> The only way I can convince myself to do it is by finding a suitably engaging show I can distract myself with on my phone while I huff and puff.
> Combine the task with something you enjoy. You know what makes cleaning out the garage a lot better? Some good tunes.
This motivational advice is deeply misguided. These are very clear examples of "dopamine stacking". The idea is that by combining a stimulating activity (eg watching show/music) with a motivation-requiring activity (eg working out/cleaning) you can get an initial boost in motivation to accomplish the hard task. It works (initially) because the stimulating task (show/music) is giving you a dopamine increase which feels like motivation to complete the hard task. The problem is that if you repeat this behavior with any consistency, your dopamine system quickly adjusts the high activity-combo level of dopamine as a new baseline. Soon not even the dopamine you get from the combination is sufficient to motivate you to accomplish the task. At this point people often seek another short lived dopamine-increasing stimulus to combine into the mix.
You can see this pattern in people who exercise only with some combination of pre-workout, caffeine, music, phone scrolling.
The off-ramp is learning how to derive dopamine (aka "motivation") from the actual activity itself.
further reading: 1. https://youtu.be/PhBQ4riwDj4?si=n-afP-Rj_k7qfATz
My trick lately has been to allow myself to do nothing.
If I don’t want to do the task, that’s fine. I’m allowed to sit at my desk and do exactly nothing for as long as I want. No hackernews, no snack breaks, no bill paying, no online shopping, etc. I just sit there and do nothing.
Eventually the thing I need to do becomes the most interesting thing in my orbit and I do it. Sometimes I sit there for 15 minutes doing nothing before the task I don’t want to do becomes interesting enough.
Do something quick and crappy. And let your perfectionism fix it. And... here you are gotten started!
It can be a single word or a instruction that crashes your program at the location that needs to be worked on.
Leave a syntax error for getting started quick tomorrow.
Write down what needs to be done before it leaves your head (but don't make it perfectly structured and clean, a few words on a paper on your desk will do).
edit: For instance, you'd possibly want to fix the missing "n" in this comment. Make this feeling a tool against your procrastination.
edit2: ah, and get the hell out of HN, too.
My observation is it's an equation between:
1) reward/incentive/expected good feelings
2) effort/displeasure of doing the thing and the result
One way to increase #1 is to make it more socially involved. If you're working on a project solitarily, start going to events and talking about it with people, or write about it online. Humans are massively socially motivated.
For #2, one way to address this is with emotional processing. Often something is unpleasant because it reminds of something we didn't like from the past. So really digesting those emotions can allow the expected displeasure to fade because we kind of integrate it into our brains/bodies. But the key for this is that it has to be emotional processing, not intellectual processing.
Boredom is the key to solving this problem. Exert control over yourself, do not let yourself do anything other than the task. No watching videos, no reading of either web sites or books, no checking the phone, no listening to music. Nothing. Eventually the original task will be a pleasant relief. Basically you're increasing your interest in the activity relative to other tasks rather than trying to increase intrinsic interest in the task.
I personally draw inspiration from John Carmack. I've understood his approach to be basically just stare at your problem and ignore everything else until you make a little bit of progress. The answer is there.
Terence Tao uses a trick, I think he calls "structured procrastination": When there is a thing he doesn't want to do, he recalls another thing he doesn't want to do more. This way he's procrastinating on the other thing by doing the not favoured one.
Speaking from no expertise but my own decades of living, the only way to do things you don’t want to do is to do them. No excuses, no procrastination, no unrelated rewards, just do it. Everything else is a hack based on procrastination, or making you feel good about procrastination. You have to make a contract with yourself, where there is no payoff but that the thing gets done, and then do not break that contract. If you can’t make yourself do big things, make yourself do small things, but do them without fail.
If you do that, you will become a different person.
I find it interesting how a lot of this advice overlaps with the same tricks we use in software engineering to tackle big problems. Breaking things into smaller chunks or even gamifying with streaks is basically the human version of agile sprints.
Sleep, diet, and stress are like "system dependencies".
This is reason I am not doing workouts at home. I hate splitting workout and normal life to separate categories. So I try to integrate physical exercise into daily schedule. I commute by running, cycling or walking paired with public transport. Also I do a lot of walking/running with my small kids. I am able to average 10 km walk per day with two 30 km bicycle rides in hilly terrain and one 5 km run per week. This is without forcing myself to "workout time". If I have time I am also going to bouldering or wall climbing once a week. It works great because I have reasonable physical exercise despite enjoying time with my kids and being an office worker.
