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How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To

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Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To

#101

Post by leviathan »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #62

I 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…

I have the same issue, and I solve it by offloading the burden of choice to someone else. My wife is a project manager at a company, while I'm self employed; so I give her the job of scheduling my tasks. It's very refreshing to just open your tasks software, see what you have to work on next, and just do it. No overhead of wondering which task to start with.

Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To

#102

Post by TeMPOraL »

pandler wrote: post #92
thatthatis wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The coin flip works surprisingly well for me, and for the exact reason you stated. Given the choice between two options that I can't decide between, I flip a coin. The actual result of the flip is irrelevant, because I'll invariably know which result I want before the coin even lands. It forces me to make a decision in spite of myself.

And if you don't find yourself having a preferred outcome, it means the choices are more-less equal, so coin flip will still save you time.

Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To

#103

Post by TeMPOraL »

chegra wrote: post #72
TeMPOraL wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tried that with working hours, with amouny of daily reports sent (I kept forgetting or avoiding them sometimes) and with sleep hours. In all three cases, it only ended up in me getting into unseen levels of anxiety because of failing AND loosing money (which I don't have much), which obviously led to more failure (positive feedback loop of anxiety and/or panic).

Ultimately I semi-solved some of my problems by writing a time for coming into office in my work contract and thus fixing the top (early) part of my schedule.

In a way, this experience taught me that I'm increasingly anxiety-driven and unable to be deterred by potential punishment. I'll ponder something hurtful to me in my conscious mind, stress like hell because of the unconscious, and then go ahead and do it anyway. Anyone knows a cure for that?

Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To

#104

Post by mistercow »

pknight wrote: post #78
mistercow wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Churc…

I don't think that there's any reason that it has to be one or the other.

It's interesting that you bring up Winston Churchill. He slept less than 6 hours per day, which suggests to me that he likely had a higher dopamine response than normal. That's associated with higher drive, which means Churchill was probably one of the outliers I was talking about.

Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To

#105

Post by slowmover »

b1daly wrote: post #24
asdashopping wrote: post #22

I 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…

Not to be obvious, but have you tried medication? Like a lot of things YMMV but it can help a lot, and also make those other approaches more effective. Hang in there...

He mentions that he's tried multiple antidepressants in the third sentence.

Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To

#106

Post by slowmover »

asdashopping wrote: post #22

I 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 have nothing to offer except that I'm right there with you. It's a daily, hourly struggle. Email me if you'd like.

Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To

#107

Post by mynewwork »

eaurouge wrote: post #87
callum85 wrote: post #74

I 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 construct…

You can't "just" do stuff if you don't feel like it, as this article suggests. And yet every morning, millions of people get up and go to work to do a job they really don't feel like doing. People still do back-breaking work just so they can put food on the table. I'm not saying it's a recipe for happiness but people have been doing stuff they don't enjoy for millennia. And even in present day, only some of us can af…

It takes far less motivation or willpower to do manual labor than mental labor. I had multiple manual labor jobs before becoming a developer and I could do my work on the factory line even if I was tired, unhappy, apathetic, distracted or preoccupied. I find it far harder to code under those conditions.

Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To

#108

Post by scott_karana »

mynewwork wrote: post #107
eaurouge wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't "just" do stuff if you don't feel like it, as this article suggests. And yet every morning, millions of people get up and go to work to do a job they really don't feel like doing. People still do back-breaking work just so they can put food on the table. I'm not saying it's a recipe for happiness but people have been doing stuff they don't enjoy for millennia. And even in present day, only some of us can af…

It takes far less motivation or willpower to do manual labor than mental labor. I had multiple manual labor jobs before becoming a developer and I could do my work on the factory line even if I was tired, unhappy, apathetic, distracted or preoccupied. I find it far harder to code under those conditions.

I think you're right, anecdotally. I've had the same experience.

Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To

#109

Post by jaysonelliot »

leviathan wrote: post #101
jaysonelliot wrote: post #62

I 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…

I have the same issue, and I solve it by offloading the burden of choice to someone else. My wife is a project manager at a company, while I'm self employed; so I give her the job of scheduling my tasks. It's very refreshing to just open your tasks software, see what you have to work on next, and just do it. No overhead of wondering which task to start with.

Your approach is my favorite. I've had an assistant in the past to do just this kind of thing, but now that I'm doing a startup, I can't afford to do it anymore.

It would be great if there were a matchmaking service that teamed people up to do this for each other. I find that it's a lot easier to schedule someone else's tasks than your own—I'd love to trade task-making responsibility with someone else.

Re: How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To

#110

Post by gravedave »

eaurouge wrote: post #87
callum85 wrote: post #74

I 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 construct…

You can't "just" do stuff if you don't feel like it, as this article suggests. And yet every morning, millions of people get up and go to work to do a job they really don't feel like doing. People still do back-breaking work just so they can put food on the table. I'm not saying it's a recipe for happiness but people have been doing stuff they don't enjoy for millennia. And even in present day, only some of us can af…

Because you don't need focus and creativity to carry shit around. Anyone can dig a ditch while not feeling like it, but very few can actually do intellectual work in the same state.
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