This seems like cheap advice that's trying to get me to buy into a lifestyle in order to sell me things.
"Have less exposure towards super fun things". "Get bored". These describe the same general concept as dopamine fasting. The third bullet point can be reduced to "focus on what you have to do, until you can focus on it" which is circular.
I'm not buying in. Maybe I'm getting old but "failure to start" is starting to sound like a meme to me perpetuated by vultures trying to exploit creative personalities, hackers included.
I think what we need to do, is to step back and appreciate ourselves for the effort we continually expect from ourselves. As hackers in one way or another, we are constantly putting up our ego as collateral in order to take on challenges that threaten to knock us down a peg or two if we fail. For many of us, failure is a threat to the core of our identity, yet we dive on in anyway. Exhaustion from that sort of loop is to be expected.
Most people don't live like this. Most people reduce the flux in their lives instead of seeking to increase it. Why? Because most people cherish their egos to the point where they cannot commit to a goal with an uncertain outcome. They would rather work a 9-5, which is fine, but it doesn't describe our community. We are addicted to risk if it means building something new and that we can call our own.
I agree with your points on appreciating yourself and better sleep.
As for this seeming like cheap advice, keep in mind that A) many people have not heard it yet, and B) sometimes a new twist on an older concept drives the point home.
And you don't have to buy anything. Most of the stuff we create is free on our blog or Twitter. We're not "vultures," we're 2 guys helping people to stop scrolling and go do stuff, driven by our own past struggles. Fin.
The article was what I needed to read, when I needed to read it, as it is something I am actively struggling with. And some of the advice, while I have heard it before, was framed differently enough that it allowed me to "get it" this time around.
Thanks!
Where do you think depression fits into this model? I have depression and take antidepressants, but I still experience an undercurrent of inescapable ennui that appears to be resistant to even the most interesting, well-defined and meaningful work.
IMO depression is something that only resolves with endurance and time. Luckily there will be people in your life that will find you or that you may find by chance that will help you with this. All this happens on its own time though, it sounds a bit religious but one needs to have faith. I am not a doctor but I wouldn't recommend anti depressants to anyone really as it numbs you and takes away your ability to think which means that it doesn't really solve depression. On the other hand if you're going to kill yourself then anti depressants may help you but always bear in mind that they should be temporary and that you should try and get off them if you can.
YMMV but it's generally possible to improve that sensation over time by conscious appreciation and a return to less information-intensive activities.
Generally philosophical visions of the world are a product of emotions and neurological and physical conditions that are sometimes as mundane as bad digestion.
Speaking of compassion for yourself, I also often feel lonely and depressed. Somebody once suggested that I read "Radical Acceptance", a book by Tara Brach. I've only managed to read part of it before putting it down. I couldn't really agree with some of the arguments in the book (e.g. people in the West having more self-acceptance problems due to biblical story of the original sin). YMMV.
ennui
ennui /ɒnˈwiː /
▸ noun [mass noun] a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement:
he succumbed to ennui and despair.
– ORIGIN mid 18th century: French , from Latin in odio(n-), from mihi in odio est ‘it is hateful to me’. Compare with annoy.
>This seems like cheap advice that's trying to get me to buy into a lifestyle in order to sell me things.
Funny but I thought the exact opposite. People believe something much more easily when they want it to be true, so the typical sales approach is to tell people what they want to hear. Ridding your life of whatever seems most fun doesn't seem like cheap advice in that regard.
On the other hand, I think you're spot on with creative types too often getting exploited, and the involvement of ego being such a key factor in why/how we hackers get burned out.
There’s a second Christian-esque type of self help which states, “you are a broken and pitiful person, your fundamental nature is flawed. Take these steps to salvation.” Jordan Peterson is like this with all his requests to empathize with gulag prison guards and the like.
I think people don’t just like hearing what is good or easy. Sometimes we want to have an incredible cross to bear. It’s the mentality that causes people to commit to overbearing self-regulation, like using pomodoro for the entire day or going on an impossible diet. Self-transformation sells just as much from the mouth of the stern father as it does from the caring mother.
