Ask HN: Can't concentrate to focus, until it's last minute or later

2) "working on the project that I know I must work on to accomplish my goals" sounds like a fundamental mis-step. what makes you think things will change once you achieve those goals? are you certain your goals are what should be your goals?

3) buy a 12 kg kettlebell (i don't care how beast you are, 12 kg is enough to start or you're gonna fuck your back). fuck around with it for half an hour every night watching TV like 2-3 hours before bed. don't do a regimen, or a program or any of that bs, you're not van damme and you never will be. just fuck around with it and have fun. eat an egg and drink a craft beer go to sleep. move to 16 kg, you should see mental and physical results in a week.

4) some people saying stop fapping? that's absurd, fap every day if possible, good for your testosterone. although, maybe stay away from the dehumanizing kink shit, that definitely gave me interpersonal problems for a while. I see a connection between personal relationships and fapping, but not productivity so much. besides, there will come a day when you can't do it more than once every few days, or once a week, or whatever, and believe me it's fucking depressing. there is absolutely no reason to not fap.

5) screen killers like lux f.lux etc. that gradually shut all your screens down in intensity as the night goes on. blue light sends wake up chemicals, wake up chemicals for 18 hours a day will fuck you up.

6) if you drink more than 10 beers a night, try cutting it down by 1 per week until you're at a normal person level. it's a bitch and a half to get to sleep, but it really does feel great the next day. but if you go from 10-0 in a day it will feel like fucking ebola. quit smoking cigarettes.

7) if you don't smoke weed, smoke some and watch youtube tutorials on like whittling, don't take notes. if you do smoke weed, go sober a day and go to the park to read a book. both of those are amazing after prolonged time of being the other state. adderall, cocaine, anything from the amphetamine family is not your friend. benzos, ketamine, anything from the barituate family is not your friend. mushrooms are your friend. ecstasy / lsd i have mixed feelings on. basically find anything that gets your eyes wide open _and makes you feel awake_. The goal is to feel childlike wonder, _NOT EUPHORIA_ euphoria is a dangerous emotion and should be shunned.

8) drink your weight in ounces of water each day. It is difficult.

9) walk, but not like chore walking running jogging fitbit bullshit. just opt for the stairs, or park at the far end of the lot. people say you should meditate like half an hour a day, but that's just because we're so fucking busy optimizing our movements all the time that we can't think in between actions.

10) similarly disable facebook and twitter and instagram and whatever they've made in the last 5 years I don't know about. Mine are all deleted, you don't have to do that, but when they are installed, and you get notifications on your phone, you are in a state of anxiety at all times of the day because you feel good when you get a notification so you're always waiting for one and pop-psychology pop-psychology pop-psychology. Around day 3 or 4 of having it off it starts to feel good, like really fucking good. I'm well known as "the guy that sends emails" and people love it. similarly with browser notifications, system notifications, etc. If it beeps at you or rumbles at you, it is offensive.

11) self help books, ted talks, anything that makes money from things being wrong in the world and promising to make it better is a fucking waste of space. Avoid these things at all costs. you intrinsically know what is wrong, you just have severe cognitive dissonance naming it so you psychologically pretend you don't. if you're going to read something to make you feel better, the answer is to read something that has nothing to do with anything, it's not work so don't read a machine learning text, it's not a social game so don't read whatever is on the NYT bestseller list in the sci fi section, read something that's purely fun. I'm in the middle of a textbook on ancient chinese history. Or watch some conspiracy theory videos. Or start growing designer peppers. Again, the goal is anything that opens your eyes wide.

Not being able to focus is a common problem that happens when your entire life revolves around one thing, one routine, one goal, one person, one whatever. You just need to do something, anything that's not that one thing, whether it's playing catch with a 12kg metal ball, getting high and watching some redneck whittling wood for half an hour, or reading a hundred pages about the Yuan Dynasty of China. You need to turn off -- so stop letting bright blue lights, email chimes on your cell phone, rushing up and down elevators and hunting for the most efficient parking spaces dictate your actions, intentionally say "fuck you" to that. Also chemical balance is a thing and almost everything I've said directly has an effect on that balance.

Cal Newport wrote a pretty nice book about the deep work concept and its importance for makers, full of interesting annecdotes [1].

Another critical point is to limit work in progress. If you work on too much stuff at the same time you can become overwhelmed, and thus this will lead to procrastination.

Starting tasks late, close to the deadline, might indicate you have incredible high expectations about yourself and you are afraid of underdelivering. If you are a perfectionist, understand that perfection is achieved by iterating not by getting it right initially.

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25744928-deep-work

So what to do? Get a new job, for a while it will feel important. Accept that you may need to change jobs regularly.

Get a job that matters. Life and death matters. Go be an EMT.

Live somewhere where basic needs are not a given. Help make that place better.

Try an SSRI or meth derivative, if for no other reason to kill the idea that a pill can solve your problems. (Tried both, not worth it.)

I've also heard starting judo or other violent contact hobby helps, no idea why.

Edit: corrected initialism