what works for me, at least in getting through difficult software grinds is commit to some deadline and a presentation of progress to a friend or better yet several friends at once.
How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To
71–80 of 111 posts
Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To
#72I said this in another comment, but what works for me is publicly pledging to work for x number of hours on y project or else I give z dollars to some charity. Where x is normally between 2-10 y is anything z is normally 10 If you are procrastinating right now, give it a go. Go on twitter or facebook and say if I don't work for 2 hours on Akasha(a project), I will donate $10 to watsi(the charity). I think when settin…
Tried that with Beeminder. It didn't work and I only lost money in the process. I know this works for some people, unfortunately not for me :(.
Hmm, was the goal set in a way that you can accomplish it? Like if you say I want to lose 100lbs in a day that wouldn't work. Even 1lb in a week wouldn't work because it is not the amount of weight you lose is not upto you but up to your body. The same way with working. You can't specify how much you want to get done just only how much time you plan on spending on it. The amount of work done will vary again with how you are feeling and some variables not under the control of your willpower.
But who knows this may only work for a certain type of people.
Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To
#73I'll read this later.
Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To
#74I think this is terrible advice. I got much better at motivation over the last year by thinking in exactly the opposite way from what this article recommends. I accepted that I had virtually no willpower, and that I wasn't just going to just magically develop some, and that I didn't need it anyway. Instead I needed to get more skilled at 'coaxing' myself into doing things – at steering my feelings into more constructive areas, and then letting my desires drive my actions. I applied my tiny amount of willpower to this 'steering', rather than trying to use it to drag myself kicking and screaming into doing things, which it clearly is not powerful enough to do. It worked, and I'm much happier. You can't "just" do stuff if you don't feel like it, as this article suggests. That's completely unsustainable. Any approach amounting to "just fucking do it" is going to last only as along as that little glimmer of resolve lasts, which is obviously short term. Instead you need to break down the wall between your gut desires and your cerebral strategies, and make those two parts of yourself acknowledge each other and collaborate.
Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To
#75I was hoping to see one for my personal bugbear: paralysis of choice. The most common situation for me is to be faced with a list of projects and tasks that are more than I can handle, and doing any one of them means ignoring the others, which are all equally urgent. I know all the GTD and Pomodoro techniques and everything else, but it's in my head where the problem lies. Once I settle in to one specific task, I can…
In cases like this I use a binary comparison tree:
Task a vs task b: if I don't have an opinion about which I should do, I flip a coin.
Task c vs task d, task e vs task f, task g vs task h.
Then winner ab vs winner cd, winner ef vs winner gh.
Then winner abcd vs winner efgh.
I almost never make it all the way to the end as by round 2 ive considered the urgency and value of every task and the winner is usually obvious.
In the cases where I truly don't have an opinion about any of them, the coin flipping only takes a few seconds and getting started on somehing now is often better than spending the time trying to gather enough evidence to form an opinion.
The trick is in forcing relatively easy binary comparisons vs hard absolute or exhaustive evaluations. Our brains have lots of good hardware to make binary and trinary decisions, but we have to use software once we pass 4 or so competing choices.
It works for me. Ymmv.
Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To
#76I have suffered from depression for years and it is destroying my life. I read articles like this and think that what they're saying sounds like a great idea, and then proceed to completely ignore it. I have tried multiple types of antidepressants and found the side effects unbearable. They didn't make me feel happy, they made me feel nothing. I have tried CBT and regular therapy, both of which have failed because I…
Hi, from my own experience getting out of depression and then later helping a friend out of it I firmly believe you can get out of depression if you want to. Wanting to get out of depression is the hard part because you got to be willing to do what is necessary. You are closer than you think to getting out of depression when you say, "Maybe it is just a matter of changing how I think." It is that. You are also right…
What you described is quite close to how I manage my own depression. And it's working flawlessly, btw.
But, at least in my case, obsessively pushing myself into doing something I wouldn't ever 'normally do' had the opposite effect. I realized that there was/is probably a reason why I never tried it before, the chance that I will somehow magically start liking it now is too slim, and the only thing I was doing at that time was wasting energy that I could had otherwise spent on doing something I would've enjoyed.
The only thing that's left to add is to never push yourself into doing something you don't enjoy in hopes of finding somehow happiness. (I guess a lot of people fail here, or at least I did)
Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To
#77This is kind of funny as I just started reading "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Kahnemann.
