You need to break the problem down into chunks with SMART goals. Then you need to define intermediate milestones which you complete within your allocated time period. For example, do a design do before lunchtime. No doc. No lunch. Higher order needs such as food or going home quickly help focus the mind.
Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness?
61–70 of 272 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness?
#62Do you find that when you have to do something mentally unpleasant (such as homework back when you were in school / college, or doing your taxes, or whatever similar thing affect you), do you tend to space out? Or do you get a feeling in the pit of your stomach like you are about to be sent to the principal's office (to use an over-used analogy), and you find that you must do something else (that is pleasant) just to make that sickening feeling go away?
If it is the first (spacing out), that could be ADD/ADHD. If it is the second, then it could be fear of failure / depression. If it is neither, then you will need to find a way to re-train your mind, by forcing yourself to see hard problems through.
A professional may need to help you if it is the first two problems. But if it is the third one, the standard techniques is to do deliberate practice, starting off with mild problems and working yourself up through more difficult ones as time goes on (but going back to milder ones and spicing up your workflow with slightly more difficult than what your are used to). Kind of like interval training for physical exercise -- you don't just try to run slightly faster each time, you run at a sustainable pace and punctuate it with something above your abilities for short bursts.
Some people find that they can't do this without a personal trainer. For work type problems, you may need to team up with someone that can help coach you through.
Here's another analogy that I believe carries over. For much of my life, I didn't like tomatoes (except I liked ketchup, tomato soup, pasta sauce, etc). One day I got tired of picking tomatoes off my burgers, or out of a salad, and decided to eat them anyway. After doing this for a few months I got to where I could tolerate them, and eventually start liking them. Same thing with sour cream -- now I love it. And buttermilk. Got tired of throwing out buttermilk that I'd buy for making biscuits, so I taught myself to like it. Now I can't get enough of it.
Re: Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness?
#63Increase pain tolerance.
Re: Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness?
#64I have this (at least by the sound of it: if totally different, maybe something is helped by this anyway) (and had it for for 35 odd years). I was told I can ‘achieve anything’ during my childhood which, somehow is a signal to my brain to pick the things I definitely can do and leave the harder things because it might actually show I cannot ‘achieve anything’ (duh, ofcourse I can’t, but it is not a rational or even conscious thing anyway).
Luckily I found a mechanism to cope with that very early on; I build a ‘story’ around the task/project/thing that I want to do but also ‘prove to my brain’ I am ‘all that’ (so I don’t simply don’t do it as is the first instinct); basically to narrate that this is only the first step and it will probably be crap, but it will become that shiny perfection that was promised later on through iteration.
I do this with everything; cooking, software dev (where it is actually the normal way things work), hardware, management, sports, etc. Some things go ‘perfect’ the first time, most obviously do not, but they either become irrelevant or get better (and even perfect for some definition).
That way, I am mentally shielded from not doing them in the first place because of my mental block. This used to be (in my teens) an actual narrative with myself where I told myself a story how something would go; starting really badly and insignificant as possible and then building out that narrative up to castles in the sky. Coming back down I would then be able to start the journey at the bottom while genuinely believing I would get to the top ‘in some time’ (it really does not matter if you do; the starting and iterating matters the most imho). Now the process is automatic, but it still has that same feeling to start with; I will never get over it but I managed to cope.
Re: Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness?
#65Some things that have been extremely useful for me: Play video games that require intense focus for prolonged durations to perform well like Starcraft 2, CSGO, DOTA 2 helped me build mental endurance. Reduce social media. I’ve found that this was the most productive. Social media was fragmenting my attention by making me anxious and addicted. After I reduced Reddit and Facebook usage, my mental discipline increased d…
>Play video games that require intense focus for prolonged durations to perform well like Starcraft 2, CSGO, DOTA 2 helped me build mental endurance. Don't do that. These games are exactly the core of my own mental laziness.
I've played dota for a while and used to feel this way. It's still not something I'd recommend to get smarter, but if you feel like it's making you lazy try staying focused while you're dead. Personally I just think about what I/my team could have done differently (or if maybe my death was a good trade). After minute 30 or so you spend upwards of a minute dead, if you just go and check reddit or whatever it just reinforces hard thinking -> extreme mind candy (or at least, it did for me).
Plus you'll probably improve, I rose a few ranks after starting to do this.
Re: Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness?
#66you might have trauma (little t trauma), which feels weird to call trauma because its not obvious trauma (death, car accident, abuse etc) but still affects you a lot and your feelings are still just as valid and they are there and real. Try to allocate a long time, like 2 hours to focus on something that you know you have to do. Observe how it feels physically, in your body. For me, my throat tightens up and my chest…
I don't relate but this is extremely interesting to me.
Re: Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness?
#67The financial system is a mess these days... I think being lazy is a good thing. Just find a 9 to 5 job and do the bare minimum work that you need to be able to eventually retire.
Don't waste your life chasing success. Success is completely random.
The journey to learning this terrible fact will teach you a lot of things, none of which will make your life any better. It's far better to be a lazy idiot. Stupidity and laziness are very useful tools for succeeding in our modern economy. Lazy people don't get burned out.
Re: Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness?
#68[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness?
#691. Every seemingly hard problem can be broken down - or at least, approximated - by a series of easier problems. Do the easier problems.
2. Separate the thoughtful from the mechanical - some tasks need you to shut down your thinking and just wing it. Like installing a new computer or a development environment or boilerplate code and all that. You solve these with time: put in an hour and it will be done. Just tell yourself that as time passes, so will this issue.
On the other side are problems which require thinking rather than doing. You solve these by concentrating and shutting out noise.
Mixing the two types of actions is devastating.
Re: Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness?
#70There is the potential that you have ADHD, because what you're describing sounds similar to my situation. I eventually ended up on stimulant medication to help, but there's non-stimulant medication available (if you're opposed to eating amphetamines for breakfast), as well as counselling and other treatment options that don't involve medication. Even if you don't want to seek professional treatment, you could look up…
Fellow ADHD sufferer here to second this. Thinking about ADHD as a deficit of motivation, which is much more accurate than an attention-oriented view, tends to clarify this sort of situation.
I have trouble focusing on work most of the time and lack the motivation for almost everything, unless not doing it would cause problems.
But everything I've read about ADHD doesn't sound like a me at all.
Never heard of your way of describing it though.