81–90 of 378 posts
How do people still fall for advertorials like this?
It is known that buying and going through the 4 week anti-procrastination program from deprocrastination.co instead of doing real work for 4 weeks helps you not procrastinate. Dothraki choir: "it is known".
Pet peeve: when people take phrases intended for one thing and uses them for a slightly modified purpose. I take Branson's "screw it, let's do it" mantra as something entreprenurial, a call to break the rules (and stuff like that). Using it in this purpose feels more like "screw it, let's work even though I'd rather stay in bed", which is different emotionally, and kind of saturates the sayings power. (Maybe nikes "J…
- take a list of tasks you're procrastinating on
- set a timer for five minutes
- do just five minutes on task one. Then stop, and do the next, even if you were enjoying the first one
- keep cycling over until you've unblocked them all
I have ADHD, so this is a constant struggle. Make sure the thing you have to do is something you want to do. While you can procrastinate on the things you're truly interested in, ultimately you're more likely to follow through with the things that interest you than the other random tasks that require doing. Writing that design doc, report, or review at work? Meh. I drag my feet until I'm the last person in the office…
Does it help you at all to have external recipients of your work, or does it not factor in at all in what gets done?
It helps me if I tell someone else "I'll send you the report today", because it makes me more accountable. I'll probably delay it until panicking at the end of the day, but I will at least hammer something out and send it off. Or worst case finish it tomorrow morning, after having started, but having to leave work the day before, which is still better than postponing even longer.
For me to do tasks, I need to reach the "Screw quality and completeness, I need to send _something_!", which usually turns out to be plenty good enough based on feedback. I just need to find someone to promise sending the result to for my more important tasks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroo…
Maybe this works for potters but I don't think it'd work for developers. If a compSci lecturer suggested one group would get an A for writing a perfect, bug free app and the other group would get an A for writing 50,000 lines of code, I wouldn't expect the group writing as much code as they could to make the best app.
It's like order and chaos, what you want is to find a balance that allows you to explore, and leave things a bit open so they can also be extended, but also sound and precisse enough so that it actually works, and does the job.
I'm needing this a lot right now for a massive project to deliver at work. I get so tangled up in the mess of trying to make it perfect or thinking that I'm not approaching the problem in the best way that I end up twiddling my thumbs for hours, pretty much doing nothing worthwhile the whole time. I'll be trying these out tomorrow and see how deprocrastinated I can get before veering off again.
The self-doubt is also normal, and I actively push against it by reminding myself that, while someone that has done this before can likely jump to a good solution right away, it doesn't mean that it's realistic to expect that of myself.
Being tangled in a mess of something you are not an expert in is a normal way to learn. I have to remind myself that this approach worked before and there is no reason to believe that it won't work this time.
I'm going to put these tips to good use today:
I don't know if this is the right module to use for this. It looks like it doesn't do X and Y. Screw it, I'm going to try to get Z working.
I can't figure out the proper way to pass this argument in? Let's just hard-code it for now to get things working and mark it with a TODO.
An eagle doesn't force itself to hunt for food; it just hunts. I can't imagine it having to psych itself up simply to be. Looking for and harnessing that level of purity seems ultimately more fruitful than playing psychological tricks on your mind. Easier said than done, unfortunately.
I'd like to share this post[0]: The last two weeks I made it a goal to run 5km every morning. A few times, particularly today, I felt lazy and run down, but I got out of bed anyway and told myself that I'll at least walk. The next thing I know I'm running and feeling amazing and on to set one of my better times. The point: When you tell yourself "just one more game" or "just one more post", or "just one more video" a…
I'd like to share this post[0]: The last two weeks I made it a goal to run 5km every morning. A few times, particularly today, I felt lazy and run down, but I got out of bed anyway and told myself that I'll at least walk. The next thing I know I'm running and feeling amazing and on to set one of my better times. The point: When you tell yourself "just one more game" or "just one more post", or "just one more video" a…
Two of my personal "works for me" tips: explore the ketogenic diet and the effect of ketones/ketosis on the brain function, and/or try out the Wim Hof breathing method.