There are millions of articles on the internet about this topic. You can equally feed Chatgpt the submission title and it will give you roughly similiar advice. Forget all this crap: See rather a proper physician and psychologist if you struggle with this problems for a long time to be checked for various conditions.
My day job writing code I play a techno/rave playlist to get in the mood. Has to be something I already know. Kangluenster in this case.
For more intellectual endeavors I find if I'm avoiding working on something it can be because I'm being lazy or just don't like the category of work but often it is a good sign it's not quite the right activity for the moment. It may not be well defined enough, or the highest priority, or doubting it is likely to yield the outcome I want. Time of day matters too, in the morning I feel like doing different things than in the afternoon. I can push through and "just do it" if I have to but often it's worth listening to this feeling and picking a task I am motivated to do instead.
I understand that these heuristics are completely different for people with ADHD.
Also the role of dopamine cycles has a big effect on proactiveness.
À while ago, i went very hard on sport and even though i know before training that it would be hard, i would always reach some point during the training (usually around 40 minutes) where a feel good sensation, kind of god like, happen.
And you know, doing something hard when you know you’re going to get the high isn’t so terrible. But at some point it went away and since then I could not ever reach that.
I thought it was endorphine or dopamine kicking in, but why it would suddenly stop is weird.
That was years ago, still doing lot of sports and tried a few other since then, some I liked more, some I liked less, no difference whatsoever.
I’m thinking maybe I’m not pushing myself hard anymore but last summer I climbed Mont ventoux on bicycle 3 times during the same day. As a year old cyclist it was absolutely exhausting yet nothing at all. Just glad the suffering ended.
Also checked my hormones, everything fine.
That’s weird but I’m just wondering if that happened to someone else.
"How words are post-hoc arbitrary retrofits to actual neural thoughts"
A self-help guide about language wholly distinct from thought.
> As you near the end, you can even push yourself a little to wrap it up and get it off your plate.
As a person with ADHD, this struck me. I have an easy time continuing something. But an impossible time starting and finishing something. Obviously I am not mentally healthy. But who is this person who is mentally healthy? And what am I missing to being the same way?
I think it boils down to being yelled at and penalized and being unable to handle this feedback well enough. I don’t know exactly what I am fearing here. It will be an exploration.
> you are both pleased with yourself and a little annoyed that it took you so long to deal with.
I am never pleased at the end of a project. I am blame full why I could not do it before.
I find this is what happens to me. I just back burner things that I don’t want to do and do the easy stuff and after a while I just have a list of all these back burner undoable projects and it’s like the worst thing ever because then I’m not motivated to do anything, because I have to complete all these terrible back burner projects.
Avoid thinking of the pain of the task at hand. Imagine and focus on the reward of these tasks.
Lifting weights... imagine the stronger person you will become. Studying for that exam.. picture the career you aspire to. Avoiding that donut... imagine the healthier you.
Habit stacking helps to remind one of the task to do. To avoid the struggle of doing them, picture the desired outcome.
Remember the Tetrapharmacos - three part cure to life. 1. Things that make you happy are easy to otain. 2. Things that are painful are relatively brief. The greater the pain, the shorter the duration. 3. Don't fear god. This doesn't mean don't fear consequences - it means don't live life afraid of what will come.
Everyone is different, but here’s my hack that took me from an overweight, mostly sedentary person to a relatively fit 40 miles per week runner and 7 days/week weight lifter.
1) Remove friction. I am also an enthusiast cyclist, but gearing up and getting my bike ready takes time which gives me plenty of opportunities to reconsider that 50 mile ride in 90F heat. In contrast, getting ready for a run takes me 5 minutes so there’s no much time to find excuses.
2) Get it out of the way first time in the morning before breakfast. There’s this extremely positive feeling when you achieve a goal early. I think it makes the rest of your day feel much easier particularly at work.
3) The Pareto principle. 80% easy effort and 20% intense/hard. I am not completely sold on the science but definitely works for me. I don’t get injured often and I recover faster, which allows me to exercise more often. I guess 70-30 would also work but the idea is the same, just go easy most of the time, you’ll get the same benefits without being sore or in pain.
4) Once in a while (twice a year for me) sign up for an event, a 10K, a half iron man, a bike ride, whatever, and tell everyone about it. Some relatives and friends will held you accountable for it.
5) Find a fitness buddy. Ideally it would be someone you spend lots of time with, your spouse, sister or roommate. In my case is my fiance. This also allows for accountability and moral support because you drag each other on those days you are not feeling like exercising.
