[deleted]
Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?
61–70 of 282 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?
#62Get rid of your browser and your smartphone. Avoid GUIs and closed software and anything that involves psychologists or "UX designers." Force yourself to understand what your doing.
Re: Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?
#63[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?
#64I'm going to say something that might be wildly unpopular among ambitious people: If you have a full-time job, you are by far not a passive consumer. You presumably contribute >40 hours every week of creatively demanding, high-quality labor to society. For most people, the premise of this question is wrong. Procrastination, when you don't obviously have a lot of available time and effort, is a symptom that most of yo…
Can you cite any credible source other than subjective reasoning for creativity being a limited resource that we spend during a dayjob and have almost none left to build something at home?
Because the fact that daily work exhausts people and drains their energy is some kind of complex nuanced issue that requires dedicated research to verify?
Obviously it depends on how demanding/time consuming the daily job is, but that's a standard observation with millennia of empirical evidence.
I swear, it's like people can't even tie their shoes anymore unless there's a long-term study (and preferably, meta studies) to prove them that tying one's shoelaces is good.
Re: Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?
#65I'm going to say something that might be wildly unpopular among ambitious people: If you have a full-time job, you are by far not a passive consumer. You presumably contribute >40 hours every week of creatively demanding, high-quality labor to society. For most people, the premise of this question is wrong. Procrastination, when you don't obviously have a lot of available time and effort, is a symptom that most of yo…
Can you cite any credible source other than subjective reasoning for creativity being a limited resource that we spend during a dayjob and have almost none left to build something at home?
It's not creativity, it's mental energy. Most people don't have the capacity to even work 40 mentally demanding hours per week, let alone double that. Just look around at your colleagues and ask how many are really working hard eight hours every day for five days straight. I know I'm not. My best output comes in shorter stretches of flow a maximum of a few hours long, and often not even every day.
Re: Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
So true. I'm blogging one a week about dev stuff and it takes 2-4 hours depending on the topic. I met a few devs with family and children, and they were blown away by my commitment.
> I'm blogging one a week about dev stuff and it takes 2-4 hours depending on the topic. I'm so jealous! :) I publish a new post once every couple of months. Some posts take really long to prepare, like 40 hours (and more) of work long. The biggest problem is that it doesn't really show - for that much time my posts should be each as long as "Steve Yegge's Best Of" anthology. I'm not even sure it's worth it as a lear…
Steve Yegge gets away with it because he's Steve Yegge. There's definitely lots of people that write blog posts that are too long, and if you're just starting and don't have name recognition yet, I'd say it's better to aim for a reasonable length that most people will at least get through.
Re: Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?
#67I'm going to say something that might be wildly unpopular among ambitious people: If you have a full-time job, you are by far not a passive consumer. You presumably contribute >40 hours every week of creatively demanding, high-quality labor to society. For most people, the premise of this question is wrong. Procrastination, when you don't obviously have a lot of available time and effort, is a symptom that most of yo…
+1 I notice a hive-mind of looking-down on "ordinary work" even if it's not really challenging, and is actually isn't less purposeful than open source projects that get to the HN front-page. 'Coolness' is an unmeasured and a dangerous motivation.
the biggest problem with ordinary work is the rote schedules most such work entails. Just having to be in the same building for many years from X am to Y pm Monday through Friday, except for M weeks vacation, is itself pretty depressing to many people
Re: Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?
#68The process from consumption to production can be gradual and organic. Highly I'd recommend getting some sort of blog service and posting when you can about various topics. It does not have to be anything massive or even focused, but over time if you did, say, one post a week, you will find that things add up, all those little dust motes of posts can become a mountain all together (as the Japanese proverb goes).
Re: Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?
#69My biggest tip: minimize what you do.
Since you want to do more, I know this sounds crazy. But when I set up a personal kanban system, it really changed my life. You establish a backlog of what you want to do. Then you limit the amount of work in process (WIP). That gives you a very small number of open tasks to switch between, which means you end up increasing your focus and being forced to finish things. (Or at least clearly admit that you're quitting a thing.)
This process is, honestly, pretty unpleasant at first. Being a passive consumer pays off right now. There's always a new article, a new tweet. When you're bored, you just skip ahead. Real work is frustrating and pays off very slowly. So you're going to spend months just breaking yourself of your quick-entertainment habits and learning to put up with the frustration of longer scale.
If you really struggle, consider trying out the pomodoro system, which involves fixed periods of focus with breaks. E.g., 25 minutes of work with 5 minutes of break. When I'm feeling really resistant to production and just want to fuck around on the Internet, I'll tell myself, "Ok, one pomodoro of work on the project." I'll set my countdown timer and just fucking do the work for 25 minutes, no matter how much I don't want to. Often after that, I get into it and it's fine. But that first wall of resistance can be brutal.
The other thing that really helped me is taking up running. Pick a race, like a 5K. Train for it and do it. Then pick another race. The main trick to running successfully is not giving up. You learn to put one goddamn foot in front of another. Some days it's a joy and some days you hate it, but that ends up not mattering so much. You slowly learn that your feelings are just these things your brain does. You can notice them without having to obey them.
Re: Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?
#70Not everyone can be productive all the time and that is ok.
Also, think what you really want to produce. It could be that your goals are too vague and big.
As soon as you stop thinking of it(blogging, making videos, coding) as a committment you will be at an ease.
The trick is to make a committment for two-four weeks, after that it could become a nice habit.
If it still feels like a burden it is not the right thing for you.