Hmm, I don't quite agree with that characterization of Jordan Peterson. I believe his main point when talking of these prison-guard horror stories is to "embrace your shadow", as in: Realize that you might not be as far away from being dangerous as you would think, if you just thought of yourself as a good person. Considering the numerous crimes against humanity that have been carried out by people as soon as the "veil of civilization" showed a few cracks in the past, I don't think it's an unreasonable aspect of human nature to remind people of.
I believe the concept of the shadow stems from Jung's work, and I admittedly don't know precisely in which context Jung applied it. But ostensibly, being mindful of the dangerous paths one can be lead down if you don't take care to stay in balance seems like a reasonable thing to teach people, without it instantly degenerating into a "you are a sinner and need to atone"-routine (as you seem to see it).
Totally agree. I thought this closing statement on this recent BBC article [1] hit the point home:
"Sometimes the women are portrayed as exploited victims. At other times as sadistic monsters.
The truth is more horrifying. They were not extraordinary monsters, but rather ordinary women, who ended up doing monstrous things."
I think we have enough data-points by now to know that any large group, regardless of race, gender, country, sexuality, etc., has a much larger percentage of people capable of doing horrific things that we would like to believe.
>your fundamental nature is flawed. Take these steps to salvation.
When a cheap sales pitch uses the "you're flawed" format, it's usually telling people "we are all flawed, but here's how you can be morally superior to your peers" or "do this thing and you'll receive a divine reward/achieve enlightenment." The promised reward or feeling of superiority is what makes people want to hear the message.
It's cheap to tell an aging church congregation about the dangers of video games and internet pornography, because it let's people pat themselves on the back without making a sacrifice. It's a little harder to tell an audience of young professionals that they need to limit high dopamine activities to find low dopamine activities appealing, and given that it's a real call to action based on a reasonable, falsifiable claim, I don't think it's cheap advice.
I don’t think it’s cheap advice. He may have spent a lot of time writing it.
The only thing I read that was humorous and slightly wrong was the interesting take on meditation: getting bored more often.
I enjoy quiet, so I’d be a “zen master” according to the post, at least for some minutes each day. But those who know me would not confuse me with a zen master.
The advice may sound formulaic, but that's because there are only so many ways you can talk about productivity and procrastination. The fundamental issues being addressed are always the same: distractions, instant gratification, poor discipline, lack of measurable goals etc.
Not everyone procrastinates for the same reasons. I wish I could do more, but after reading that article I'm fairly sure I'm just exhausted, not procrastinating.
> As hackers in one way or another, we are constantly putting up our ego as collateral in order to take on challenges that threaten to knock us down a peg or two if we fail. For many of us, failure is a threat to the core of our identity, yet we dive on in anyway. Exhaustion from that sort of loop is to be expected.
I've never really heard this feeling described this way, but it totally resonates with me. What a beautiful way to put it. Thanks.
Failure? I think failure is the inability to do what we wanted to do in the first place. A lot of failure is from the inability to finish a project due to lack of motivations, not because it's impossible.
Many of these goals are quite beneficial, like working out everyday.
I agree 100%. I didn't read your comment before I wrote mine because I had this page open for a few days and for some reason just wanted to post, but it's nice to see!! I agree especially with the last point and the mention of the ego.
From your own description, it sounds as though the self-perception as a creative and continual risk-taker different from the nine to fivers is where the ego maintenance lies, so it might not actually be put in danger by failure.
re sleep: is it common for sleep schedules to "drift"? I'll sleep at 11pm on one night naturally and wake up refreshed at 7am in the morning the next day, but I won't naturally go to sleep until 12am that night. This leads to a 8am wake up time the next day. You can see how this will quickly lead to an bad sleeping pattern.
is it possible to fix this with a few weeks of consistently sleeping at the same time somehow? will I eventually sleep at the same time naturally? or will this take months of "forcing" myself to sleep (as ridiculous as that sounds)?
