Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How to do that you need to do but not motivated at all?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 143 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to do that you need to do but not motivated at all?

#21

Post by annie_muss »

Methylphenidate. It makes the boring kind of ok.

It's not a magic bullet though, so here are some other things that help.

Accountability. A person checking in on doing what you need to do.

Timers, alarms, reminders. I have have an Amazon Echo in every room of my house and set reminders whenever something pops into my head.

Pomodoros: just do a couple of minutes and then stop. It's usually not as bad as you imagine.

Above all, forgive yourself. You are a not a machine. You will have better days and worse days. Keep going in the right direction.

Re: Ask HN: How to do that you need to do but not motivated at all?

#22

Post by flexd »

I'm not motivated, but I am stubborn. I try to not wait for motivation, but rather go do something else, anything else for a little while.

This applies to anything really, be it work or chores at home or anything else I either really find boring or can't quite solve. If there is a problem I can't think of a solution for it must be split up more.

If it's something like doing the laundry or something you can just do a little bit here and there. Just 5 minutes of doing what needs to be done, even if it's a quick few dishes in or out of the dishwasher and a few clothes folded up. I don't need to be motivated to manage 5 minutes of doing something. Just 5 more minutes!

For some things though like going to the gym when I really don't want to, refer to the first sentence. I'm not motivated, but I am stubborn so I'm going anyway. :)

Re: Ask HN: How to do that you need to do but not motivated at all?

#25

Post by Rzor »

DrThunder wrote: post #5

Habit. Stop looking for motivation to drive you. Sometimes it will and sometimes it won't. There's a pretty common saying that motivation is a result of doing stuff. You just do it whether you want to or not. I know that's simplistic but that's really all there is to it. Easy to understand but harder to implement. It helps me not to think too far into the future and break stuff down into daily goals so I don't get ov…

And to more on this I highly recommend this research if anyone's interested: https://behaviordesign.stanford.edu/resources/fogg-behavior-...

The author has a book called Tiny Habits. It's short, but packs a bunch. Essentially: (B)ehavior = (M)otivation + (A)bility + (P)rompt.

Edit: Direct link to the paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19LYba4fuceGM3KhqxTXByV4msmb...

Re: Ask HN: How to do that you need to do but not motivated at all?

#26

Post by zrail »

Couple thoughts that might help, might not:

* Try to recognize that you work in cycles and try to structure your life and your work according to those cycles. Try to really, viscerally understand that "not every day is gonna be a perfect day" means that some days will be amazing and some days will be terrible and that's part of living life.

* Try to recognize that arbitrary measures of productivity are a part of capitalism that we get taught to buy into at a very early age, at least in the US.

* Think about taking some online ADHD quizzes and if you score reasonably high, maybe think about bringing it up with your doctor. Doing that was a turning point for me personally, both because it's a very useful lens for framing my life and because, right now at this stage of my life, medication really does help me get through my days without the sudden realization at the end of the day that I just spun in circles for 12 hours.

Re: Ask HN: How to do that you need to do but not motivated at all?

#27

Post by sparks1970 »

Try breaking it up into small steps. I procrastinate about doing my tax return all year but I "tricked" myself into doing it earlier this year by telling myself "I'm not doing the tax return now, all I'm doing is finding my employment records."

Finding those records was easy, energized by that easy win I picked another easy task, "I'll get together my bank interest statements" and in a couple of hours I was done.

Maybe this could work for you.

Re: Ask HN: How to do that you need to do but not motivated at all?

#28

Post by Karsteski »

Like someone else said, you kinda just have to do it. Like just sit, and start. This was my attitude when I was teaching myself software development the past few years. I'd come home from work (I worked in a lab as a chemist) and just sit and work on whatever project I was doing at the time. While I enjoy coding a lot, it's far less enjoyable after work when you just want to relax. But that attitude got me to a really good dev job currently, so it paid off

Now though, it's hard to do the same thing when I spend all day looking at code, but I know once I get started again the momentum and enjoyment of my hobby turned career will drive me

Not sure if this was really helpful lol... but hopefully

Re: Ask HN: How to do that you need to do but not motivated at all?

#29

Post by chasebank »

These posts come up often here, seemingly more so since the pandemic. The most successful people I know all learned at some point in their lives to take large goals, dreams, work duties, etc, break them down into manageable sized tasks and go through each one. Some tasks will become second nature, others won’t. This is not rocket science. Just do it. There’s no secret, shortcut, magic pill. Eat right, get good sleep, exercise, laugh a lot.

There are 8 billion people on this planet, nobody else will look out for your well-being except you.

Re: Ask HN: How to do that you need to do but not motivated at all?

#30

Post by andersource »

I'd echo other comments suggesting examining closely what you really need to do (e.g. "how to be productive" is a very loaded question for me, modern society tends to way overemphasize the importance of "being productive" to the detriment of many.)

If you really are struggling doing things you absolutely have to do, my suggestion is using an exhaustive TODO list where each action item takes ~10 minutes, that can get you rolling relatively fast. Happened to write about it recently here[0] as I was experiencing something similar.

[0] https://andersource.dev/2022/11/25/the-exhaustive-todo-list....

Post reply on HN