Ask HN: Again: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma

Not really. The only way to actually get things done is to do them, and that will never change. Planning and daydreaming is very satisfying and feels much easier than actually doing, but it's a dopamine trap. Plain old setting a schedule and applying self-discipline is the simplest way forward...

I think it was Warren Buffett who said, “Really successful people say no to almost everything.”

That seems to have been true of successful people from every time period that I’ve read about.

Now I have all of that.

Decisions are often made for me as I prioritize meeting the demands of higher minimum income and time spent with family and kids.

For better or for worse, growing older and gaining extra responsibilities acts as a forcing function. You need to prioritize more ruthlessly.

Choosing what to spend time is harder! The opportunity cost increases as you have less time available to spend on yourself. Choosing, therefore, becomes a bigger gamble.

If you’re relatively free in time, you should come up with a framework on making decisions on what to work with. It will depend on your goals - making a business, learning an instrument, learning skills to further your career - whatever. Make a goal and act in ways that furthers your goal.

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

If you peel away all the controversial things about scrum in software development you are left with "finish what you start". It's also a common practice in cafes and restaurants.

- figure out what you want - figure out how to get it

First point is the hardest. Since most of us don’t really know what we want. We might describe an incomplete picture at best. Hardly a clear vision. So start with what you don’t want and go from there.

Second point is about organizational skills. Research, plan, execute, iterate. Rinse and repeat.

Don’t forget to be kind to yourself. The world is has enough without an enemy within.

I’m currently reading The One Thing [0] and it’s actually making a lot of sense. Plan on giving it a try!

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16256798-the-one-thing

It's not about quantity, but the quality of work you do. Less with good quality is better than more but bad quality.

So yes, the dilemma is real ;) Whoever wants to do everything comes up with dirty works, which could be counted as nothing !

- Travel around the world solo for years

- Find a wife, get married & have kids

- Build my dream website (https://dustinbrett.com/)

- Get a job in Big Tech as a self taught developer

It's been 10 years since I started living this way and it's worked out so far. Before living this way I had no real plans, just hopes.

As for the former, I recommend taking notes diligently while studying/learning new topics and filing these notes appropriately where you make consulting the original material be it YT videos, online tutorials/posts, articles or books unnecessary since your notes are more than enough and are kept up-to-date accordingly; adding, removing or archiving as you deem necessary.

As for the latter, I struggled with this lately but I think that I made some progress to overcome this roadblock by making snap decisions on the spot by resorting to the old trick of "heads or tails" everytime I start to overthink a solution, and for more overwhelming alternatives, I built a custom randomizer that's fed a list of choices, and then spits the decision that I should make, and I comply with its wish enthusiastically every time.

I wouldn't say that this is the most efficient decision making process out there but for me action is always far better than inaction, and I don't think that perpetual state of deliberations and contemplation was any better as it hindered any progress to be made in the name of picking the most rational or efficient course of action to be taken which it didn't seem to emerge no matter how hard I tried to think a way out of it.

https://sive.rs/donkey

25 year old me was stupid. He wanted things I don’t want anymore. I’m glad I wasn’t too effective at actually getting them.

Understanding progress vs activity, and 3 types of effort.

Rock metaphor: The goal is to deliver a big, shiny rock to the top of the mountain. You can (1) move the rock, (2) polish the rock, and (3) other distractions.

* Push the rock up the hill. You have to keep pushing until you get to the next flat land. If you stop whenever you’re interrupted, the rock will roll back down to the bottom of the hill. Requires a chunk of undistracted time (Cal Newport Deep Work, etc).

* Polish the rock. You can engage in this type of effort well, even with frequent interruption. Polish for 10 minutes, answer a phone call, polish another area, go to lunch, polish more, repeat until finished.

* Other stuff. Sometimes required maintenance (paying bills, paperwork, etc), but often unhelpful distraction.

Getting more tactical:

* Bucket selection - pick the right buckets, and right number of buckets (not too many, you can only move a few rocks each day)

* Move rocks in each bucket consistently (no starved buckets)

Summarized: Move rocks, in a few areas, that are important to you (not to other people)

To illustrate, my buckets are: day job, freelance work, trading, family, and health. Every time I’ve been “off” in life, one of those buckets has been starved (workaholic, neglect family), or I’ve had too many buckets, or one bucket explodes (family health crisis, newborn child, etc), or efforts become distracted and while much activity happens, no rocks move.

Most of this I derived from The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, originally published in 1966 (so nothing new since 2015).

On the opposite end, there are specialized applications, and in between there are application areas with specialized tools, infrastructure, software components and whatnot.

You're simply not going to be an expert in every application area. Realize that, and stop trying!

Buckle down and specialize. Be an expert in some subset of the abstract core, and its realization in some choice of platforms and tools that you follow, and beyond that, pick just a few application areas. Have a main area or two, and then some fringe areas that you are interested in that are little bit on the side.

You can switch application areas in mid-career. Being good in one application area is better for being able to dive into another than just knowing a smattering about many areas without any expertise.

Going far and deep in any application area as a developer will give you the skills to be able to work on almost anything.

Any code base in any application area has lots of code that is not specifically in that are which needs general expertise and experience; you can make meaningful contributions to those areas almost from the get go.