If you solve this problem, would you share the details? I've been dealing with this for my entire adult life. When I can convince my body to actually sleep when the sun goes down, the day that follows is typically one of my most productive, but I also only seem to get one of those per week or so.
I can work around this by moderating the length of my sleep, ie, allowing myself to go for at least 7.5 hours no matter when I fall, but sometimes IRL obligations get in the way. For most folks working more strict office hours (or god, retail) this is not a workable suggestion. Even then, eventually I'll drift too far, one of the sleep cycles gets shorted, then there's this weird recovery period with some short naps, and surprise now we're waking up at dawn again.
I'll bite and say I think it can be pretty personal. I struggled with insomnia-like symptoms for a while (eg, I simply was not tired and could not fall asleep) until I began to experiment with a couple of things. For me the most important where
- waking up at a consistent hour, every day, even the weekends
- no caffeine after noon, ideally not after 11, but I like coffee (individual tolerance will vary, I'm apparently on the sensitive side)
- make sure you're comfortable at night. It's baffling that I didn't realize this sooner, but the trick to falling asleep for me is to just get comfortable enough that I don't really want to move. When you hit that point where you're so comfortable and don't feel the need to move, then drifting off is easy.
- have a planning method to make sure you are organized and offload any thoughts about what needs to happen. I read Getting Things Done and implemented some of the stuff there and that helped a lot in freeing up my mind from worrying
- remind yourself, routinely, that whatever you are doing, you'll be able to do it better in the morning
> I can work around this by moderating the length of my sleep, ie, allowing myself to go for at least 7.5 hours no matter when I fall, but sometimes IRL obligations get in the way. For most folks working more strict office hours (or god, retail) this is not a workable suggestion. Even then, eventually I'll drift too far, one of the sleep cycles gets shorted, then there's this weird recovery period with some short naps, and surprise now we're waking up at dawn again.
That is pretty much where I was. I'd go to sleep at varying hours from 10PM to 5AM, always somehow later each night. Sometimes it would take me very long to fall asleep (ie 2 hrs +) unless I felt very tired. Looking back, it is like I needed to be truly exhausted -- not just sleepy, but exhausted -- to fall asleep and that pushed back my sleep schedule every night a little bit.
It wasn't until I got brutal headaches and brain fog everyday that I made it my top priority and began to take an inventory of everything that got in my way. I still go to bed late (between midnight and 1) though, in part because it lets me do regular social things and still, usually, go to bed on time.
It is called Non-24-hour sleep–wake disorder [1], and is very common in blind people. I have it (though not blind). The Wikipedia article suggests some treatments. It's impossible to fix in my experience by forcing myself into a consistent cycle; I'll just grow more and more tired over time until I simply fail to wake to alarm.
I solved this by exercising, it normalised my sleeping patterns drastically compared to what I had in my student days. Now I am 'ready' at 12, and consistently wake up at 8-8:30 in the mornings.
Okay, that Wikipedia page reads like a personal biography lol. I probably have this in some mild form. The drift is usually about 20-30 mins for me (I used an hour as an example in my original comment), so it's mostly manageable by shortening my duration of sleep by an hour once or twice a week, but I should get this fixed.
It seems common enough and from what I have read, it is just something a certain number of people have innately. And it doesn't fit well with an 8-5 workday unfortunately.
The only way I have found to moderate it at all is using a moderate stimulant in the morning (pseudoephidrine) and a moderate sleep aid (allergy pill, diphenhydramine) at night, plus being very disciplined (no caffeine after noon, go to bed at a certain time with no video screens/close my book).
Good summary of what procrastination essentially is: an emotional problem, rarely about "laziness" or time management. Readjusting your dopamine sensitivity will most likely solve most of it, trading my expensive gaming PC for a Macbook Pro probably was the biggest game-changing (pun not intended) event of my life so far, and greatly improved my relation to work and life in general.
All very true. Without diminishing this suggestion, though, I feel it's worth pointing out that some people can't just 'readjust their dopamine sensitivity' by changing some things in their environment. If you have chronic issues with regulating attention and they're strongly impacting you in multiple areas, seeing a professional could change your life.