6) Track your metrics besides weight. Weight is not the best feedback for motivation. There better feedback metrics like Vo2max and HRV. Get a good tracking device that’s reasonably accurate and easy to use and provides you good history. I use Apple Watch but other ones like Coros are good too.
7) Go to bed early. This is the most difficult one for me. I’m trying to put away my phone by 9 pm and switch to reading in Kindle, but man it is hard!
8) Gear. Don’t buy shitty gear to try out an activity and see if you like it. You won’t like it because you are using shitty gear. Invest in gear that is safe, comfortable and of decent quality. It will make the experience much better and you’ll have more chances of sticking with it.
Let's all be honest here.
I use Vyvanse.
I have spent my entire life frustrated with the reality that none of this advice actually works for me. This is because motivation was never my problem to begin with: my problem is "executive dysfunction", which is very counterproductively titled ADHD.
I bought one of those Concept 2 rowers based on all the hype online. I absolutely, positively HATED rowing. I did it a lot, but I hated it. The rower got sold this summer, it's out of my life. I much prefer my treadmill and I'll probably get a bike at some point. I hated everything about rowing, though.
Don't. Motivation external to the self will always be ephemeral and fleeting, like a drug (hence the popularity of "motivational" content on YouTube). If you don't have a genuine desire to do the thing, don't do it. Not because you can't do it, but because you lack the internal drive and inspiration to do it (and that may just be right now, not permanently).
The idea that you need to motivate yourself to do a thing you don't want to do is an idea that needs deeper investigation. I've caught myself trying to do that a bunch of times. Why the hell I think I need to do this thing in the first place?
I totally get things like I have a job and there's a task that needs to get done. But what about outside the job life?
My strategy: actively give yourself permission to just not do the thing, it’s ok! Enjoy your “time off“. This alone sometimes just makes me do the thing eventually kind of out of nowhere.
Everybody is different, but the biggest reason I struggle with this right now is the pace of modern life.
Doing hard things is hard, and that means I won't be thinking about the other stuff I have to do. I'm more apt to miss a text from my family when I'm running or writing a document than when I'm vibe coding, because the effort is all-encompassing. Subconsciously, that's stressful, so I steer away from it.
Habits help here, because with enough repetition, I learn that it's OK to disappear for an hour to do the thing. But the real issue is getting the meta-organization of my life right enough that I'm not scared to shut down my ambient executive function for that hour. This shows up as both "I'm too busy to do the hard thing" and "I'm too tired to do the hard thing."
Slowing down isn't the answer, but it's been pretty transformative to notice that that's what I'm worried about.
Step #1 is a significant amount of mental effort; how do I motivate myself to do that?
Mark Manson recently did a 4-Hour podcast on procrastination https://youtu.be/b77XuGU52To
I do amazingly well in life if i simply remove the 'more desirable things'. As in i uninstall all games and set some manual routes of popular sites to 127.0.0.1 for a while.
I can do the things that are hard to start but fine to continue. But sometimes you have a very long slog which is hard to start and hard to continue and hard to finish. That's where the difficulty lies.
Also worth considering: just don't do the thing and live with the consequences. You have to apply this with care, but it's worth having in the toolbox.
One fun trick for this is to commit to writing a check to a non profit you dislike / would be embarrassed by if you don't complete your task.
After several years of trying to come up with the perfect way to keep motivation up, I have found there is no such thing.
The only thing that matters for me nowadays is this: before I start the task, I admit to myself that it is going to be hard, but I am doing it anyways, so why do it like its a drag? It's pointless and it's a waste of energy.
Doing it to distract yourself from the other thing which you want to do even less.
Or maybe, if you don't want to do the thing, that's your true values showing. If it's your true values showing, then you should consider listening, and maybe just don't do the thing at all!
If I remember correctly, a YT video from Andrew Hubermann, talks about rewards and that you should avoid excessive rewards.
It can make the actual work even more painful, because your mind is too focused on the reward, instead of trying to enjoy the hard work itself.
"just DO IT!!!"
-Shia LaBeouf
I need this for language learning
I just spent a couple weeks hyperfocused on solo building a whole new python project from scratch. Motivation is a skill that needs to be trained.
It's a bit counter intuitive, and while your environment needs to be conducive to work. Among the other factors, you dont just gain motivation by having a clean desk.
The way that works best for me is a 2-step approach:
1. Think about the ultimate goal and why you want to do it. If there isn't a compelling reason, there is no reason to do it, especially if there is short-term pain or annoyance.
