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

I have gaps in between every job I've ever held, but those gaps are strategic. In them, I figure out what I really want to do, and whether I have the tools to do what I really want to do. I applied to YC's first class of S05, as I was finishing up college. I didn't get in. I figured that if investors wouldn't talk to me, I'd learn how to do a bootstrapped startup, so I went to work for a bootstrapped financial software startup. After 2 years there, I quit and founded my own bootstrapped startup, this time in Web 2.0 casual games. It failed too. In examining the failure, I figured that I lacked enough real-world experience to understand what the real markets were, I'd exhausted my pool of potential co-founders, and I had this continuing anxiety about how to do software development "the right way" and make programs that scale. So I moved out to California to work for Google Search. I'm on my own again, but I got everything out of Google that I hoped to get out of it (and more!).

If you're doing it right, each job is an opportunity to get a lot more than money. It's a chance to build technical experience, to challenge yourself, to look at how people with way more experience than you make decisions, to understand how an industry works, and to see how an organization fits together.

Without going into details, in my case the task is implementing a terrible, hacky solution for a total edge case problem. It's something I will probably never do again in my entire career.

It's draining. It claws at my self esteem, as I sit in the office wasting literal hours during a day not doing anything. The output of the 4-5 hours of actual work I put in over the course of a week appear satisfactory to the stakeholders, which is mind blowing.

I know that the sooner I get this done, the sooner I can move onto something more interesting. However, just working on this particular task has sapped my will like nothing I've experienced before in my career as a developer.

Realizing that changing your environment so that it encourages the right outcome is orders of magnitude beyond being a basic, mediocre grown-up who relies on discipline and will power, which is easily depleted, to overcome an onfavorable environment. No one should settle for relying on discipline and will power. That's a moralizing exercise in futility. I've had this argument with my stepfather until he became abusive. The result: I stopped talking with him. It has been one year. Reserve your discipline for differential association and for improving your environment.

But I do encounter many chores in my work that are boring, that are bad ideas, that are for difficult customers, or often all three. I can have the same problems getting those tasks done, just like you describe. Actually, you seem to be way ahead of me because it took my far to long to figure it out. I thought I was losing my ability to program. I was wondering if I was going to have to find another career because I had lost my ability to concentrate. I was reading books on getting things done, and concentration and trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with me. I would sit down to do a task, check email, check reddit, check hacker news, check reddit, get coffee, go to the bathroom, check reddit, "Arg! I have shit to do!" Check reddit, check IRC, etc. I caught myself more than once closing a browser tab with some distraction, pausing for a half moment to organize what I should actually be doing and then open a browser tab to the same thing again.

The insite came when I finally got something engaging to do, and I just powered through it. I could still program! How did I get in the zone? How do I get there again when I need it? Well I worried about hat for a while, thinking there was some combo of sleep, nutrition, environment and task management software that I could line all up and get back to "the zone". It finally dawned on me that I subconsciously find distractions to avoid doing things I don't want to do. What a revelation.

How do I get over it? Well I still struggle with it, but simply identifying the problem was a huge step towards fixing it. Here are some techniques that I use:

Pomodoro technique. This is a productivity trick that actually works pretty well for me. The short version is that that you make a list of very small tasks, then work for twenty minutes (straight! no phone, no emails, no coffee, no bathroom), then take a five minute break. This helps with distraction problems because you can tell yourself, "I can goof off in 7 minutes". It sounds like a lot of interruptions, but I'm amazed at how much I get done with it.

Creating crisis. I work harder with the Sword of Damocles hanging over me, so I put those swords there myself. Call me back at 2:30 and I will have this done. Then I'm good for two hours of, "oh shit, oh shit, oh shit," type production.

Pair programming (and rubber ducking). This really helps to power through crummy tasks. Unfortunately, I work from home for a tiny company. I don't have anyone to program with. But if I am really stuck, I can ask my wife to sit next to me, while I explain what I am doing, and what I am trying to accomplish, and the details of what I am coding as I code it. I can use this occasionally to get over a hump.

Change of venue. I have struggled to find some shitty bug in some shitty spagetti code for a crappy website selling stupid things for WAY too long. The only way I broke through was to take my computer somewhere else, in front of other people. David Sedaris has a great story about a book suggesting he make a change in his house to help him quit smoking. Buy a new couch or something in order to change the venue. In our comfortable habitual surroundings we act in comfortable habitual ways. So he moved to Japan to stop smoking. I can't do this every day, it's just for breaking major blocks.

Anyway, I need to get back to work. Good luck!