I'd assumed from the context it was clear that I was referring to a psychiatrist.
It could also be worth talking first to a clinical psychologist. They're less about the drugs and more about the analysis, and sometimes that's able to get you working with just a 'software patch.' Sometimes, though, when you've tried everything and your brain still isn't doing the thing, medication can be absolutely lifechanging.
As the saying goes, if you can't make your own neurotransmitters, store bought is fine.
I actively disrecommend talking to a psychologist. If you suspect ADHD, the first-line treatment is getting stimulant therapy via a psychiatrist. Understanding and talking about your problem does not fix it. They've studied this, it's simply an ineffective treatment for ADHD. People go from being distracted all the time without understanding why to being distracted all the time with tools and techniques they don't actually end up using.
Stimulant therapy, on the other hand, is effective to a degree that every other mental health intervention wishes it could be. I am a relatively conscientious high performing software developer with medication, and borderline unemployable without it. Night and day difference.
Therapy and education is more appropriate for the people around the ADHD patient. Getting a sense of empathy for their situation and learning how to generate an effective context for them to operate in is incredibly valuable.
I've quit toxic competitive gaming (League of Legends, Overwatch) and replaced it with Netflix and shortwave radio listening. I'm still procrastinating because I work a bullshit job, but at least I don't rage as much and I always have some topics for small talk and conversation, which I feel is boosting my mood by a lot.
Similar but less drastic -- I traded League of Legends, Counter-Strike, and Valorant for games like Minecraft, Rust, and Valheim. I can play at my own pace, and even doing "nothing" in those games is calming and fun. I'm definitely a much less anxious and angry person because of it.
It's funny, but I feel in the opposite position. To me, computers had become associated with work-only, so much that I needed a change. I decided to assemble a new machine for fun coding and maybe some games (though I probably won't really have much time for it). starting up the new Flight Sim feels great and gives me a different perspective, after staring at a screen of e-mails and calendar and presentation slides for hours.
Is that due to you reducing your gaming (did you completely eliminate gaming?) or is it because the laptop gives you portability to work at different places - whether that includes cafes or different spots in your home that may have less distractions of whatever sort? Just curious about what the before/after looks like for you.
Primarily cutting off gaming –the only gaming I have left are the occasional chess games on the week-end – I haven't got much opportunity to work outside comfortably yet with lockdown. It changed my relationship to computers: sitting at my desk is now about work, and I do much more things outside of it.
I would consider selling my expensive gaming PC if whatever I replaced it with had a reasonable similar CPU. Not sure if I can get that from any type of laptop though at least not without paying more than I paid for my PC. Also I kinda need PCIe lanes.
Amusingly, I had just built myself a pretty expensive gaming PC right before selling it all, and then got myself a second-hand 2015 MBP. I'd say the newest M1 MBP are worth the money, my metric shifted from raw performance/$ to experience/$.
And honestly, I will gladly sacrifice some CPU power just to keep myself away from gaming.
I don't understand this. People who are addicted to games won't play any non-intensive games, like League of Legends (or Which is the lower spec one) or speed chess ?
For me, a big draw of gaming is being part of the zeitgeist. New game comes out, I want to try it, talk about it online, etc. Sometimes my friends get into a game extensively (like COD Warzone) and I don't want to be left behind. If I just had a laptop, it wouldn't be possible to run those games on it. And because I don't have any friends playing League of Legends or participate in online communities talking about, it's not really appealing to me.
It was though, at first I simply switched to surrogate dopamine dispensers which I ended up blocking, only allowing myself access to certain hours for a limited amount of time. Overall: blocking myself from such activities turned out to work well, can't recommend it to everyone though.
I picked up new things by making an habit out of it, such as reading at least a few pages of a book every day. It's cliché, but setting medium to long-term goals also clarified what I wanted my days to be made of, so now I'm very focused on a personal startup project.