2. Take at least one small action towards it per day. This often puts you in the mindset to do more things.
I'll keep it short, to avoid spending too much time on HN when other stuff should be prioritized, so apologies for repeating things that others have already said. ;-)
What I do is three things from the OP, and one extra thing:
- break down things into chunks (divide and conquer is what computer scientists are trained to apply)
- reward yourself (after each mini-step, I grab some chocolate, after certain time units, I will make a short break, and after the complete session if I'm satisfied with what I have achieved, I might order myself a book from my online wish list ;-).
- The third and most important part is start by picking a small and easy task. In many cases, the problem is easier to solve and less painful to complete than it appeared before starting to tackle it; once you're on it, things get easier and you may soon enter the flow and then things start to fly & rapid progress may ensue. I circle around the hard parts fixing a bunch of easy things that I know are easily and immediately solvable. Going around Mount Everest and depleting bits from all sides, suddenly it's not that big and scary anymore, and I have already understand bits from different parts, so my mental model of the problem as a whole approaches what's left of the real Mount Everest, not a huge mountain behind a wall of fog.
Curiously, I'm successful with that technique, and I have a friend whom I also consider successful who does it the other way round: he starts with the carved-out core problem, and once he knows how to solve that, the rest is just code writing approaching boilerplate-level. And before that, he does not bother with addressing all the other stuff, the "mere periphery".
I call my method outside-in and his method inside-out. In theory, I appreciate his method, but in practice, my method makes me more productive, because even on a very bad day (say, a zero flow, mega-unproductive day, which happens, but thankfully not that often), I can write a logger or a test harness, and once I've done any of these easy bits, the dopapine reward will motivate me to solve harder parts & because I've started to write code or whatever it is I need to do that I was postponing/dragging out, I'll be more likely in the zone and will be able to do the harder bits of it.
BTW, don't confuse the *order* of doing things with the kind of *abstraction* in software architecture (where I would consider myself a top-down thinking person that consciously combines top-down and bottum up approaches to ensure the pieces fits together and each piece can be build). The two are related, but not the same thing.
"The pattern often goes like this:
Before you start, it feels daunting, and the prospect lingers in the back of your mind. You know it needs to be done, but you really, really don’t feel like it. You leave it until it starts to loom larger and larger.
When you finally convince yourself to start, it’s not what you want to be doing, but it’s generally fine. It’s often not even as bad as you thought it would be, and it feels good to make progress.
As you near the end, you can even push yourself a little to wrap it up and get it off your plate.
When it’s over, you feel relieved, like a weight has been taken off your shoulders, and you are both pleased with yourself and a little annoyed that it took you so long to deal with."
If it's something I really don't like doing, even when I'm doing it I hate it every step of the way and it just gets worse and worse overtime.
Otherwise I would want to do it to at least some extent. In which case, yeah I would eventually be able to muster motivation and push through.
Why would you do a thing you didn't ultimately want to do though?
I recently found a weird trick to motivate myself to do things I don't want to do. Instead of thinking of the outcome of this task (which I probably don't care much about since I don't want to do it in the first place), I think about the fact that doing things I don't want to do makes me better at doing things I don't want to do, which is a desirable outcome for me. Your mileage may vary.
Speaking of motivation, maybe provide a hook instead of expecting your reader to dive head first into your otherwise lukewarm air bike analogy? Why do so many bloggers seem to think we have an infinite length attention span to their personal stories?
“This morning I made an omelette, but I forgot eggs so I had to go to the grocery store. On my way to the store my mom called and reminded me of my cousins birthday coming up…”
“Now that you’ve read all this, you should be able to sum up the importance of planning ahead!”
I guess I motivate myself by realizing that taking care of the problem early will be easier than later.
By knowing if I don’t get this thing done, it doesn’t get done.
That for some tasks “want” doesn’t matter.
"I will read it after this 15 min short video"
just do it is the only way forward. perhaps helped by breaking things up into smaller chunks (pomodoro's perhaps). action precedes and creates motivation.
Only doing it once a week is the problem. Good luck making a habit out of that.
why?
Do what u wanna do.
Don't do what u don't wanna do.
..
Or at least try, doing otherwise is crazy right?
We can learn from people who go to church every Sunday.
You need Drive to get things done. Motivational can only make you start them.
Biggest productivity hack is to just avoid working in fields you don’t feel passionate about. If you don’t know what you are passionate about, then just keep trying things passionately
Professional procrastinator here. All the tips in the post are common knowledge and, sadly, not very good (especially in the long run).
The only thing that works for many people is to skip the motivation part and embrace the rather uncomfortable principle of "action before motivation."
The flow state will come. I believe it arises independently of motivation. Motivation just tricks us into believing that everything we do should bring joy.
It will — but not right now; we need to dive in first.