141–150 of 232 posts
Obviously this requires some mental gymnastics to eventually complete both X and Y, or to come up with some task Y that feels important but actually is not. But it works great.
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Pardon the tangent, but could you provide a link to that project? I'm curious to see why something like printf is worth writing in assembly.
As I said in my post, I did not release it yet, and it will be very incomplete. But I am not alone, and some did assembly written printf like functions (gogol). The actual real way to work around the inappropriate complexity of that function is to remove it and switch to a brutal "put string" with string conversion functions (with space allocated on the stack). In the end it would be not that much more work in most c…
I developed a bad case of perfectionism-procrastination after working for a toxic boss. It didn't matter how polished our product was, he'd find a way to tear it apart. When he'd have a bad day, he'd start picking apart a random team's product. "Unbelievable!" he'd say in Slack, dropping a screen recording of the app that showed something we were supposed to be embarrassed about. It could be that the app took 3 secon…
Out of curiosity, what kind of background did your toxic boss have? Is it technical or business side?
I have a couple hunches for why this happens: 1. These people are dreamers and dislike people who bring them back down to reality, even if they need those people to actually build things.
2. They feel superior to people on the ground doing the building. Like they're above getting their hands dirty.
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> Shipping is the most important quality. So.. Can you trick yourself into directing the perfectionism into shipping fastest?
The best I’ve been able to do is: if perfection == high quality, then shipping smaller iterations faster is the most cost-effective means of improving quality.
The most effective antidote to procrastination for me is to get up at 5am. I have literally nothing to do for 4 hours, and I'm awake, and I have loads of energy, and no one else is up, so I may as well just do that thing I've been putting off. Also, literally just starting the task, regardless of how I feel. That works too.
Yeah, or maybe it's "just" ADHD. "Just" in parentheses because it's a horrible condition to have. Russel Barkley with a succinct video on "ADHD as Motivation Deficit Disorder": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR3RJU6838c
Counterpoint: ADHD diagnoses are a hot topic among kids and junior devs right now. Many of them self-diagnose based on Reddit, Twitter, or TikTok information that tells them that ADHD explains away all of their perceived shortcomings: It's the reason they're not motivated, it's the reason they didn't attend an Ivy League school, it's the reason they don't earn as much as their peers, it's the reason their last signif…
A recent nytimes opinion on the subject: https://twitter.com/emmma_camp_/status/1726390207740608823
>> It's generally a sign of progress when diagnoses that were once whispered in shameful secrecy enter our everyday vocabulary and shed their stigma. But especially online, where therapy "influencers" flood social media feeds with content about trauma, panic attacks and personality disorders, greater awareness of mental health problems risks encouraging self-diagnosis and the pathologizing of commonplace emotions what Dr. Foulkes calls "problems of living." When teenagers gravitate toward such content on their social media feeds, algorithms serve them more of it, intensifying the feedback loop.
Yeah, or maybe it's "just" ADHD. "Just" in parentheses because it's a horrible condition to have. Russel Barkley with a succinct video on "ADHD as Motivation Deficit Disorder": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR3RJU6838c
Counterpoint: ADHD diagnoses are a hot topic among kids and junior devs right now. Many of them self-diagnose based on Reddit, Twitter, or TikTok information that tells them that ADHD explains away all of their perceived shortcomings: It's the reason they're not motivated, it's the reason they didn't attend an Ivy League school, it's the reason they don't earn as much as their peers, it's the reason their last signif…
I think the same ADHD diagnosis problem is happening in New Zealand too.
The easiest antidote for procrastination is boredom. This may not work for everyone but for me it works exceptionally. Most often the reason why you don't want to work on something is because you find it too hard, too boring, or too irrelevant. But if you force yourself to be bored for a while, you will eventually crave some mental stimulation. And that's when you can pick up the task you have been avoiding and work…
> The easiest antidote for procrastination is boredom. From my experience with young people, the worst procrastinators will often choose boredom over the task they're avoiding. Doing nothing at all is less painful to them than doing the work they're avoiding. This is even more true for the perfectionist procrastinators: They are avoiding some exaggerated hypothetical pain that might come from failing at a task. If th…
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> 99 times out of 100 you are way overestimating the value of what you're delivering and people's expectations for it, and underestimating the value of time i.e. shipping quickly. Agree with this. Shipping is the most important quality. The faster you ship the faster you would be enjoying anything
> Shipping is the most important quality. So.. Can you trick yourself into directing the perfectionism into shipping fastest?
At one point, the thing I wanted to learn was "call something done". So I did that, and because it was a side project with learning as an explicit goal, I was able to actually do that - it was literally impossible to ship something imperfect, as shipping would already mean I'd perfectly reached my goal.
But that turned out to be enough faking it to make it - the feeling of shipping it felt good, and gave me the confidence to spend a small amount of time to polish my side projects up enough for shipping, rather than a large amount of time to do everything I want. And it's way more fun now to be able to occasionally pull up an old side project of mine that's still usable, because I got it to a usable state in the first place.
(In case anyone's interested, you can see the project, and how small its scope was, at https://agripongit.vincenttunru.com.)
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> 99 times out of 100 you are way overestimating the value of what you're delivering and people's expectations for it, and underestimating the value of time i.e. shipping quickly. Agree with this. Shipping is the most important quality. The faster you ship the faster you would be enjoying anything
> Shipping is the most important quality. So.. Can you trick yourself into directing the perfectionism into shipping fastest?
Perfectionism comes from iterations