How to overcome resistance to work • Hacker News Board

Re: How to overcome resistance to work

#51

Post by einhverfr » Sun, Jun 10, 2012, 11:43 PM UTC

heretohelp wrote: post #41

newbie12 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is spot on. After four years as an independent, burnout is a huge issue. I'm 1/3 as productive as when I started down this path.

I hit burnout and was less productive for a long time. It's taken about five years, but I'm almost back to full productivity. I'm basically back to normal, or better, in my day-to-day work, but I still have almost nothing in the way of progress on side projects compared to before. Advice: 1. Pace yourself, get some work done, then go make coffee/food, or in my case, go for a motorcycle ride/work out at the gym. 2. Ex…

100% agreed with all of the above, except I would add one caveat to #5....

I think one does need to focus on macro, long-term, and broad scoped stuff a bit. This doesn't mean keeping it as a goal (which I think is your point) but it does mean setting aside time to plan, think about the long-term, re-evaluate where you are from time to time, etc. At the same time these plans should be shelved once complete and only reviewed periodically. The point of such planning is to think about the long-term not map out how you are going to get there. As Eisenhower said, "Plans are nothing. Planning is everything."

Re: How to overcome resistance to work

#52

Post by einhverfr » Sun, Jun 10, 2012, 11:51 PM UTC

gwern wrote: post #30

TrevorJ wrote: post #2

Some great suggestions here, but I find the best method for me is to just crank some music, down a couple swigs of coffee and dive in. About 95% of the time the issue isn't about getting stuck partway through, or approaching the problem wrong, it's about getting through the first ten minutes of work. Resistance crumbles after that and motivation and focus kick in to full gear.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3kv/working_hurts_less_than_procrast...

You know, if a task isn't particularly urgent, I have no problem with procrastinating for a couple days on it (and working on other things in the mean time) as long as I keep coming back to it.

This resembles the Feynman method of how to be a genius, but sometime if a task is hard, and seems insurmountable, sometimes all you need is some time for your mind to grasp the task. I have occasionally tackled a problem, given up as it seemed hard, come back a couple days later and discovered a trivial solution, completing in half an hour what I figured would take me 3. So I call this "productive procrastination" and it's a good thing. Another function of my complex to-do list is that it gives me a chance to think about tasks before I start (again, I don't worth through it sequentially). The difficulty is in figuring out when to procrastinate and when not to. There are a lot of things you never want to procrastinate in doing (if you take a long time to bill your customers, they will usually reciprocate when it comes to timeliness of payment, for example). But there are a lot of cases where procrastination can be helpful. So the challenge is when to and when not to.

Re: How to overcome resistance to work

#53

Post by onlyup » Mon, Jun 11, 2012, 3:12 PM UTC

TrevorJ wrote: post #2

Some great suggestions here, but I find the best method for me is to just crank some music, down a couple swigs of coffee and dive in. About 95% of the time the issue isn't about getting stuck partway through, or approaching the problem wrong, it's about getting through the first ten minutes of work. Resistance crumbles after that and motivation and focus kick in to full gear.

Agreed, but it's still so hard to do. This is the biggest obstacle I face.

Re: How to overcome resistance to work

#54

Post by intractable » Mon, Jun 11, 2012, 4:00 PM UTC

overgryphon wrote: post #39

michaelpinto wrote: post #38

"resistance to work" usually means that you don't have any passion for that work, and that you shouldn't be doing it. if you're running a business you should think of outsourcing any task that you don't want to do, unless it's mission critical.

This isn't necessarily true- for me, resistance generally means I'm scared I can't do the task well enough, or scared that someone else will look at my work and think it's awful.

I have the same thought process as you, and I find it quite debilitating. It often manifests as a need to know everything about a problem space before even starting on a solution.

The upside is that on the whole I produce code that is logical, consistent, maintainable and relatively bug-free. But it takes a long time.