101–110 of 133 posts
Thanks for sharing. What do you draw your doodles in?
Sketches app on an iPad, then converted to SVG and touched up in Inkscape.
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>This seems like cheap advice that's trying to get me to buy into a lifestyle in order to sell me things. Funny but I thought the exact opposite. People believe something much more easily when they want it to be true, so the typical sales approach is to tell people what they want to hear. Ridding your life of whatever seems most fun doesn't seem like cheap advice in that regard. On the other hand, I think you're spot…
There’s a second Christian-esque type of self help which states, “you are a broken and pitiful person, your fundamental nature is flawed. Take these steps to salvation.” Jordan Peterson is like this with all his requests to empathize with gulag prison guards and the like. I think people don’t just like hearing what is good or easy. Sometimes we want to have an incredible cross to bear. It’s the mentality that causes…
When a cheap sales pitch uses the "you're flawed" format, it's usually telling people "we are all flawed, but here's how you can be morally superior to your peers" or "do this thing and you'll receive a divine reward/achieve enlightenment." The promised reward or feeling of superiority is what makes people want to hear the message.
It's cheap to tell an aging church congregation about the dangers of video games and internet pornography, because it let's people pat themselves on the back without making a sacrifice. It's a little harder to tell an audience of young professionals that they need to limit high dopamine activities to find low dopamine activities appealing, and given that it's a real call to action based on a reasonable, falsifiable claim, I don't think it's cheap advice.
This seems like cheap advice that's trying to get me to buy into a lifestyle in order to sell me things. "Have less exposure towards super fun things". "Get bored". These describe the same general concept as dopamine fasting. The third bullet point can be reduced to "focus on what you have to do, until you can focus on it" which is circular. I'm not buying in. Maybe I'm getting old but "failure to start" is starting…
I agree with your points on appreciating yourself and better sleep. As for this seeming like cheap advice, keep in mind that A) many people have not heard it yet, and B) sometimes a new twist on an older concept drives the point home. And you don't have to buy anything. Most of the stuff we create is free on our blog or Twitter. We're not "vultures," we're 2 guys helping people to stop scrolling and go do stuff, driv…
Wow. Thanks, I guess.
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Amusingly, I had just built myself a pretty expensive gaming PC right before selling it all, and then got myself a second-hand 2015 MBP. I'd say the newest M1 MBP are worth the money, my metric shifted from raw performance/$ to experience/$. And honestly, I will gladly sacrifice some CPU power just to keep myself away from gaming.
How did you go about replacing gaming? I often game mostly out of habit but haven't found anything I'm really jazzed about to replace it
I picked up new things by making an habit out of it, such as reading at least a few pages of a book every day. It's cliché, but setting medium to long-term goals also clarified what I wanted my days to be made of, so now I'm very focused on a personal startup project.
Bonus advice that may not apply to you at all: don't be surprised if relatives tries to keep you from changing your habits, or if you find yourself distancing away from friends, it's a feature of improvement not a bug.
EDIT: What worked for me was to divide my work day (that's when I work) in 15 minutes chunks on a paper. Luckily I have reMarkable with graph paper made of 36 cells vertically. This nicely makes each cell 15 minutes making upto 9 hours.
Sometimes I just wonder, is the frequent burnt-out we see for programmers caused by not having a fast feedback loop. For me, I feel excited when doing performance tuning work, front-end stuff etc. However, I would quickly become bored after working on work that take more than 5 days or so, even if I love the subject. Although I'm not really into TDD, but I think sometimes using TDD could help you get some more feedba…
Coming from a background like that, I find that the days/weeks feedback loop time in tech makes me positively giddy with joy. It's hard for me to imagine thinking of 5 days as a long time to work on a problem.
I moved my television out of the living room and into a spare room. I felt like I was binging too much and wanted a jolt to my routine. Since doing so, I’ve read a backlog of books and even stated practicing tech skills I wanted to develop after work. I can vouch for it not seeming as difficult to do after toning down my stimulation. In fact, I can’t wait to get off work to start doing my stuff. Losing tv felt really…
Environment changes are powerful. Same goes for apps like Twitter. I used to have it both on my phone and tablet, and that lead to me checking it hundreds of times a day. Now I only access it in the browser, and in restricted time windows. Much better. Another "environment setup" example would be buying an analog alarm clock instead of using your phone (and doom scrolling for 30 minutes every morning. Simple changes,…
Good summary of what procrastination essentially is: an emotional problem, rarely about "laziness" or time management. Readjusting your dopamine sensitivity will most likely solve most of it, trading my expensive gaming PC for a Macbook Pro probably was the biggest game-changing (pun not intended) event of my life so far, and greatly improved my relation to work and life in general.
I've quit toxic competitive gaming (League of Legends, Overwatch) and replaced it with Netflix and shortwave radio listening. I'm still procrastinating because I work a bullshit job, but at least I don't rage as much and I always have some topics for small talk and conversation, which I feel is boosting my mood by a lot.
1. Avoid facile things.
Things that aren’t facile involve difficulty which in turn can involve learning, challenge, mistakes, or other things your brain finds painful. To know more tomorrow than you knew yesterday, you may have to remember why it seemed fun to touch the stove.
Have a hard look at what you do rather than work and whether each is genuinely fun. If it’s genuine fun, you likely don’t regret the time spent. More often, the things done instead of work, when looked back on, were not meaningfully rewarding. You’re not the better for having spent time on them.
This also helps you decide among “fun” things. For instance, between these two guilty pleasures: binge Netflix, or binge an airport novel?
The second one subconsciously reminds you that reading can be fun, and rehabilitates your ability to focus on reading at length, so primes you to be able to read and learn rapidly as needed to maintain mastery in your profession.
Anecdata suggests that for coming back from burnout on activities, facility-based alternatives are better than abject avoidance.