How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating, and Love Letting Go • Hacker News Board

Re: How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating, and Love Letting Go

#71

Post by asdasf » Thu, Feb 06, 2014, 5:02 PM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #68

TheSOB888 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is nothing at all like happiness. Are you one of those people without emotions? It's OK, I was too for a long time. It happens a lot to people in tech, or people who end up in tech. Anyways, happiness is an innate emotion. It's much more central than anything about "achieving" your goals. If you don't feel stressed about the future, don't wish you were somewhere else/someone else/doing something else constantly,…

"Are you one of those people without emotions? It's OK, I was too for a long time." Haha. Healthy people have emotions for reasons. If you don't introspect about why you are happy, sad, content, enraged, or depressed, you will have less information about how well you are living your life according to your own standards. "It's much more central than anything about "achieving" your goals." It's not clear to me how some…

You are confusing a sense of accomplishment for happiness. That suggests that you may not have felt happiness enough (or recently enough) to recognize it.

Re: How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating, and Love Letting Go

#72

Post by scotch_drinker » Thu, Feb 06, 2014, 5:48 PM UTC

jmilloy wrote: post #56

randallsquared wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happiness is a natural measurement of how well you (believe you) are achieving your goals. If you are unhappy, it's a signal that you should change something about your life, not a signal that you should short-circuit the measurement system.

Changing something about your life is a valid response. So is short-circuiting the measurement system. Keep in mind that the measurement system includes external cultural/societal pressures, out-of-date instinctual responses, and your emotions as interpreted through the lens of your own emotions . A disadvantage of changing what you do, instead of how to feel about what you do, is that you will probably arrive at a p…

This. I have a friend who changes jobs about every 6-12 months chasing happiness. And every 6-12 months, I can count on him starting to bitch and moan about everything at the job. He refuses to listen to the idea that maybe happiness should be externally obtained and instead should start from within somehow. In a lot of ways, this seems to be an Eastern-Western dichotomy.

We can decide to wake up and be happy or we can decide to wake up and let something dictate our happiness. Whether we do it consciously or not, it's still a choice.

Re: How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating, and Love Letting Go

#73

Post by 6d0debc071 » Thu, Feb 06, 2014, 6:31 PM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #53

vidarh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something." Nonsense. This in itself is a result of falling prey to what Leo Baubata (the author of the linked article) writes about: Inability to "let go". There may certainly be things you'd find more fulfilling. But if you need to do stuff to be happy, you are letting yourself suff…

Happiness is a natural measurement of how well you (believe you) are achieving your goals. If you are unhappy, it's a signal that you should change something about your life, not a signal that you should short-circuit the measurement system.

> Happiness is a natural measurement of how well you (believe you) are achieving your goals.

And what are your goals? If they're just things you set out to achieve, then that's false. We set out to achieve things that bring us no real pleasure in the achievement of - qualifications, promotions etc.

Re: How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating, and Love Letting Go

#74

Post by bcbrown » Thu, Feb 06, 2014, 6:43 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #38

Jun8 wrote: post #16

You may want to not waste time reading this but instead use that time to read pg's essay on similar ideas, "How to Do What You Love" ( http://paulgraham.com/love.html ), which, if I had the power, I would have millions of copies printed and have every kid in the world read it. It explains (at least) two simple ideas very effectively: 1. The work versus fun dichotomy is taught very early: "The very idea is foreign to…

> Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something." Nonsense. This in itself is a result of falling prey to what Leo Baubata (the author of the linked article) writes about: Inability to "let go". There may certainly be things you'd find more fulfilling. But if you need to do stuff to be happy, you are letting yourself suff…

My experiences don't bear that out. A few years ago I quit my job and spent six months traveling across the USA, camping at national parks. It was a dream I'd had for a while, and I loved it. At the same time, I was very glad when my trip had finished, and I could get back to working.

What I noticed was that my subconscious had a need to make plans, to have a goal to work towards. I was living my dream; there was nothing I wanted to achieve, because I had achieved it. As a result, I started daydreaming, with my daydreams steadily becoming more fantastical and involved. By the end, I was ready to find a new goal to work towards; that ended up being professional/career development and continuing education.

I agree absolutely that it's important to be able to be happy while doing the dishes, but that's a different sensation. There's the pleasure of being in the moment, of acknowledging the sensations that surround you, of being alive. Then there's the satisfaction of achievement. Both are important, but they are distinct.

Re: How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating, and Love Letting Go

#75

Post by GFischer » Thu, Feb 06, 2014, 7:14 PM UTC

hueving wrote: post #22

willvarfar wrote: post #20

Was I the only one expecting it to be a fun play on words and be about embracing golang?

