Ask HN: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma

I recently got out of this rut (somewhat. do you ever escape completely?) by starting a side project with some (light) responsibility. It's a reasonably complex mobile app, for a company I like, with guaranteed users and a time-table for delivery.

It has been wonderful. I'm a lot more focused in my research, because I'm hitting problems I haven't hit yet at work. I'm learning stuff that comes in handy elsewhere, and learning it quite a bit better than "read it somewhere" because I've had to use it non-trivially.

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Not that I'm suggesting you start contracting. That's unrelated. But having some kind of social responsibility can help a lot - talk about it, blog about the progress, and try to do something on it every day or so. Finishing things can be almost as addictive as wanting to start things, and it's way more useful.

edit: I'm seeing lots of "don't break the chain" mentions. In isolation, that hasn't worked for me :| Having some kind of external expectation that you don't break it / continue to make progress anyway is what pushed me over the edge.

You are not alone mate..

You have great advice here. This is how I do it. Create todo.txt and put everything you need to do in there. Make sure it's reasonably comprehensive and then start crossing things off. A productivity book will tell you the same thing in 200+ pages. If you save the finished items, you may be amazed by what you have accomplished. I had an app for this but I found editing todo.txt is faster. Apps like Trello don't have plaintext export. So let's say you finish to-do work for a client, with a text file you can just cut-paste the completed work into Square, Paypal, spreadsheet, whatever the client prefers. I've tried dozens of applications, but none of them will do the work for you ;-) Todo.txt seems antiquated but I found it's easier to make many edits quickly. I indent everything, similar to writing software. This helps me to see the big picture. I have todo.txt on a remote server so all my devices have access to it (no need to "sync") also automated backups that I control.

also, encrypt it and push it to Github.

"I just read an interesting article on addictive behavior."

My take on this is that the OP is simplistically addicted to learning because it's easy and requires little effort and prolongs not having to actually do something.

Back in the day of buying books at Barnes and Noble, I found myself doing something similar where I would continue to buy books to learn but never took any action or put off taking action on doing because it was much more comfortable to justify the time spent learning as "being good for something". Even if learning just meant leafing though the books. Similar to a graduate student getting degrees to avoid real life (in some not all cases I mean) and the real world.

I broke the habit by deciding that I didn't need another book and I should spend the time actually using the knowledge that I had acquired. Not that these were all computer books (they weren't) but an example would be to actually sit down with that book on PHP or Mysql and actually start to do something (was a LAMP book iirc). I did that one day and built a tool that I could use that was really valuable. I forced myself to read from the start. Now I question each thing I think about learning in terms of the actual value and whether I should concentrate on things that I have already acquired knowledge wise.