Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness?

Have a look, maybe it helps.

The good side about the common ADHD medications (various stimulants) is that they mostly help within half an hour, if they help at all.

So apart from the hassle of getting a diagnosis and prescription, at least you won't have to endure months of side effects before you know whether you can get any better.

(I'm contrasting that with eg anti-depressants here.)

Laziness isn't always "lazy". It can be fear of failure or fear of wasting your time. Learn to value small successes rather like completing a chapter or incremental increases in knowledge rather than waiting for the euphoria of "I completed the thing!" That has probably helped me more than anything and prevented a lot of frustration when learning/doing something new. Also, say "I'll work on it only a half hour and then stop" sometimes you'll find you are enjoying or at least appreciating what you're doing and keep coming a bit (or a lot) longer.

That sounds promising. On a side note, today I've tried Nicotin for the first time. I've heard that it helps people with ADHD and as this has been on my mind for a couple of months by now, I figured that this might be an easy way to check myself. Your post was the last push and I have a shop right next to my door.

Well, it seemed to work. Maybe placebo, but I'd say that I had high concentration burst in 30-45 minutes intervals (after inhaling). I kind of forgot that I've taken it a couple of minutes in, because I was so focused on the code. I heard that Nicotin works as neuroenhancer in general, so nothing is proven. But no matter why, it seemed to help.

I really don't want to get addicted to Nicotin, so I'll see how I can find a doctor to verify/falsify this.

Thanks again!

Thank you so much for sharing this. A lot of people will knee-jerk react with "push, push, you're worthless, push" and I have deep appreciation for this wiser attitude.

> That is called delegation of responsibility. If you are not qualified to make a certain professional decision or if such a decision exceeds your delegated responsibility then you need to bring somebody else in, possibly a supervisor.

Delegation more often happens toward subordinates than supervisors, but I don't see how that's relevant. My response here was to your statement that, "If you are afraid to associate a decision with your reputation then somebody will make the decision for you." I was pointing out that someone else making the decision for you isn't necessarily a bad thing as you seemed to be implying.

> That consideration is itself a decision and it should not be delayed.

You seem to be arguing here just for the sake of arguing, even if it means arguing against your original point. By the same logic you're using here, the decision to procrastinate can itself also be a decision, which is actually the entire point of my post.

> Exactly. You have no idea until you can determine the result. If you fail early and have the awareness to recognize that failure you are in a far stronger position for all forthcoming decisions. If you wait to make that decision all the time between now then remains an unknown and you also aren't completing any resulting actions. So not only does risk increase but your productivity proportionally decreases.

Your reasoning seems to rely on the premise that you can only learn by making a decision, which isn't true at all. You can also learn by research, which you have more time to do by delaying a decision. Even without research, there are many things you can learn just by allowing more time to pass and more events to unfold without any deliberate action on your part.

An example of this could be something like submitting an application that's ready today for an RFQ from a large potential customer that isn't due for another month. Then, 2 weeks from now you find out from an acquaintance who used to work for that customer that they always valued some other piece of information being included in the RFQ submissions they review. I can't tell you how many times I've run into similar situations, and procrastinating improved the quality of the final result.

Similarly, most of the time, you'll only ever have more information available to make decisions the longer you wait, not less.

> It makes sense to wait on a decision only when that decision is both critical and costly and even then the only advantage on waiting is to perform further investigation. There is no advantage in hesitation only for the sake of hesitation, because then you are allowing external factors to influence the conditions away from what you currently know.

You're arbitrarily asserting here that external factors can only influence the conditions away from what you currently know. External factors can also influence conditions toward what you currently know. Furthermore, the longer you wait, the more you'll know, which means the more informed your decisions will be.

> This isn't something that software developers are well equipped for. Other industries have specific processes and criteria for evaluating risk in a uniform and standard way as well as the processes to apply the proper controls. These are basic trade practices that are often affirmed through education and licensing with bodies of enforcement. Software, on the other hand, does not have a commonly recognized ethics enforcement/evaluation body to define these trade practices. In practice most of this is outsourced to security professionals, for example people holding one of the various ISC2 certifications: https://www.isc2.org/ethics/

I have know idea what point you're trying to make here or how it's at all relevant.

At the end of the day, I've had enough good decisions come as a result of waiting to make them when I can to know that what you're prescribing isn't a universal truth, which was the point I was trying to make clear.

I've also had plenty decisions turn out to be the wrong decisions, which I would have known if I'd waited another day or two to make them, further reinforcing that quick decisions aren't always better than delayed decisions. Again, the hard part is figuring out when it's better to make a quick decision and when it isn't.