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Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?

#261

Post by cannedslime »

So your struggle is focus and not hard work as such?

I think we all have problems with that from time to time, I catch even the most high paid and productive members of our organization have their procrastination routine from time to time.

If you catch your self in a hard procrastination loop too often, it might be a good idea to try something. For me it really helped to completely stop drinking coffee at work, it seems like it made me less focused. I heard others say that standing up while working helps them focus.

Re: Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?

#262

Post by thecatspaw »

kortex wrote: post #181
bitL wrote: post #178

What can help: - visualize yourself as a homeless in your late 40s, abandoned by your wife and kids, no longer recognized/avoided by your friends, destitute, in bad health. It's a likely outcome if you don't learn how to finish things, work on your own projects and make it. Think about it as your default future state you want to avoid - remove distractions while you are working on something. If distractions are your…

> visualize yourself as a homeless in your late 40s, abandoned by your wife and kids, no longer recognized/avoided by your friends, destitute, in bad health. However true this might be, I think this is bad advice for someone with OP'S mental architecture. That sort of thinking only reinforces anxiety (the unhelpful kind, not the fire-under-butt kind), loss of locus of control, and imposter syndrome feelings. Otherwis…

I kind of do have a similar mental architecture as OP, though a few years younger.

This sentence doesnt make me feel anxious or any of the other feelings you mentioned. It makes me go "Yeah sure, as if that will happen". If the threat is not immediate or in the near future, its very easy to just push it aside

Re: Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?

#263

Post by linkregister »

rconti wrote: post #260

Yes, mid 30s, I struggle as well. I'm much better at small discrete tasks than I am at larger projects, where I often work for a few minutes, then back up and think about the scope of the whole project, get discouraged, get distracted, etc. I've been very successful in life but the past 6 months I've been working hard to tweak a lot of the things I don't like about myself. Currently seeing a CBT specialist which is h…

How does CBT apply to task focus and work completion? All the literature I've seen is for dealing with emotional issues (important, but not applicable to tasks IMO).

I'm asking because I am interested in effective solutions, not to be an internet contrarian.

Re: Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?

#264

Post by FeepingCreature »

zinckiwi wrote: post #5

I'm familiar with this. There's no magic solution, sadly, but I'll share one thing that has helped me and may apply at least to some of your situations. I realised a while ago that my main issue was with nebulous tasks -- that is, the more concrete, defined, and _meetable_ a task was, the less trouble I had with it. So I started to break down large tasks, which never got started much less finished, into smaller ones,…

A specific version of this is just writing a single connected "skeleton" of app, stubbing out absolutely everything that isn't needed with 'if (input == this) return that; assert(false);' and just getting something from input to output. Then it's a lot easier to go and add more meat.

Re: Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?

#265

Post by anonlazybastard »

linkregister wrote: post #263
rconti wrote: post #260

Yes, mid 30s, I struggle as well. I'm much better at small discrete tasks than I am at larger projects, where I often work for a few minutes, then back up and think about the scope of the whole project, get discouraged, get distracted, etc. I've been very successful in life but the past 6 months I've been working hard to tweak a lot of the things I don't like about myself. Currently seeing a CBT specialist which is h…

How does CBT apply to task focus and work completion? All the literature I've seen is for dealing with emotional issues (important, but not applicable to tasks IMO). I'm asking because I am interested in effective solutions, not to be an internet contrarian.

I'm interested in an answer to this as well.

Though I wouldn't be surprised if the avoidance of work is ultimately an emotional issue.

Re: Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?

#267

Post by throwawayts »

scotty79 wrote: post #74

Get hired in some software corporation. You'll be amazed how easy the work is and how well it pays. The only motivation you'll need is to get up in the morning and haul you ass to the office. After few months of what will feel like vacation to you, in the company of fresh smart people, you'll start to get bored, even despite doing more hobby programming in your free time then you done in a long time. But at this poin…

>After a while of that let one of your freelancing clients hire you but not as freelancer but a full time remote employee paid not for hours of coding but rather for 8 hours each day, same way you were paid at corporation.

I'm here now, but find myself in a similar situation to OP and have been thinking about quitting. There's very little oversight and the business large enough that I have very little to do - and noone really cares if it does get done or not.

I moved to the countryside in another country and do a lot of mountain biking, running, walking, skiing, as work only takes around an hour a day. My friends all think it's crazy and that I'm in the luckiest situation I could possibly be in. I do feel my physical health has never been better, but mentally I find it really hard to do this.

Re: Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?

#268

Post by t_akosuke »

Remote freelancer here. I've had this problem for forever as well - many days I will stare at whatever project I'm working on all day without getting anything done, and maybe the next day the same will happen, and by the third day I will start avoiding communication with the team. Sometimes a week will go by where I've sat down to try to work as if it was full time but only clock a quarter of that. After a few months of that kind of torture, I'm dying for the customer to dismiss me and try again from scratch...only it's the same thing over again. It's no wonder I haven't built a solid network of clients, and I'm genuinelly surprised when I get anyone to call me again. I know I would probably perform better in a regular job environment - I know I've done in the past. But at the same time, I have both a very hard time accepting the idea of spending 40-50 hours in an office, and huge difficulty convincing those jobs of taking me. Development for me was supposed to be a way to get home the bread and support my artistic career, but it's working out to be very poor at bread winning for me, and I find it just as hard to work on my art this way. I'm considering quitting it completely and do menial jobs that don't fry my brain so I can really push my real passions.

Re: Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?

#269

Post by curo »

A few years ago, I could have wrote what you wrote, but at age 31, I feel almost as productive as I’ll ever want to be.

So what changed? I simply don’t think about it anymore. Coming up with rewards schemas is thinking about it — it’s your mind taking something simple and making it more complex. It’s also an implicit acceptance that you’ll postpone enjoyment of work and use your reward to compensate for that postponement.

Any schema is thinking about it. Any hack is thinking about it. Any todo list is thinking about it. Strategic plans…thinking about it. Any time you think of the outcome of your work before actually doing it. Todo lists will naturally write themselves when they’re needed. Strategic reflection will happen when curiosity or aimlessness arise. That’s there natural habitat. The mind weaponizes them for procrastination far beyond their intended purpose.

I'll post the rest in a comment, but your post inspired me to write this post:

https://medium.com/@cureau/is-it-normal-to-struggle-with-wor...

Re: Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?

#270

Post by whiskyant »

teekert wrote: post #214

You mention playing video games as a rewards and I immediately wonder: how much of your problem is the fact that video games made you get used to fast and easy rewards? How much did you desensitize your innate reward system by video games? I'm probably going to get down voted for this remark but I encourage every gamer feeling the urge to down vote to take a critical look at themselves before doing so, be honest, my…

I would say most video games do not have fast/easy rewards. There may be numerous small wins scattered throughout the completion of most games, but I would argue it's not much different from the distribution of small wins you could find at work (completing a small function, finding/fixing a bug, getting a large subtask done, etc). Most video games are decently challenging on a whole, and requires some persistence.

I would argue browsing reddit/HN/facebook/checking email/notifications are loaded with a ton more fast/easy rewards that give instant gratification than most video games.

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