HN Explorer

Ask HN: I lack Motivation. What should I do?

36 points by rammy1234 ↗ HN
I am unable to focus and I am not interested to code or learn new thing. I used to enjoy these activities. I love figuring out inner working of tools I use. Now Iam try to ride the wave. I’m a father of 2.

37 comments

[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 77.3 ms ] thread
matai_kolila
If you're not interested, why force yourself? It's okay to let things go that no longer give you the joy they once did. Maybe a break will rekindle that spark, but maybe it won't!
rammy1234
Thanks. I keep starring at my laptop to try a quick idea but unable to focus. I should try a break
fuzzfactor
Things that might motivate you might be at different ends of the spectrum like fulfillment vs fear.

When experiencing the sea, riding the waves would be the thing you would want to be comfortable with, and you could just drift with no problem.

OTOH an attractive shore or perhaps sharks closing in from the deep could be what it takes to motivate anybody, to head in about the same direction either way.

It's not usually that extreme, but it's a thing.

Maybe revisit some physical activity that both reduces worry and provides joy at the same time, which could lead you in a direction where you really look forward to continue moving that way more.

hindsightbias
Parenthood is so stressful and time consuming it is kind of amazing people have time take on new interests. One coworker had some luck with raspberry pi projects with the kids, new learning for both of them, but not all his kids had the same interests.
rammy1234
My 2nd newborn is 7 months old. Is it contributing.?
pickitupsnake
This. 3 and 1.5 here. If you are pulling your weight (or more) at the homefront then there is no time/energy for much else beyond staying afloat.
nickd2001
For sure! In my experience, rock bottom parental tiredness is at 3-4 months old due to cumulative sleep deficit at that point and baby doesn't sleep through yet. So only a few months on from that, I think you're beating yourself up about work. Its fine to feel less motivated about work as a Dad of young kids. Speaking as a Dad of older kids now, over time you develop efficiencies at home and at work, and in the end you can become good at both doing plenty enough to please your employer, whilst keeping hours of work sensible to enable family time too. So then motivation and focus is no problem. Providing for a family can be a good motivator. (caveat - this requires working for a decent reasonable employer and having a job role that matches your skills well. this can sometimes involve a job move or two to get to)
giantg2
I've feel similar. I've been quiet quitting at work. For me, I feel the biggest demotivational factor is that my career has never built off of previous roles/tech. It's always start over in a new stack. All the knowledge is basically thrown away. And also that management has screwed me over.
rammy1234
This is so true for me as well. Accidentally I have been thinking the same. Is it software or things I work on, I don't have a compounding effect on my knowledge. I dont build on the previous learnings. Is that a reason for my demotivation ? Is this common or we are exceptions ? How do we all deal with it ?
trevyn
It sounds like you have someone in your life who is telling you to do things that you don’t want to do, and for some reason you’re listening to them.

Sounds pretty demotivating.

giantg2
That sounds like a boss or work in general.
nickd2001
"It's always start over in a new stack." - I think you yourself have control over this, and may need to be ruthless. My career has been long, successful, OK not stress-free, but also not breaking point. Its been decently financially rewarded, some would say I could've earned much more but there-in lies stress and time famine. I'm content. I attribute this partly to vigilance about skillset. Find skills that are here to stay - Deep Linux, bash/zsh/whatever shell command line programming, Python, nowadays docker, AWS, devops, Go possibly worth a look. I shunned the MS stack - vendor lock-in and constantly being re-invented. I was wary of JS libraries - content flux and short shelf life. Be wary of obscure vendor specific stuff where that vendor can get bought out or change course. Tech with a big open source community is good long-term. And fun :). You may need to move jobs to get what you need. But I'd say, take ownership of skills, don't let people push you around, being forced to keep learning new stacks can lead to burn-out and impression of being weak performer. Don't let 'em do this to you. Even if you go to a new team with different tech, you can often find a way to use your base skills and not let them atrophy. Whenever I was on Windows I'd install Cygwin and do shell scripts instead of dos or powershell ;). you can do some tricks that solve problems quickly in weird ways that impresses people, I'm sure you know that. Good luck :)
aliqot
stop using 'quiet quitting' as a real term. it's bullshit made up by the media at the behest of corporates who want to pretend the pandemic never happened and that "everything is just fine as long as we have butts in seats".
kingant
Become a PM (product/project manager) at your company if you can. Less stressful.
BirAdam
I highly recommend setting aside time for meditation and physical exercise, follow up by reading books. In my case, reading books related to the field helps.

Additionally, consider any part of your workflow you could automate and then write the software to do so.

For me, these things help.

marcusverus
How much time do you spend on high dopamine activities each day?

High dopamine activities are those that are engineered to pique and hold your interest. Video games, tv, social media, news aggregators, porn, etc.

Our brains are designed to prioritize the most interesting stuff. Back on the Serengeti, that made sense. There wasn’t much novelty, so when you found some, your hardware wanted to ensure that you were able to focus on it long enough to grok it. Will it hurt you? Can you eat it?

Nowadays novelty is ubiquitous. Interesting stuff is everywhere! Learning new things can be pretty interesting, but it will never be as interesting as stuff that’s literally engineered to be interesting.

The solution is to simply (ha!) remove those more interesting but less rewarding options from the equation.

