Ask HN: What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?

It seems I am fighting with myself. This has happened multiple times and seriously affects the quality of my life.

I am assigned a feature to implement, usually vague and something that I feel adds unnecessary complexity to the codebase. I try to reason with my managers, but usually their minds are already made up. I then struggle with finishing this feature, logging hours upon hours against it...not because it takes so long to code, but because I can't make myself do it and waste hours motivating myself to do it. Also I waste considerable amount of time trying to do things in the most readable, maintainable and simple way possible. This means weighing merits of different solutions and choosing one. I am a really hesitant decision maker, resulting in more wasted hours.

The haranguing part is that my managers don't fire me. They don't see how many hours I have wasted, how unmotivated I am. Instead they treat me as one of their most valued employees (oh the irony!). (I am not in a position to change jobs at the moment. I am helping my BF's startup by doing this job.)

Have you been in such situations? How do you get in the zone and get it done when your entire being is revolting against the task?

You can add meaning to your work by picking goals and accomplishing them. It doesn't matter what they are -- just as long as they can be accomplished and you know that you did.

Pick things that incidentally accomplish the assigned goal. For example,

1. Pick an amount of time, like 3 hours, repeat this cycle

2. make a branch

3. implement the feature in the fastest way you can

4. think about why this isn't acceptable

5. throw away the branch

6. do it again avoiding one thing that made the last one crappy

Also, weighing merits of different solutions and picking one is your job -- no need to feel bad about that. Come up with an assessment tool that will help you decide. Time-box decision making, but don't stop thinking about your solution -- just give it the appropriate amount of time, not unbounded.

Making progress is motivating. You want to end up at the same place but have the feeling of progress making throughout the process. I believe that it's possible you are taking the appropriate amount of time to do the work at hand, but you are getting into an anxiety/depression cycle because you can't get into a flow state.

> What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?

...anything other than the task at hand, obviously. :-)

It sounds like symptoms of burnout. I am not an expert but I have personally suffered from burnout before...and it took me a while to get over it. It sounds like you are additionally hampered due to being personally obligated.

As far as I know the only way to get over burnout is to stop. If you do not you will suffer more. I wish I had better news.

1) Look at the problem a different way and try to find a way to make it more interesting, attractive and (most importantly) impressive. I had to find and fix a tedious problem so I wrote a visualization, defect detection and automatic correction tool. If you have the freedom, try solving it with a new language or technology that you've always wanted to learn.

2) Challenge yourself to finish the project as quickly as possible. If a realistic estimate is that the work will take 1 week then try to finish it in 1-2 days. If it is awful work, try to get it over as quickly as possible. It helps if you can find an existing solution that you can use as a starting point.

3) If you're paid hourly, you might consider outsourcing the problem to someone off of elance. You should reframe the problem so that it doesn't require you to share any info (source code etc) from your employer with the person you outsource to. Ideally, ask the person to create an open source project on github.