Bonus advice that may not apply to you at all: don't be surprised if relatives tries to keep you from changing your habits, or if you find yourself distancing away from friends, it's a feature of improvement not a bug.
I don't have an addiction to games, but I play a lot of them because it's how I keep in touch with my friends from across the country. At the start of COVID/WFH, I was pretty concerned that I'd become a gaming addict. The reason I didn't is one of those smart/dumb oxymorons: I've just been plugging the peripherals from my gaming tower into my work laptop. After a day of work, the absolute last thing I want to do is sit at the same desk staring at the same screen and play games. Even on the weekends, I look at the desk and get this "ugh this feels like work" feeling which has really helped with not playing games in my spare time.
This of course has two huge caveats:
1. I didn't have a gaming addiction in the first place, evidenced by the fact that I have a Nintendo Switch that gets played in short bursts, rather than constantly.
2. I work with embedded systems/hardware, so I need to have an actual workstation area to keep the tools (debugger probes, power supply, oscilloscope, etc) on. The embedded systems curse of always needing more ports has been a pretty effective anchor for keeping my workspace in the same place as my PC, and if it wasn't, then I'd probably get more "I should spend all day today playing games" desires
I ended up feeling the same thing as you. I only have the room for one desk, and so the screens/ other stuff had to be shared. After 8 plus hours in my bed room working the last thing I want to do is spend the time before I sleep there too, looking at the same screen. In the before times the urge was much more stronger.
Someone commented but deleted on how they felt laptop CPUs have gotten worse in recent years, using the example of their U series cpu being slower than a much older M series cpu. Since I wrote the comment, posting it here:
The U series are "low power CPUs". They can do a lot more than they could in the past, but the H series are the actual successors to the M series. It's why the 10980HK is still the top performing of Intel's CPUs in a lot of workloads (quite significantly in some cases, we're talking 60% reductions in compile times for large C++ projects, like Chrome): https://youtu.be/pdO4u87UCYI?t=346 , and for that workload even an older 9300H handily wins against their current efficiency flagship in the 1185G7.
You are trading off a lot of power for improvements in power efficiency.
It was me! Thanks for the tip about M -> H. Sorry I deleted the comment - I wasn't 100% sure about the models (I don't have the laptops near me at the moment and I didn't want to spread misinformation).
I cannot emphasize enough how powerful this is. If you're struggling to focus on your work/projects, try living a bland existence like a monk for a while. You won't be able to stop thinking about working.
Great life. Live like a monk to work more. Thanks, I'd rather be less productive and watch some Youtube during work from time to time. As long as I'm delivering stuff on time I don't need to constantly push myself harder. How should I know how much productivity is productive enough? These articles never bother to explain that.
Not everybody wants to watch youtube or play video games all day as their desired state.
It's not about pushing yourself harder, but making you do what you think is important rather than have your brain seeks short term pleasure at the expense of long term well being.
I think the article's point is that procrastination is caused by your mismanagement of a pleasure gradient. The more you immerse yourself in the portion of the spectrum that is zero-effort and high-reward, the less you're motivated to leave that region, even as empty as it eventually makes you feel and your life becomes.
The author almost makes a really good point. The best way to entice yourself back into a more dynamic rhythm of life where you look forward to something is 1) to deprive yourself of it, and 2) not to seek it too soon.
Deprivation and anticipation are essential to maintaining a dynamic interesting lifestyle. Without the self-discipline to redirect your attention toward serving more mundane daily needs, you become a hedonist and focus only on getting high and staying there. You become a junkie.
Not everyone has a staid worklife, for some people working harder is incredibly important to their long term goals, for varying reasons. Such advice is very valuable to them, obviously it's ridiculous if you're pushing yourself to work harder for a Fortune 500 megacorp. who sees you as a cost centre.
This advice feels, to me, kind of like saying "Are you bored of your limited cooking skills? Eat gray sludge for a while, and you'll love your old mediocre cooking!"
If the solution to being productive is to rid yourself of joys, then screw it, I'll take an unproductive happy life.