You don’t have to believe me—it’s an easy hypothesis to test. Just quit ALL high dopamine activities, cold turkey, right now. Zero exceptions. In my experience, those relatively boring tasks become attractive again within mere minutes of dogged abstinence from high-dopamine activities.

rammy1234
Interesting, This is great thought. I am uninstalling social apps. Twitter, FB, Insta to start with. I want to see where else I am going to spend time on. Will report back here to this thread to let how it helped. Thanks !!
marcusverus
I hope it helps!

If you’d like to hear more, consider reading Dopamine Nation, the book that turned me onto this line of thinking. It’s a quick read and very enlightening.

renaissance_tea
Neat idea. I’m taking a couple weeks to relax this holiday and will experiment with this.

I’m in the boat where I’m always learning, but get easily distracted since some tech is a huge dopamine hit whereas sitting down and deeply studying something isnt.

Edit: just ordered the hardcover book

rg111
Cal Newport discusses a very similar idea in his book Deep Work.

I recommend reading this book to everyone who are struggling to focus for longer times, or consider themselves chronic underachievers.

This book had a huge influence in my life and getting my shit together.

rammy1234
I am ordering this book. Thanks.
QuantumGood
Change your perspective to success is in all the things I am NOT doing. See avoiding something interesting as making a deposit for your future self.
oshirisuki
get as bored as you possibly can, put yourself in a situation where your only alternative to boredom is doing something that you think you can only do with motivation, figure out what that is, and then don't allow yourself to do anything but that, so if you're not doing that, you should literally look at paint dry, or be in an empty room (completely empty, no bed, no chair, possibly, no lights)

you can "nudge" instead of going cold turkey, set your phone to grayscale, turn notifications off, close social media accounts (or at least uninstall apps), stop binging tv shows (if you do), or watching tv, you probably get the gist of it, make it so that what to you now requires motivation, is the fun option

samarthr1
Do you get sufficient sleep? While i am not in the same boat, life situation wise, I find that not sleeping well causes similiar issues.
rammy1234
Now you say this, not sure. I get around 6 hrs max.
solarized
Been in this situation a year ago. i cure it by creating a new project i haven't done before.

i solve new problem, give support to it, made my user life easier. fixing the bugs.

thats bring my adrenaline back again

jameal
I would recommend starting with the basics: Sleep, Physical Activity/Exercise, Nutrition. I'm sure it can be hard as a father, but doing as much as you can to get these balanced will go a long way. You might also consider your social ties, who in your life (family and friends) do you have a strong connection with?

Then, try introspection. Start a journal and write in it consistently every morning or evening. After awhile you will notice patterns that come up. You may also want to review previous entries to find patterns that aren't immediately obvious. When you find a pattern, journal on it to investigate it further. You will be surprised what you discover about yourself through this kind process. Happy to chat about any of this if it's helpful. Email is in my profile.

mdcds
Consider this angle: what if it's your intuition telling you that whatever you are doing isn't important and you should be focusing your efforts on something else?
Ilasky
I recommend doing things with others. Having a social commitment to an activity drastically improved how well you do them! It’s called body doubling, or social facilitation.

You can use a tool like Double[0] to find others to do these things with if you don’t have people you already know.

[0] https://doubleapp.xyz

logicalmonster
If you see one person trip and fall on the stairs, you might say that this person needs to be more careful about where he puts his feet. If you see 10 people trip and fall on the stairs in the same exact spot, maybe you should start to question if there's a design flaw in the stairs.

This refrain about lacking motivation is something that I think all of us have been seeing more often: to the point where it shouldn't be primarily considered a "you" issue where better sleep/nutrition/etc might be the go-to recommendation, but a blaring alarm bell that something about society isn't really working well.

(The problem of course is that Teams Red/Blue/Yellow/Green all disagree about what needs solving)

potta_coffee
This is 100% right. I and a lot of people I know have absolutely BS jobs. It's difficult (impossible) to be motivated about BS.
thedangler
This might sound harsh but, who cares about motivation. I'm not motivated everyday. But what makes you stronger is doing things when you aren't motivated. But I also believe in what marcusverus mentioned. Also, you do not have to spend hours on a task. Try to do one small thing a day or every other day. Could be 5 mins of learning, coding, or reading.

The other day, I was not motivated to work on my side project. But I needed to know how some small part of an external API worked. I dedicated 5 minutes to reading the docs. That 5 minutes turned into me implementing the whole thing.

You never know where a small bit of work that you do not want to do will take you. Just my two cents.

sunzijie
躲进小楼成一统，浮躁的世界容易迷失自我
potta_coffee
I'm no longer motivated either. I started doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu because I thought having a more balanced life with a hobby outside of work would help. Well, I have become motivated, but only for getting better at Jiu Jitsu. It's like a cult and I'm totally sucked in. But I still don't care about work, side projects, etc. I'm a walking disaster, but I can rear naked choke like a boss.
lakotasapa
Father of a toddler. I feel the same. Ever since becoming a father, I've been severely depressed and lack motivation outside of daily necessities for the family but nothing for myself. I don't mind being selfless but wanting something for myself I miss. I don't have an answer to this problem. I code for "fun" kinda necessary for home managing million pic/vid of the kid. My life isn't at all what it was before the child but then I realize I never really had a purpose in life before then either although I did it all; exercise, eat right even meditate. I don't do any of it now as I am a full-time father unemployed. I'm looking for a reboot of my brain. On particular how I view the world. Currently this very ugly world. Seriously thinking getting the reboot via magic shroom.