Ask HN: Why can't I get started?

This sounds like me most of the time...

I think half the battle is just forcing yourself into getting things done. Usually once you're into a task it's harder to stop than it was to initially get started.

"I've been a Windows programmer for nearly 20 years, but I desperately want to be good on the Mac" This may be one of reasons. For many people the critical thing about self-motivation is getting some kind of gratification quickly. That's why many big projects are constantly started but never finished. It's their size (and thus delay of gratification) that is discouraging. If I was you I'd start something what will bring you the gratification in a shortest time. Start with technology and problem you know. Get the results asap. Then add a little feature that will require a bit of learning. Just a bit so you'll be still seeing the results quickly. Than make another step and gradually increment the difficulty. You'll both learn and get something done. Also, some usual tips about productivity/time-management (like Pomodoro technique) might be helpful - they're often based on slicing this big-discouraging project into small bits where you get the results quickly.

I know what you mean. I’ve been there too. I’d have these big ideas in my head, but never executed on them for reasons unknown. Or I’d write some ideas down, only to procastinate on them later on.

My solution had everything to do with the proverd ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’. The thing with big ideas (or wanting to learn new stuff, FTM) is that it’s kinda hard to grasp where to start. Once you break it down in simple, little steps, your big idea and the way to finish it will become much more actionable.

Write down your idea, break it down in smaller chunks. The first thing after that is to know what you don’t know. Educate yourself on those, for instance with codecademy for everything related to web programming. Once you’ve mastered that, it’s much easier to see what you have to do.

For your procastination issue, I recommend a time management system like the pomodoro technique.

In the past year and a half, I started at least a different dozen projects. None of them is finished, or in a "correct" state. I would start something, to stop it half way through in order to start something else. I would sit on the computer to work, and start gaming a few minutes later. . .

But lately, within 3 weeks, I popped up my first android application on the store; without any prior knowledge on database, webscrapping or anything else I needed to build the app.

The difference? The users. A friend of mine called me saying : Hey, I do that every morning, and the current way of doing it is a pain. I am sure you can do something for me.

And magically enough, I got motivated, working my arse off to get the first version finished. Since it is on the market, I got 60 recurring users and growing. And this keeps me motivated. I put hours on the project, just because I get feedback.

So the conclusion: Do something that someone asked you to. Get your users first, start working afterwards. Don't be alone.

If you don't have users, then join a project that has already started, in order to code with someone and get some interaction.

I think that for a good 90% of us, what keeps up working is the passion for solving problems others have.

Hope this helps :)

I had the same problems. Until I was kinda forced to do a lot of work in my free time. Well I had to decide, walk away and let three other people down or just do it. That was the start of a couple of month where I worked every sunday for 8 hours on the project. For other people this is maybe easy, for me it was huge.

And the best part was it affected everything else. I started just getting things done I wanted to accomplish.

I did also some reading about willpower, how it works in our brain and how we can train it. It's a really fascinating topic and helped me alot.

Many times I have realized that if you are not able to get something or get something done, its because you are focusing on it too much. And in such cases, I try to go for the tangential focus approach. What I mean by that is that instead of trying to build what exactly you want to build or instead of trying to learn what exactly you are trying to learn, do something else which is tangentially related (kind of difficult to explain this though but you will get it if you get it).

I feel for you, friend. Some days (weeks? months?) I am in the same boat. First off, you shouldn't get down because of this. Software is complicated. I also invested a substantial portion of my career in Windows development. A younger me looked at Petzold and that that was all there was. How mistaken was I! Then came MFC, COM/DCOM/OLE, .net, ... I stopped paying attention at that point. Think about it ... the tech we use changes every 2-3 years. Some tech ages well. If we had only jumped on Python or ruby when it first came out, we'd have been gurus now? Would we be as broad today?

I'm actually pretty handy with Python. When a younger me would get depressed, I'd code to get happy. These days, Python gives me similar happiness. I love coding that much. Yet, when I had an interview with my dream startup, I froze up (just as you describe it). The dude on the other hand probably thought, this guy knows shit. It sucked for a while .. but then I get over it. Just keep coding, my friend! And stay happy.

There are tons of mental blocks we can have that prevent us working on our own stuff.

Some people don't have any of these blocks (or at least, none strong enough to stop them). These people are the ones who say "just do it", because for them, the only trick is to stop thinking and roll up their sleeves. But many people can't "just do it".

Some people only have one or two things blocking them. They fix those things, and suddenly they become highly productive. These are the people who will go around saying that they have finally found the magic bullet that solves their productivity problems.

Some people have a ton of mental blocks. Often these are beliefs that work as cross-purposes.

For example, it sounds like you have the belief "if someone else makes something that I had the idea for, that's terrible". This pushes the "knot inside you to inarticulately roar". Trick is it's not that you want to work on something cool, it's that you don't want to not have worked on something cool (subtle, but important difference - negative motivation is very poor at driving creative work).

Another belief is "all I want is to get something finished, these things hold me up on things that I know should be almost trivially easy". This one is familiar to me. This conflicts badly with belief number #1, since one part of your brain is telling you you have to get coding, and another part is flashing warning bells telling you that whatever you are doing can't be worthwhile because it's so hard. Result: paralysis.

The good news is you can debug these different blocking beliefs.

I learned most of this stuff from PJ Eby's site: trouble is he uses an offputting sales-letter/self-helpy language, but the ideas are golden. http://pjeby.com/ http://thinkingthingsdone.com/ are your starting points. Email me (isaac@i.saac.me) if you (or anyone else) wants to talk more; I'm thinking of starting a site which communicates some of these ideas.

I would hardly call seeing something on HN and wanting to make an app out of it a "great idea". I would call that, I don't know, not your idea at all. Windows still has 80% of the market-share on desktop, and soon droid will over take the iphone market. I think your thinking is backwards on a great many things. How about you find something you are passionate about, using technology you are already good at, and then try to "start".

Start with finishing one very small project. Then buikd a bigger one. And so on.

Probably because you're making it a joyless enterprise. You have high expectations, and you're making it a test of your worthiness as a person. So even starting to work on it reminds you of many personal regrets. You also have the problem that you're a very experienced Windows developer, so being a dummy again with a new topic is painful.

Your body doesn't like feeling that way so it says "nope".

I struggle with this problem too; I'm in a similar situation. But I think I broke my programmer's block by allowing myself to just do silly little projects. No big plans or expectations. Like, set yourself the task of rewriting a small program you did before. Or something small and personally valuable, even if it just gives you the scores of your favorite team or something. Think very small, low stakes.

I can very well empathize with you. I still don't have anything to "show", but am slowly making progress. Baby steps. I started with little bit of javascript and went onto node.js and then setup mongodb. The setup HTML5 + mongodb + node.js is a fertile playground to get few projects complete.

What do you actually DO with your time?

I know exactly what you're talking about.

What helped me immensely: Take a finite, tiny step. Let's say you noticed a really small bug or even just a typo in your current project. Say to yourself, "Okay, I'm going to fire up my IDE, find the misspelled word, fix it, and commit the change. This will only take two minutes, then I can go back to surfing HN". If you haven't even started yet with your project, just say, okay, let's set up the project structure. Or even just install the IDE or whatever. Find the step that appears to be the least intimidating, and just do it.

More often than not, I then feel, okay, I got the project open, might as well tackle this other problem that I have. Take the next step, whatever is within reach. Suddenly hours have passed and I've made substantial progress.

After you do this a couple of times, it will get easier and easier to get started.