Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness?

I had a similar problem where the the bigger / the more complex the task in front of me was, the more my brain resisted to getting started and the more i procrasitnated.

I came up with a fundamentally "agile" solution: break the problems down into smaller tasks until the first task is too small to offer resistance.

E.g. rather than "write architecture specification", start with "outline the heads for architecture spec" and then maybe "draw rough sketch of architecture on paper" and then maybe "write introduction".

Almost everything in my to do list these days can be executed in under 10 minutes. As a bonus, it gives you the dopamine hit / satisfaction of watching a stead stream of items moving from 'todo' to 'done' state on a daily basis.

I'd recommend reading Angela Duckworth's "Grit". It helped me overcome the same challenge.

> There is probably an influence from inherent personality differences, but I would speculate that building up stamina for tackling hard problems comes down substantially to practice.

I was diagnosed with ADHD my senior year of college. Before that, the mindset you're advocating got close to breaking me.

Other replies have hinted at why this may be the case: ADHD, told you were going to excel/smart causing non-effort/try, failure adverse.

For me it was all of those and probably more that I'm not even aware of yet.

What did I do to over come?

First, I haven't fully. I struggle every day, and know that it is okay. Even after I decided to tackle the problem 10 years ago, I work at it.

For myself, I knew a key symptom that I had is I don't like to finish anything... like anything... no matter how small. A lot of it was rooted in my fear of failing. That's probably linked to the idea that I was supposed to be smart. I'm an engineer, good at math, all the classic things that cause parents to say - oh child shouldn't fail.

This showed up in my every day life. I realized I would never even finish my rice... there's always like 20% left. I was always starting a project and then simply moving on to the next. Never taking it to a specific end-goal.

So to tackle my problem of not finishing something, I started with the smallest thing - my bowl of rice. I started requiring myself to finish it. That last 20% was a struggle. I'd sit there and struggle. It wasn't the amount either; I would get less food, which did help, but I still had a lot of trouble. I'd get up and leave then force myself to go back.

I didn't allow any other requirement to enter. No other projects, no other personal goals. I had to finish my bowl. It was, one meal then one day, backslide, two days in a row, and it took me about 3-4 months for it to become a habit. I let it be the goal for another month or so before I finally told myself I accomplished this goal.

For once in my life, I finished something. I set a goal and completed it. F'ing bowl of rice. But it was mine.

From there I scaled it to a very small Rails project I could complete in 1 weekend, an online language dictionary for myself. It was stupid easy so I knew I could do it. My goal was to deploy it on Heroku and use it myself for some small language learning. Took me 3-4 weekends to fully deploy & self-use. But I did it, my first side project completed. A clear goal, achievable and finished.

It took me 6-12 months to even begin to feel I started tackling my problem. From there I slowly scaled and I've personally learned I can only do 1-2 things at a time to completion.

Best of luck to you. I only hope the best for you.

ya semen retention has long been used for mental power