One of the tricks is to create an environment that doesn't require willpower to avoid distraction. There are plugins that block distractions on your browser. You could sell, or lend out, or put your X-box into storage, etc.
I moved my television out of the living room and into a spare room. I felt like I was binging too much and wanted a jolt to my routine. Since doing so, I’ve read a backlog of books and even stated practicing tech skills I wanted to develop after work. I can vouch for it not seeming as difficult to do after toning down my stimulation. In fact, I can’t wait to get off work to start doing my stuff. Losing tv felt really weird at first. I ate in front of it. I’d turn on one quick show (that always turned in to several episodes!) after work to relax. I’ll probably go watch some shows I’m looking forward to once they’re out, but it’ll be more of a decision than a default. Tv isn’t the devil. I just needed more balance in my life, and the results are making me feel a lot more fulfilled than I was.
Environment changes are powerful. Same goes for apps like Twitter. I used to have it both on my phone and tablet, and that lead to me checking it hundreds of times a day. Now I only access it in the browser, and in restricted time windows. Much better.
Another "environment setup" example would be buying an analog alarm clock instead of using your phone (and doom scrolling for 30 minutes every morning.
I found the "get bored" astonishing. I used to lie down on bed when I was younger and just think and do nothing. That always motivated me to keep doing stuff throughout the day. I really got excited after a couple of minutes to continue or start a new task. Unfortunately that trick doesn't work anymore, now I'd just fall asleep. On the other hand I don't suffer from insomnia anymore.
When I had to prep for the GRE, for a month I would go in the early morning to my dad's office (he only uses it for a few hours) and study there. And there was nothing in the office. No other books, no tv, and the internet wasn't as much fun then. So I had only two options: study or sleep. Obviously I slept a lot, but there's only so much you can sleep! So I ended up studying very well and getting really good scores (not that it mattered a rats ass in the end).
Progress over perfection is what I keep telling myself all day. My brain automatically goes on to investigating something else when I’m faced with my projects. “Oh wait how do we get our terminal to look that cool?”.
I’m working on my first project involving a DB and a CRUD Java program that will talk to a website, potentially. I am too concerned about “am I doing this the right way”?
Things like how I’m setting up my db table, or “is one is enough or I should use more”, if people will look into it and say “wow this guy is dumb” or whatever.
They all prevent me from just pushing forward and improving later. I’m too scared of someone telling me to fix shit even though I actually enjoy learning so much I’d probably like that.
I wish I could just go in my brain and turn that off, I’d be living in the future.
I've made this mistake in the past, but I don't any more. The difference is that rather than closing my feedback loop over the code/architecture itself (so the cycle of working is start feature => code => look at code => code, which obviously never leads to starting new features), I close the loop over the experience (becoming start feature => code => use/test the feature => start new feature). This way your focus is on the product and your working cycle involves incrementally adding features, not navel-gazing at your code. So basically, bring yourself out of the code and actually try the product whenever a feature is done; context-switch from coder to user.
Sometimes I just wonder, is the frequent burnt-out we see for programmers caused by not having a fast feedback loop.
For me, I feel excited when doing performance tuning work, front-end stuff etc. However, I would quickly become bored after working on work that take more than 5 days or so, even if I love the subject. Although I'm not really into TDD, but I think sometimes using TDD could help you get some more feedback when you work on some abstract stuff. (Although writing the tests could be boring for the beginning...)
I would argue that having no expectation on the first-draft may not be the best way to be more productive. Having some concrete goals or metrics could be beneficial if you can get the feedback-loop working. Under-defined, subjective goals could be bad as achieving the goal may seem never-ending if you want perfection. (at least for me)
Some other fields (e.g. long-running academic research experiments) involve a feedback loop of months or years.
I've done experiments where the experiment subjects (mice, human cells, etc) look exactly the same for weeks and weeks, and you have to work on them every day not knowing whether they'll turn into something useful in a month or two. Writing grants and papers has a turnaround time of months--you work so hard on it, lob it into the ether, and just wait 6 months to see if anything will come of it.
