41–49 of 49 posts
Just keep in mind that you cannot keep sprinting forever.
But, if it is laziness, try Pomodoro techniques. They work well. So simple but effective.
Are they really interesting to you or do you feel like those things should be interesting to you? Did it come from you or something or someone external to you.
> What can I do to improve my attitude toward useful areas of my life and convince myself to stop wasting time?
Find what you really want to do. If you truly enjoyed those books/articles/projects/etc, you wouldn't have to convince yourself to "waste time on those things". You'd "waste time on them" out of your own volition.
You'll never improve your attitude to like something you don't like deep down. It's like marrying someone you hate and hoping your attitude towards your wife will change. All you'll do is just increase resentment of everything including yourself. So instead of wasting your time on an impossible endeavor, find out what you really enjoy doing.
Also, laziness isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's one of the three virtues of a programmer.
"Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.
Also, laziness can be an antidote to useless busy-body work.
https://www.economist.com/business/2013/08/17/in-praise-of-l...
Dealt with sleep/concentration issues for over a decade. Some anecdotes: - No caffeine after 1/2/3PM (even "sleep-friendly" tea throws me off) - Melatonin / Sleep aids: See if they work for you - Don't drink before bed (because it means a bathroom break in the middle of the night) [1] - If you do wake up in the middle of the night, a snack may help. ( https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/food-and-drink-prom... ).…
"Simple carbs can impact me heavily!" What effects do they have on you?
Indirectly, it affects my bedtime routine, as I get way less done on the day, and feel guilty going to bed. (Even as I lay in bed after taking melatonin at a certain time.)
One trick I've learned is to keep a separate list of "low-barrier" tasks for those times when I just can't get started on something important. I get a big emotional boost from getting things done. Once I've completed one or two of those, I'm sufficiently revved up to start on a top-of-my-priority-list task.
By "low barrier", I mean simple, stand-alone tasks that don't require lots of thinking. A good example might be re-shelving a stack of books or sorting through a small box of hardware. These tend to be very low priority tasks, but it's especially satisfying if they're things that have been on your physical/mental to-do list for a long time.
You have a never ending set of goals. You sound like a classic goal oriented person, but you don’t derive satisfaction from discipline which is the only strategy that works for continuous goals. Shift your strategy and aim for the simplest possible task, it’s gonna hurt your ego but you have to do this if you’re seriously asking: Pick the easiest thing on that list (reading that book for example) and aim to read 1 pa…
A technique I use is to use the thing I'm avoiding to make progress on the 2nd thing I'm avoiding. It's strange, but if I'm overscheduled and REALLY don't want to work on my taxes, somehow I have a lot of energy to clean up the garage. I've also found that if I work on something and finish it, the next day I bumble around when getting started. But if I stop right at some obvious place in the middle, the next day I im…