Ask HN: How Can I Be More Hardworking?

I work from home. I make enough money to work about 10 hours a week so I often work 10 hours a week. The rest of the time, I don't really do anything. "Nothing" can range from hours on Stack Overflow, spending 4 hours filling a form, vacuuming the office, or having an hour long morning tea.

I have a very productive workspace; own room, fast equipment, good workflow. I eat healthy, sleep early, wake early, get enough exercise.

I've tried all the major productivity tips - meditation, Pomodoro, gamification, watching motivational videos, RescueTime, nootropics, plain grit, keto. They help for about a week, but then I build immunity to them.

I can easily cold turkey something like Facebook but this just ends up replaced by something else like breadmaking or reading books.

I tried working full time. I can work 14 hours/day full time just fine. But when I'm done with it, I still go back to working minimum hours.

I like my job and I have above average motivation and discipline. I have no willpower issues otherwise.

What else is a good way to increase my work rate?

IMO, any response to this question is tightly associated with specific contexts of your current workspace and only gets more complicated when considering what kind of company you work at / where your current goals for the next 2-5 years stand.

You want to maintain progress and improve your output, but not at the cost of compensation or burnout. This is very hard to answer without those contexts.

From your post I think you're going about this the wrong way. External acts like meditating or "optimizing time" are easy ways to burn yourself out doing stupid things and end up flat out not enjoying your life. I tried this during a gap year I took to work at a startup in college while I was considering dropping out and one other time after I'd graduated.

Genuinely wasn't worth it.

My best simple advice is to just focus on work while you're at work or set 4hrs aside each day to really focus. Otherwise, live your life. In time if you follow these simple rules I think you'll find surprising gains.

That's called living your life. I think you need to work on your mental blocks. i.e the fact that you feel the 'need' to work as opposed to 'wasting' time by living your life.

3 months ago I started waking up at the same time every day, and immediately having a breakfast with good amount of healthy fat. It’s been a game changer for my consistency. Some days are more productive than others, but in general I hardly ever have the useless days I used to have where i couldn’t seem to get anything done. I initially had a hard time waking up on time, but I got the philips Hue smart bulbs and the sunrise routine on them has really helped me wake up. It’s much more pleasant than an alarm.

Have the same problem here.

The only thing that motivates me is the EXTREMELY interesting work.

So I'm starting thinking that I don't need the tools to improve my ability to work harder, instead I need the work I want to work harder.

If not - then I should not worry about this.