Yeah, perfect title, just add a couple more words... "How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating, and Love Letting Go Garbage Collect"

That sounds like a randomly generated title from the HN Headline Generator :)

https://github.com/sursh/markov-hacker-news or www.blarworld.net/hackernewsgen.html

Re: How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating, and Love Letting Go

#76

Post by beamer99 » Thu, Feb 06, 2014, 7:58 PM UTC

hopfog wrote: post #52

For me, the single most efficient anti-procrastination technique has been Don't Break The Chain. I have a few tasks that I need to complete _every day_ and the point is that the longer the streak is the bigger the incentive will be to continue. It also creates a clear routine which helps a lot on the psychological level (anyone who is into physical training of some sort knows how important this is). I usually break i…

I use a variation of this technique. I spend X minutes doing Y. Where X is 5 minutes. The 25 minutes of the Pomodoro is too long to focus on one thing. I have a very very short attention span and I found 5 minutes to be the optimal timebox for me. Anything longer and I get bored. Now I have clock which doesn't increment in minutes but 5minute units. It's the only way I can make sense of the passage of time.

At the end of the timebox I do a 30sec review where I assess how I executed the task. Did I spend most of the time searching for information and organising material or did I spend it purely executing. I find with highly skilled people they spend most of they're time executing. If I spent most of it searching for stuff, I'd mark it as a delay due to organisation, if I was searching on how to do the task I would mark it is 'upskill', then I'd move onto the next thing. After a few hours patterns start to emerge around similar tasks. If a lot of related items were marked 'org' I'd then exploit them for automation or create them as templates for resuse. All the 'upskill' marked tasks would be condensed into a learning task at a more convenient task. The idea around all of this was to progressively become more organised and more skilled so that when performing a task, I would purely be executing and not faffing about.

It's a bit convoluted but it is a system that has worked terribly well since late last year and it's made me twice as productive at work, and smarter at what I do. There are times though where I wish I could be like people around me who are able to focus on thing for half an hour or more but we all have to play the hand we've been dealt and mine is a chronic lack of focus.

Re: How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating, and Love Letting Go

#77

Post by NegativeK » Thu, Feb 06, 2014, 8:31 PM UTC

gizzlon wrote: post #29

dscrd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son's got an ADHD diagnosis and he seems like you. Whatever is slightly uninteresting is terribly difficult for him to focus on but if there's something interesting, he can maintain perfect focus for hours. I imagine it might be days if he wasn't interrupted.

* Whatever is slightly uninteresting is terribly difficult for him to focus on but if there's something interesting, he can maintain perfect focus for hours. Aren't we all like that?

Definitely not.

I handle rote, monotonous work really well, as long as it lets my brain check out and think about other things. Alphabetizing by hand and transcription work drive some people mad, but I excelled at it.

Re: How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating, and Love Letting Go

#78

Post by resu_nimda » Fri, Feb 07, 2014, 12:36 AM UTC

asdasf wrote: post #71

randallsquared wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Are you one of those people without emotions? It's OK, I was too for a long time." Haha. Healthy people have emotions for reasons. If you don't introspect about why you are happy, sad, content, enraged, or depressed, you will have less information about how well you are living your life according to your own standards. "It's much more central than anything about "achieving" your goals." It's not clear to me how some…

You are confusing a sense of accomplishment for happiness. That suggests that you may not have felt happiness enough (or recently enough) to recognize it.

Not really. He's just using a more broad (scientific?) definition of the word "goal".

Eating food every day is a goal. Getting enough sleep is a goal. Peter Gibbons in The Office has a goal to do absolutely nothing.

Re: How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating, and Love Letting Go

#79

Post by mhartl » Fri, Feb 07, 2014, 2:25 AM UTC

ronaldx wrote: post #58

hopfog wrote: post #52

For me, the single most efficient anti-procrastination technique has been Don't Break The Chain. I have a few tasks that I need to complete _every day_ and the point is that the longer the streak is the bigger the incentive will be to continue. It also creates a clear routine which helps a lot on the psychological level (anyone who is into physical training of some sort knows how important this is). I usually break i…

"Don't Break The Chain" can be dangerous on its own. Whenever I do break the chain, I feel unmotivated to start the chain again ( especially if I've done a good job, because it seems overwhelming to pick it up again from the start of the chain). I've had to move on from Don't Break The Chain to being positive about making consistent progress. I would say Don't Break The Chain is great for a fixed-length, short-to-med…

Agreed. The solution I like is http://beeminder.com/.

Re: How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating, and Love Letting Go

#80

Post by e12e » Fri, Feb 07, 2014, 7:39 AM UTC

Nilzor wrote: post #42

vidarh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something." Nonsense. This in itself is a result of falling prey to what Leo Baubata (the author of the linked article) writes about: Inability to "let go". There may certainly be things you'd find more fulfilling. But if you need to do stuff to be happy, you are letting yourself suff…

"Unproductive pleasures pall eventually ". Would you be happy staring at the clouds consistently for two months?

You'd also have to define unproductive.

Spending a few decades thinking about the meaning of life might be considered unproductive - or it could be considered "being a philosopher". (Most) art is arguably fundamentally "unproductive". I suppose one might say that if you, over time, don't impart some impact on the people around you (share a work of art, pass on wisdom, [ed:raise] (and/or) feed a child...) then you've been "unproductive".

But are you a philosopher by virtue of achieving enlightenment or by virtue of helping others achieve enlightenment? If you died before you came to a crucial insight -- was your time spent thinking up to that point "unproductive"?