311–320 of 382 posts
Furthermore, give a helping hand to future-you. I actually find that it's better to not-quite finish one task before you leave for the day, so that you have an easy onramp to start tomorrow.
Get hired in some software corporation. You'll be amazed how easy the work is and how well it pays. The only motivation you'll need is to get up in the morning and haul you ass to the office. After few months of what will feel like vacation to you, in the company of fresh smart people, you'll start to get bored, even despite doing more hobby programming in your free time then you done in a long time. But at this poin…
>After a while of that let one of your freelancing clients hire you but not as freelancer but a full time remote employee paid not for hours of coding but rather for 8 hours each day, same way you were paid at corporation. I'm here now, but find myself in a similar situation to OP and have been thinking about quitting. There's very little oversight and the business large enough that I have very little to do - and noo…
That's the moment when you absolutely need to avoid playing MOBA games.
> My friends all think it's crazy and that I'm in the luckiest situation I could possibly be in. I do feel my physical health has never been better, but mentally I find it really hard to do this.
I was in the similar spot (but didn't act as smart as you did and let my health slip) and eventually quit. What I think is lacking in this setup is daily company of the smart people that understand and appreciate your work.
I think you might regain some happiness by joining some lively open source projects developers since you have time during your work hours. Maybe bit covertly because while people might not be interested in the work they pay you for they might get interested if they can see you working on something else in the time they bought.
Maybe you can get some friends that way, that will appreciate your work and skill.
I'm familiar with this. There's no magic solution, sadly, but I'll share one thing that has helped me and may apply at least to some of your situations. I realised a while ago that my main issue was with nebulous tasks -- that is, the more concrete, defined, and _meetable_ a task was, the less trouble I had with it. So I started to break down large tasks, which never got started much less finished, into smaller ones,…
This approach is immensely helpful to me as well. Started practicing problem slicing after watching a lecture from Don Knuth. He started by writing down a problem and underlining it. He then solved small bits of it and worked through many examples that seemed almost trivial. Eventually, some amazing results began to emerge after the many trivial examples were worked through. Impressed on me the power of breaking a la…
The good news is that you're normal. The bad news is that you're normal. And that really strikes at the heart of the situation. A fish is worst at explaining the concept "wet" because they're born and live in water. HN appears bad explaining lack of focus and self drive because most of us have been brought up in a culture that is almost specifically dominated with instilling such aspects in people. I don't know if it is by design, but it is incredibly effective as a social glue and at showing that culture.
Cultural reprogramming is, to put it mildly, difficult at best once you've spent 30 years in one, so I'm largely posting this on the chance that it introduces a new perspective and raises curiosity, not because I think you should necessarily do it, since most people are not interested in such extremes and quite rightly: try separating from your dominant and acculturated environment and you'll likely find a while host of other (arguably bigger) problems.
You've been born into and live in a culture that, almost from birth, teaches you to turn to quick wins, entertainment, external direction and external authority. You have now subsequently internalised that culture.
To start to fight it, you need to remove yourself from those cultural aspects that reinforce such, and put yourself in a culture/situation that reinforces the opposite.
About the clearest thing that reinforces the opposite is isolation and survival: learn to be comfortable in your own company, try spending some time away from others, learn about hiking and camping. If you can spend a few weeks almost without human contact and your cultures distractions, you're forced to start to find that locus of control within yourself and not others. Of course, the downside is that done poorly, this may also be a quick path to mental illness and isolation.
Also be aware that if it works, you'll no longer be a member of your current culture as well, this has downsides as well as upsides. But I can't pretend they're not there or downplay them. Talk to others who have experienced integration and then movement or rejection between cultures to understand these: you will no longer have a cultural home, and you cannot ever fully go back, even though part of you may always have a foot in both camps.
The other side of the coin, is recognizing and thinking those influences in your dominant culture that reinforce distraction, short term, and locus of control. Obviously, if you try the rather radical route of isolation/cultural reprogramming, these also can't be present or you'll just spend your entire time on them. So:
- no TV - no computer games - no news - no HN - no podcasts - no classes or programs where someone else ticks you off or tells you what to do: schools/university - no status
Many of your current techniques are bound to failure because you're essentially trying to use your cultures dominant phenomenon to overcome the very cultural phenomenon you're struggling with.
Lastly, only the most radical...borderline insane, would actually seriously try to do the whole thing. You can take positive little steps, by recognizing small steps at first. Aside from removing the negative, there are also positive things that or culture doesn't reinforce that you can introduce:
- sign up at a library and start reading long books
- take up meditation, walking, hiking, long distance and endurance sports
- listen to classical, not pop music. Attend some concerts :p
- try some status/authority busting exercises: sign up at a soup kitchen and learn that people you might otherwise have hidden from aren't bad: volunteer to help ex criminals. Expose yourself to different cultures and classes, travel. Find someone your culture and yourself hold in high regard and look to learn all the reasons that it's bullshit.
Hopefully I've given you some ideas and insight beings the normal HN feedback.
I can relate a lot. I'm still burning through self-motivation hacks at 35, some of which are helping while most don't. Eventually, the hack with by far the largest impact (which brought me to currently being cofounder and CTO of one of the more successful German startups) was realizing that while I simply suck at self-motivating, I never had a problem getting stuff done when working for others. I effortlessly produce…
Very much the same. While I can do work myself, I get much more done with others. I'd get distracted or tired if I worked alone, but on a call with someone else I can go for hours, or often until they say they need a break. It helps.
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So here's a question - what if I am of this disposition but I have a lot of ideas? And I would not be satisfied with life unless I'm pursuing them? Is there a way to reach out to find people to be in charge of me to execute on my ideas? Does anybody want to do that? (These are not necessarily businesses)
Take this with a heavy grain of salt. It's an idea I've had -- even though I don't have motivation problems -- that I have yet to do. (I plan to within the next three months.) Hire a part-time project manager. A good project manager is immensely helpful in (1) teasing out and decoupling requirements, (2) producing a work-breakdown structure (WBS), (3) setting a schedule/timeline for execution, (4) assessing risks, an…
I'm familiar with this. There's no magic solution, sadly, but I'll share one thing that has helped me and may apply at least to some of your situations. I realised a while ago that my main issue was with nebulous tasks -- that is, the more concrete, defined, and _meetable_ a task was, the less trouble I had with it. So I started to break down large tasks, which never got started much less finished, into smaller ones,…
100% this. Break down the tasks into smaller and smaller chunks, use an app like Todoist to track it. So create a project for each major task, and have all the todo's inside that project. You'll feel achievement as you complete each small task, and within no time you'll find you have completed the project, AKA, one big task.
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Any recommendations for something like this that's local-only or self-hosted? I've been on the lookout for such a thing for a while but they all seem to be SaaS web app type things.
I use index cards and a pen! I like to have something that is physically in front of me all the time. It works great.
Our senses of touch, smell and sound are important and inspiring.