Coming from a background like that, I find that the days/weeks feedback loop time in tech makes me positively giddy with joy. It's hard for me to imagine thinking of 5 days as a long time to work on a problem.
Working in ML for a large company has really tested my liking for programming. The amount of plumbing/testing/code reviewing needed just to get a tiny feature usable for a ML model is absurd. Taking 6 months to push one model improvement is really draining.
Interesting. I love hunting and fixing significant bugs or issues. It could be because the immediate dopamine hit if successful. Harder to get motivated for things with less certain impact, even if successful.
New years resolutions and other big changes tend not to work very well because they are big changes and we are very bad at big changes. Probably the most important piece of information I needed to make lasting changes to how I spent my day was the combined knowledge and idea:
1) I ran on habits for most of my day
2) I could change about 1% of my day every month
Doing small changes continuously results in a big change within a few years and most of your day is completely different. You can learn to do uninteresting, uninspiring chores if you just put small progressions towards it.
yeah, I was wondering about this as well: basically I have experienced times, where I could rightly sit there and watch the wall for hours. I guess this indicates depression and significantly hampers implementing these ideas...
Great article. It helped me go back to work.
I feel like the world would be a much better place with less procrastination. It feels like a premise for great work.
However, I feel much of actual content of the subject feel like scam or bullshit.
Beside this site and waitbutwhy.com, what are the other legit initiatives on the subject ?
There are some good books like The Now Habit by Neil Fiore or The Procrastinator's Digest by Tim Pychil, and good articles like the one on waitbutwhy, but information on procrastination is mostly scattered about. There aren't many projects focusing solely on it.
Thank you for the reply ! And if you are behind this project, thanks for it.
I will surely dig into this gem site this weekend and maybe try your program one day !
And I add these two books on top of my ever too long reading list.
I think in this case "fun" is a bit of an overloaded word. In this context fun means low effort high dopamine rewards, things like gaming, TV, social media, porn, drugs and alcohol. What's weird is that these categories of activities when overused quickly become non-fun and just addictive.
The overall idea is to recalibrate your idea of fun towards higher effort rewards, which will often result in better work, which will then allow you to financially reach a position where you can work to live, instead of always having to worry about work.
My viewpoint is that to enjoy the part of your life which is not work, you have to get your work done.
Between workaholic and master procrastinator, there is a large gray area of healthy relationship to work.
This line resonates with my experience : if I do a lot of hyper stimulating things, I struggle to get to work.
Happy for you if procrastination is not a part of your life but it can be a struggle for a lot of people.
I see this as similar to "stop eating high-sugar foods and you'll come to appreciate more varied and complex foods." Some of the most enjoyable things in life are more subtle.
I believe that the point is that those things are relative. It would be more like, if you stop eating everthing you love now (sweets, fast foods etc) you might learn to love the alternative (fruits and vegetables).
As far as having less super fun things, I found it takes me about 2 days to 1 week to "detox" from addictive distractions, my most recent distraction being the game "Hades" :) Luckily I was about to finally finish that game but I still had to consciously keep it away for a few days before I finally no longer have the temptation.
Is there any science behind dopamine fasting? By science, I mean empirical evidence regarding dopamine fasting. When I last looked into it, there seemed to be scant evidence for it.
Honestly, "stop having fun" was the single best decision I have ever taken. I began studying a lot, I started to actually code my small personal projects, I began working on fiverr (I'm indeed still a student) and I'm much more confident in myself now.
Ironically, when I was hiking 15 days without internet and coudn't sleep at night, I began scribbling down a similar essay: points 1 and 2 are the same, stop having fun and experience true boredom. I'm very glad someone got my same idea.
Right now, most of my day is killing time on the internet and playing computer games. And I'm OK with that (right now.)
I've had really productive periods in my life. I really enjoy them, but they generally do not happen accidentally. What seems to work for me is to identify all the things I'm doing wrong, and replace them with doing the right things. (Surprising, right?)