In my university time, I was crazy into OS programming: systems programming on Unix, and kernel level. I was also crazy into computer graphics. Alain Fournier (RIP, cancer) tried to award me 110% in CS414 at UBC, but he reported that the antiquated mainframe wouldn't take the value. Compilers and languages interested me, but not as much as today. I used Lex and Yacc regularly, and in one contract project I created a billing system with a custom query language. I had an interest in implementing data structures as well.

There were things I was not into, like for instance databases or anything having to do with AI, or programming language semantics (other than taking one compiler construction course, for which I lacked prerequisites); when some buddies started on about what they were doing with, say, Prolog, I didn't follow that. I was impressed, but my plate was full of my current interests to be actually distracted and derailed. I had this intuition that life is long, and there will be plenty of time to get into other things, and that as long as you're constantly learning, you're preparing yourself for the stuff you don't yet know.

The backlog weighs heavily on my current efforts. So starting from scratch ditches the burden. Then, once I've made actual forward progress, I can go back to the archives and figure out how to work the new stuff in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33683106

1) Pick one or two things at a time to get good at. When you start feeling like you've pretty much got that nailed, then pick some other way to challenge yourself. Ideally one intellectual challenge and one physical challenge.

1a) This becomes much easier under pressure. For example, instead of just "oh I want to learn something" it needs to be in the service of some larger goal. Maybe it's for your job, maybe it's for something you're doing as a hobby, but it needs to be a Project, not learning as an end in itself.

2) Incremental progress is the only kind of progress that exists. Make incremental plans. Celebrate small victories.

It really comes down to just doing and let the act of doing find your way.

[0] https://tinyhabits.com/

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_facilitation

[2] https://doubleapp.xyz/blog/how-to-body-double

For example to become a successful entrepreneur (top), you need to understand how to run a startup (mid), raise money from investors (mid), understand your users (mid), and that comes from understanding your cash flow (low), cold mailing tens of VCs (low), interview a user (low).

Deciding and committing to a top goal is the hard part in my opinion. It means to abandon the other (incompatible) goals you'd like to pursue. But focus is the best way to go forward.

"Wanting to have done something" and "wanting to DO something" are very different. E.g. "I'd like to be able to play Claire de Lune on piano", vs the deep work of becoming intimately familiar with every single note and phrase of the piece. The latter necessarily involves getting obsessed for a while; you don't be able to do it if you don't find something deeply stimulating about the specific piano piece.

A lot of the things I've "wanted to do" I really just wanted to have done—I wanted to be able to do something, I wanted to know if I was capable of it. But I didn't really want to do it. I didn't really care. I just thought I was capable of all kinds of things and wanted to delight in verifying that. It had a sort of superficiality to it—my reasons for wanting all these things were not compelling enough to drive me to actually do them.

(Especially faced with the immediate rewards offered by video games—games and things like that change the "weights" on your internal reward system; you can feel this if you just think about the game, it feels like everything else shifts out of focus and the anticipation of the dopamine prize expands to fill your view.)

When you're in school it's relatively easy to do whatever you're told, and it doesn't really matter if you care about it. But accessing this sense of internally-generated energy that can drive you towards things that are important is a completely different skill, and you can't force it.

So either:

* figure out what you deeply, truly want to DO, and do that (which may be completely different from the things you enjoy imagining HAVING done)

* or, think deeply about what you want to "have done", and figure out why it excites you, and focus in on that, activate your curiosity for it, and let that draw you in

The "problem" is that it's something that you can't see in others, whereas wealth, assets etc. are for everybody to see and so people start competing to get those things.

There lies the difference however, to call yourself a competitive person you must be able to compete without ever knowing how you are faring against others, that's the ultimate form of competition. That's also how life begins. A Spermatozoon doesn't know and won't ever know the position of other spermatozoa, if they are ahead, behind etc. in the race to get to the egg. They only know that they have to swim as fast as they possibly can.

Likewise humans can't possibly know the amount of time that other humans are spending living in the moment, but, like sperm, you don't need to because your goal is to get as close as you can to 100%

2) For projects too, doing a little bit is better than failing to do a lot. Ditto, I've made a lot of progress on projects, especially icky ones like minor house repairs (but also e.g. personal coding projects that became hard to do quickly after my early 20ies due to other things) by committing for 10-30 minutes at a time and accepting that it might take me a year to finish.

3) Life-scale timing. That's something I really wish someone told me when I was 25, although it probably only applies to exercise. I got serious about training for climbing (my hobby) when I was 34... that is too late, and now I'm 38 and I get injured easily from intense training. I wish I did that earlier and did whatever I did then, now :)

4) Getting rid of hassles and not introducing new hassles that are not worth it. Something as simple as choosing devices/tools/appliances/building materials - how much maintenance worry does it require? How much manual labor does it add vs a more expensive/less pretty/... option? To where to live - how long do you want to spend driving around places/etc.? Feynman's bio where he describes putting on chains and his thoughts about that were very instructive for me. Then, larger choices, like I am the type of person who would enjoy skiing, but I find skiing to be logistically complicated and generally a giant hassle, so I can find similar hobbies, like climbing, with much less hassle and cost. But also larger life decisions, after looking at tons of people (from close friends/family to coworkers) with kids I choose not to have them, it's just not worth it, your whole life becomes one project with (for me) very low reward. Ditto about buying a house - an interesting tradeoff for me, cause I'd prefer semi-rural living with condo-level hassle level, but they don't build condos in rural areas ;)