Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Imagine yourself starting, not finishing

shyal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 64 posts

Re: Imagine yourself starting, not finishing

#41

Post by elcapitan »

fabled_giraffe wrote: post #38
redmaverick wrote: post #37

Mindfulness (for 45 mins to 1 hr) helps a lot in combating procrastination. The catch is that if you are a procrastinator, you will procrastinate on trying to meditate also.

Beyond procrastination, for those of us that have trouble focusing, this sort of thing is no joke. In 30 seconds, we can go from fully intending to do something that we should do to better ourselves to reading HN submissions and commenting on them.

I actually use HN frequently as a tool to concentrate better during work. I often juggle quite different tasks that I have to solve at work. To flush my mind and go from one finished thing to some completely unrelated next task, I jump to HN, read some things, then jump back to what I'm supposed to do. The important part is to have things actionable and with a definition of when they are 'done', so that you can close them and do the next task.

Re: Imagine yourself starting, not finishing

#42

Post by elcapitan »

I liked the comparison with walking the solid board over high ground. This is something I actually use quite literally to fight my (light) vertigo. The other trick (maybe more important in that situation) is to avoid switching back and forth between looking at what's close and what's far away, because that's the part that irritates my sense of balance and then creates the vertigo effect. Not mixing up close and far away makes actually even more sense than the 'first step' metaphor in what the article is trying to say.

Re: Imagine yourself starting, not finishing

#43

Post by MaulingMonkey »

bufordsharkley wrote: post #12
colmvp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the reasons why I like the pomodoro technique. You can always narrow even the most complex issues into smaller pieces that can be accomplished in a short sprint.

Agreed. The pomodoro technique asks that no task is more than 7 pomodoros (sets of 25 minutes of focused work). With this constraint, what once looked like an overwhelming and nebulous task now seems manageable and concrete.

A pattern I'm recently noticing for myself is that even if a task doesn't feel "overwhelming" or "nebulous" per se, it seems to be easier to motivate myself to knock out a small task than a large one.

Rinse a dish. Open a letter. Rename a variable. Root cause a bug. Rough out the skeleton for a feature. Write a unit test. Download an installer. Make a commit. Email someone.

I'm noting there's a difference between small tasks and a small task. Big TODO lists may not be nebulous - I find them quite handy for ensuring a complete and thorough job is done, and for project progress tracking - but they're still big, potentially overwhelming huge things. And if not overwhelming, something that I'm not going to finish today anyways - it won't hurt to wait until tomorrow...

Instead of more TODO lists, I should invest in having a TODO item.

Re: Imagine yourself starting, not finishing

#44

Post by mattfrommars »

codezero wrote: post #26
shubb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see what this guy means because i basically procrastinated myself out of a degree once. Sitting down to do study my worst subjects reminded me of how much less I knew than I needed to - so I procrastinated by studying my best ones instead. That was definitely an anxiety thing, and some well time counseling might have been life changing. It's a different thing to your laundry though, which is probably more about…

Time management counseling helped me a lot. The laundry example is a small one but often all those small things build up into a larger issue that consumes you, so it's worth treating those as important as any, unless it's just that one thing :)

Along the line, what will a professional say?

Re: Imagine yourself starting, not finishing

#45

Post by redmaverick »

onion2k wrote: post #39
redmaverick wrote: post #37

Mindfulness (for 45 mins to 1 hr) helps a lot in combating procrastination. The catch is that if you are a procrastinator, you will procrastinate on trying to meditate also.

It is impossible to procrastinate if you practice mindfulness meditation for 45 mins to 1 hr. There's plenty of good research in to the benefits of mindfulness meditation, but I've never seen anything go quite that far.

Edited it. Basically, for me at least, meditation creates a bias towards action. I feel procrastination relates to biochemistry (serotonin, dopamine etc) and somehow meditation kind of "fixes" the issue temporarily. If I stop meditating, I quickly revert back to the old me.

Re: Imagine yourself starting, not finishing

#47

Post by Gracana »

drawkbox wrote: post #17

Similar to the 15 minutes starting trick. If you don't feel like doing it, just do 15 minutes of it and you can stop. Typically you keep on going and it starts it up. Another trick is leave a simple tasks or error (syntax error) in the last place you were working the previous day/night. You'll jump right back in and get up and in production mode the next day, easy task to knock out and get coding. Sometimes having an…

> Another trick is leave a simple tasks or error (syntax error) in the last place you were working the previous day/night. You'll jump right back in and get up and in production mode the next day, easy task to knock out and get coding.

That's a great idea. I tend to get projects finished by the end of the day, which means I have to figure out what to do in the morning, which is always a little hard. I think I'll give that a shot.

Re: Imagine yourself starting, not finishing

#48

Post by codezero »

mattfrommars wrote: post #44
codezero wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time management counseling helped me a lot. The laundry example is a small one but often all those small things build up into a larger issue that consumes you, so it's worth treating those as important as any, unless it's just that one thing :)

Along the line, what will a professional say?

Depends on the person you see and your particular issues.

For me I did a lot of time management exercises like making an inventory of where I spent time in any given week and then planning the next week and seeing if I met my planned goals. That exercise is also good at showing you how much free time you actually have.

For me I often avoided starting tasks because I wouldn't have enough time to finish it before something else required my attention. Planning in advance shows that I usually do have the time, and if I didn't, I could plan to work on things in the slots where I did.

There are a lot of things they could say though, for me my ADD and poor behaviors when I was younger meant I needed a few things rebooted :)

Re: Imagine yourself starting, not finishing

#49

Post by kartickv »

drawkbox wrote: post #17

Similar to the 15 minutes starting trick. If you don't feel like doing it, just do 15 minutes of it and you can stop. Typically you keep on going and it starts it up. Another trick is leave a simple tasks or error (syntax error) in the last place you were working the previous day/night. You'll jump right back in and get up and in production mode the next day, easy task to knock out and get coding. Sometimes having an…

A better idea to stop when you encounter a bug that you know or expect will be easy to fix. That way, you start with a sense of achievement first thing in the morning, which is exactly what you're looking for. Fixing a syntax error doesn't give me that sense of satisfaction, especially one I deliberately introduced.

Re: Imagine yourself starting, not finishing

#50

Post by losteric »

drawkbox wrote: post #17

Similar to the 15 minutes starting trick. If you don't feel like doing it, just do 15 minutes of it and you can stop. Typically you keep on going and it starts it up. Another trick is leave a simple tasks or error (syntax error) in the last place you were working the previous day/night. You'll jump right back in and get up and in production mode the next day, easy task to knock out and get coding. Sometimes having an…

I'm partial to TDD because it's great for that "simple task"/error-fixing mentality. About 30 minutes before leaving, I make sure I have a couple failing tests and leave them that way when I leave.

Whenever I get back to work, I can just jump in... any kind of work interruption benefits the same way.

Post reply on HN