to tackle this" and feeling under pressure and overwhelmed, but "Yup, I already played with that. Heck, I even wrote some code to do that. I'll see if I can use it".

Playing when you don't feel like work is a great way to reduce the activation energy when you actually have to work.

Absolutely make a formal schedule and stick to it as best you can. Schedule a day that you would want and be satisfied with. Separate work time and leisure time, otherwise as a solo dev you feel guilty for not working all the time, which makes it harder to start work. Don't expect yourself to "want" to start working all the time, because you won't. That's the mistake a lot of people make. Get started on small, easy tasks that can ramp you up and get you into flow state.

Ex.

8am - out of bed, make breakfast, no phone usage

9am - start working (and make sure you have specific tasks to work on)

12:30pm - lunch break + go for a walk and listen to podcast

2pm - continue working on specific tasks

5:30pm - leisure time + make dinner

7pm - workout

8:30pm - shower, get ready for bed

9:30pm - sleep

My silver bullet: always end the day with a task in progress. Makes it much easier to jump in the next morning because you have a clear place to get started.

Have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what “Resistance” is.

- The War of Art - by Steven Pressfield

Have a creative outlet that is not digital. I paint. You can paint too, a lot of things in fact. Oil on canvas, watercolours, acrylics on miniatures (historical, fantasy, sci-fi, busts). It's a wonderful thing. I don't feel like sitting in front of a computer ever, so I bring this desire to motivate me in building SaaS products that might one day give me a passive income. Build a dozen, if each make 200 a month that's already a good amount. Right?

Hey, for me, what prevented me from starting work is the massive scale of the project I was setting myself out to do. This was totally scaring me into inaction. Like a deer in headlights.

Then someone told me: "just try and see how far you can go". And that completely lifted my inability to start working. I don't really understand the psychological trick there, but somehow it worked well for me.

I'm horrible at work from home. After about a year of brute-force methods to try to get myself to focus, or to improve my impulse control when so many distractions are immediately present lead me to come to accept one signal is above all in indicating I'm on the right track. Telling myself no.

So now, especially in the morning - if I catch myself thinking "just 15 min of YouTube" or "maybe ten more minutes of sleep before working out" I make conceited effort to tell myself "no" and actively do what I completely acknowledge I do not want to do. Ironically I sort of caught on to this signal in college when I was a horrible procrastinator and didn't yet know I was ADHD. It's a bit extreme, but always doing what you're most actively avoiding has started to work for me. Only took me a year of being locked in my apt to figure it out...

Don’t build things for yourself.

Don’t build things by yourself.

Build for specific people, and feel responsible to those people.

Tie your social status into it.

Humans are incredibly social animals, take full advantage of that fact and make sure you’re sailing with the wind on the ocean, not tinkering with model boats in a poorly ventilated bedroom.

"A warlord once stopped at a monastery on his way home from a successful military campaign. He came to visit the abbot who was an old teacher of his.

As the abbot and the warlord sat in the courtyard pleasantly chatting and drinking tea, they were distracted by an argument between a novice and a senior monk. The novice was complaining that the meditation technique given him by the senior monk was ineffective and worthless. "It cannot teach me how to concentrate much less meditate," shouted the novice. "Give me a more reliable technique."

Observing that the argument was distressing his old master, the warlord stood and said, "Please, Master, allow me to help this young man." When the master nodded his assent, the warlord summoned six of his archers.

The warlord then filled his teacup to the brim and carefully handed it to the novice. "Take this cup of tea," he ordered, "and without spilling a single drop, carry it around the entire periphery of this courtyard."

As the novice took the cup the warlord commanded his archers, "Follow him! If he spills a single drop, shoot him!" The archers drew their bows and began to walk beside the novice who, in the next twenty minutes, learned how to concentrate.

Dear Friends, there is no substitute for determination. Enlightenment is a serious matter. It can never be attained with a casual or lax attitude. You must be determined to succeed and you must be resourceful in your determination."

EMPTY CLOUD - THE TEACHINGS OF XU YUN

I would identify what tasks i want to get done. Than split them into pomodoro chunks.

Then I would, and this is the most interesting part, record my pomodoro session using OBS studio.

I love to pretend that i have thousands of viewers that are rooting for me to get the the task done in as little pomodoro chunks that I can.

I set my pomodoro intervals to 50mins focus/ 15 min break, and I would change it depending on current tasks at hand.

>> I know that once I start, I will be productive. But I don't have a recipe to start. If my mood changes, I work. If not, I dont' know what to do.

“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.”

― W. Somerset Maugham

If you don't work, how can you make your living?

A few things that help get me moving:

- Make a pretty fine-grained list of tasks that are likely 10-30 minutes

- Put my task list on an index card or whiteboard

- Maybe use a Pomodoro timer

- Change my physical environment - take a laptop outside, kitchen table, bed (or in olden times, McDonalds, library, mall food court, etc.)

- Overload on caffeine and sugary snacks

- Crank up some loud, angry-ish music

- Dangle a reward for myself (If I ship this app today, I can order another keyboard)

- Grind out a code kata on Codewars or somewhere else

- Before I quit for the day, lay out the first task or two for the morning

- Take a shower

- Take a walk

I used to have the same problem, and now I can barely stop working! I grab the opportunity to start.

What changed? I'm not sure, but I think it's that I'm working on a project that I believe in, that's more challenging to me, and that I feel in more control over. I used to be the guy who got added to a team that was already in progress, but now I'm the guy who was working on this project from the very start, and I'm determined to see it through. I feel more ownership over the project.

How do you get there? No idea, but I just made a proposal for a new project and I've got 4 days to make a prototype. This sort of thing seems to work for me. Maybe you need to figure out what works for you.

Then don’t. Take a break. Too much time doing the same thing will make you ineficient. The old rich people knew this and they had diffent types of activities scheduled. Variety and the freedom to choose.

What are you doing with all this free time you have right now?

If you're anything like the average person, you've probably filled it with _something_. Take a moment to assess if this "something" is worth the time you are spending on it or if you're just using it to pass the hours in the hope you'll get a change of heart.

If you're just using it to pass the hours - aggressively cut those activities out of your life. You'll be surprised how motivating being bored out of your skull can be when it comes to getting work done.

This doesn't always work for me, but I use Firefox with adblockers and other mods for all my personal stuff, unmodified Chrome for media, and Chromium for work. When I need to concentrate I run `pkill firefox`. A better setup would be to have a separate computer for work with no personal apps, games, etc on it.

After many decades of fighting procrastination the most important thing I have learned is that you cannot analyze yourself out of procrastination. You cannot read articles to solve your procrastination problem. The only thing that works is to start the work. I wish there were something else I could tell you, but that's it. Just open the book, open the editor, open the document, whatever.

Now, that said, you may be burnt out, or you may not actually have to do the thing you're putting off. That's different. I'm talking about something you know you have to do (or else painful and undesirable consequences), but you're avoiding starting it. It's a trap. Just find any way to start. Do a bit, don't get down on yourself if you only do a bit. It's better than nothing.