In those terms, this article is very much about "type 2" processes, which is conscious and slow monitoring of the more intuitive type 1 processes.
A consequence is that following this advice will result in "ego depletion". By exerting your willpower in one area, you deplete a common store of it, and thus you're more likely to overeat, act lazily, think lazily, etc. in other areas.
I think this probably manifests in people who work too hard getting fat, since they don't want to watch what they eat or exercise (if those things require willpower; for some people may not)
Note that "conscious willpower" is the opposite of a "flow state". And flow is what is necessary to write good software.
Like all things, there has to be a balance. You have to exert your willpower, and all new things involve this pain, but you can also set your life up so it isn't a constant problem.
Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to discount research and the potential benefits of drugs for individual use cases, but why fight the symptoms (apparent lack in motivation) with drugs instead of the cause. Why not figure out how to organize things in a way that less people struggle with these kinds of things in the first place.
Sure, we should still be researching that too, but people have been trying that, and not with all that much success. What works and doesn't work tends to vary wildly from person to person, and at best people tend to find answers that let them scrape by, not answers that really fix the problem. And I think it's quite possible that there isn't an organizational solution. It seems very likely to me that humans have evol…
Motivation is such a complex issue but it's quite apparent that you can't view it in isolation. I don't see how a hypothetical motivation pill will do much better than an anti-depressant drug.
What I find interesting though is this stigma around depression, lack of motivation and laziness. There's nothing unbecoming, wrong or unnatural about any of these states. We don't need to stamp it out completely.
Winston Churchill had severe depression but he was arguably one of the most productive people in the 20th century. Lazy people often come up with brilliant inventions (in order to do less work). And lack of motivation can often be addressed by life style changes.
Maybe for one person the lack of motivation is because the work they engage in isn't meaningful to them. For another person, the work may be meaningful but they are missing connection from other people. The next person might not be leading a healthy lifestyle so they are not providing their body an environment in which they can thrive (not enough nutrients/sun light etc). And yet another person may simply be experiencing a natural oscillation between being motivated and unmotivated. All of these things can be addressed in some way or another.
Personally, I found the education system a factor in robbing me of motivation and questioning my drive. I didn't get really motivated about learning until I got out of it and picked topics I was truly curious about. But up until that point I would almost have considered myself as kind of broken because I was doing the bare minimum to pass tests when I could be doing so much more. The only thing that changed for me to tap into my drive was the conditions I set. Now I learn because I'm driven by curiosity and a drive to make things.
It would be a pity if people start taking pills without addressing these other things (at least in conjunction).
Having said that, for specific treatment alternatives, I think the future is much brighter with neuro/bio feedback technologies. And it's getting cheaper by the year.
Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To
#79I have suffered from depression for years and it is destroying my life. I read articles like this and think that what they're saying sounds like a great idea, and then proceed to completely ignore it. I have tried multiple types of antidepressants and found the side effects unbearable. They didn't make me feel happy, they made me feel nothing. I have tried CBT and regular therapy, both of which have failed because I…
I've suffered from depression in the past, mostly during my late teenage years and early adulthood. The first thing I will say is that depression and motivation are different for everyone, so you can take this with a huge grain of salt, but here is what helped me: * Get sunlight — I grew up in Minnesota where if it's sunny in the winter that usually means its too cold for exposed skin outside. When I moved to Santa F…
I can't stress enough how important sunlight and exercise (any exercise, even walking) is. It's ridiculous how many doctors don't prescribe this before drugs.
Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To
#80I guess this is marginally better than your typical motivation article, but not much. I really want our culture to shift in a direction where it's economically feasible to research nootropics and find ones that are seriously effective. As far as I know, the last time someone put a serious effort into researching a pharmacological aid to "drive" was in the 60s when selegiline was discovered, and it worked . Selegiline…
Not to discount research and the potential benefits of drugs for individual use cases, but why fight the symptoms (apparent lack in motivation) with drugs instead of the cause. Why not figure out how to organize things in a way that less people struggle with these kinds of things in the first place.
The brain, more than any other part of the body, exists within a complex web of feedback systems that can't be separated into a simple cause and effect So if the problem is environment->thought->neurochemistry->action->environment (picture this as a cyclic directed graph), it might not matter which element of the loop is altered as long as something is done at some point on the cycle.