151–160 of 185 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I observe the opposite: the more important something is the more afraid I am to approach it. I procrastinate because it is important.
I suspect it's because of fear of failure, as failure is more consequential the more important the task is.
> Action leads to motivation, not the other way around. I've found this to be very true. A trick I found that made this easier for me is to leave a trivial task to start tomorrow with, often with notes to remind myself what to do. Ideally the trivial task is on the way to something bigger, not finishing something. That gets me into my editor, gets me running the code / tests / etc., and gives me a trivially easy way…
I’m just stating the obvious, but I find it odd that the author states the opposite isn’t true.
When stuck I do what I call "prepping". Don't try to do the task, just prep for it -- clean the room, the desk, close distracting websites, gather the materials. It's lowering the activation energy so the reaction can happen more easily.
> Action leads to motivation, not the other way around. I've found this to be very true. A trick I found that made this easier for me is to leave a trivial task to start tomorrow with, often with notes to remind myself what to do. Ideally the trivial task is on the way to something bigger, not finishing something. That gets me into my editor, gets me running the code / tests / etc., and gives me a trivially easy way…
It most definitely does work the other way around. The problem of course is that you can’t just wait for motivation to appear. But you can start an action. I’m just stating the obvious, but I find it odd that the author states the opposite isn’t true.
In my experience both works and some actors prefer one and some the other. But you can try it yourself, think of a sad thing, slumb together make a sad gesture and listen (emotionally) what happens on the inside.
It is normal to struggle with procrastination from time to time but if is a regular occurrence you need to check the actual causes. You might have ADHD. And is is very important to know whether you have it or not because all that advice for neurotypical people will not work for you then. In fact it will harm you. It will make you feel as a failure. You need to figure out how your brain works and only then you will fi…
In approx 7 years I went through working at all the top software companies in my country, but what really fixed my problems was moving on to being a researcher at the university. I’m now paid less than half from before, but it’s still enough, and I couldn’t be happier.
Getting to work on what I think is actually important and interesting every day is what helped. I also seem happier than the younger researchers who didn’t work at companies first, who don’t know how good they have it.
> Action leads to motivation, not the other way around. I've found this to be very true. A trick I found that made this easier for me is to leave a trivial task to start tomorrow with, often with notes to remind myself what to do. Ideally the trivial task is on the way to something bigger, not finishing something. That gets me into my editor, gets me running the code / tests / etc., and gives me a trivially easy way…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also just chuck Todo comments in the code The magic of Git means you can immediately find them in the working index and get back on to it. Just remember to remove them before the commit.
> The magic of Git means you can immediately find them in the working index How does git help you find certain texts in files? `grep` should do the trick just fine, unless I misunderstand what "chuck Todo comments in the code" mean, the code lives on your disk no?
git status && git diff HEAD
To search for all mentions of 'TODO' in the repo, ignoring untracked files:
git grep TODO
git grep -i TODOThe core point of the article is breaking down the task, which he made it look trivial but it's not that simple.
In my experience, higher expectations leads to trying to control the outcome which leads to perfectionism and procrastinating for "ideal" time. So the key is to reduce expectations, which is under our control.
Once I reduce expectation I can try random stuffs which usually lead to breakthrough and the flywheel mentioned in the article.
"Across a decade working at hypergrowth tech companies like Meta and Pinterest, I constantly struggled with procrastination [...] I was not making progress on the things that mattered." Maybe unless one can really convince themselves that their daily work matters (really matters and not just for their team/company metrics) one is bound to procrastinate as a symptom of some subconscious sense of pointlessness.
My boss met with me this week to have me finish something important to get done by Friday. That really kicked me into gear this week and I was very motivated and productive. Come Friday, no message, no more push from him, no mention of how he needs my work or asking how it's going. That instantly tanked my motivation to continue