Part of what helps is the cumulative effect of replacing bad habits with good habits. Things like having a few drinks at night, staying up late, not exercising enough, and eating foods your body doesn't handle well all add up to a state of mental fogginess, lethargy, distraction-seeking, as well as the cycle of going back to those same bad habits to get over it.
I've done things like the Whole30 diet, where I avoid any likely trigger foods for 30 days so I can experience a healthy digestion system, and (ideally) phase bad foods back into my diet so I can identify the worst offenders. I'll set a "this is my personal universal law" work out schedules that I prioritize above anything else. I've gone without drinking for months at a time. I'll cut out things like Facebook, Instagram, addicting computer games, binging of TV shows, etc. and replace them with educational books, programming tutorials, writing down ideas, making projects (woodworking, code, etc.)
The cumulative effects cannot be overstated. I'll spend my days with a clear head, with the energy to keep doing the things that benefit me, the interest in the projects that I value and consider productive, often a repulsion to sugary foods, a much lower appetite for frequent snacking/grazing, a somewhat natural urge to go to bed when I'm tired and repeat the process the next day.
So those periods are excellent, and I miss them when they are past. But I also eventually miss my bad habits as well, and inevitably let them trickle back in, reversing the cycle in the opposite direction. I have not found a perfect long-term solution, but I know that when I miss productivity enough or feel depressed enough about being so inactive, I'll probably be motivated enough to sit up and take action and get back into the upward cycle.
I suspect the most successful people tend to avoid the trickle of bad habits, or just have a better handle on keeping it at a trickle while they stay in a more optimal state. (And otherwise have factors like luck and good connections on their side!) But I'm content (most of the time) with a life that is sometimes really productive, and sometimes much less so. And I come to accept letting go of those golden ages and embracing the less productive consumption ages as something I can enjoy without overshadowing them with guilt. Your values may vary!
The idea to avoid fun things seems off the mark. Perhaps:
1. Avoid facile things.
Things that aren’t facile involve difficulty which in turn can involve learning, challenge, mistakes, or other things your brain finds painful. To know more tomorrow than you knew yesterday, you may have to remember why it seemed fun to touch the stove.
Have a hard look at what you do rather than work and whether each is genuinely fun. If it’s genuine fun, you likely don’t regret the time spent. More often, the things done instead of work, when looked back on, were not meaningfully rewarding. You’re not the better for having spent time on them.
This also helps you decide among “fun” things. For instance, between these two guilty pleasures: binge Netflix, or binge an airport novel?
The second one subconsciously reminds you that reading can be fun, and rehabilitates your ability to focus on reading at length, so primes you to be able to read and learn rapidly as needed to maintain mastery in your profession.
Anecdata suggests that for coming back from burnout on activities, facility-based alternatives are better than abject avoidance.
There's no such thing as procrastination, it's just a word that's very popular. It's a battle of what you're being programmed to do vs what you really want to do. Even science says that the subconscious is most of your brain power. Procrastination only exists in the conscious mind, so it just means you're relying on it too much and not giving credit to anything but your own ego. When there's no options there's no procrastination, you just do what you have to do. If there's options and you think you're procrastinating it just means your heart is not in the right place and to be frank you'd get a lot more done in life and find happiness if you "procrastinated" instead of trying not to. Just go with the flow and don't worry about meaningless definitions and words. Have a good day my friends and all the best to you.
I think this article conflates productivity with diligence.
The most effective way I've found to improve productivity is to shift focus onto tasks that bring in more money per unit time spent performing them.
Since my daughter was born 7 months ago, I've really only been able to work about 2-3 "full" 8-hour days a week without crashing, and my wife might be able to spend 8-10 hours a week working on the business.
However, because we've simply stopped doing tasks that are "work" but don't add greatly to the business's bottom line (for example, we no longer respond to dumb requests from customers, standardise products into a single SKU where possible and shifted our marketing towards eBay's promoted listings rather than building an organic following on social media), we've actually grown slightly.
Diligence and drive are definitely important parts of what makes you productive, but it's not the be all and end all.
I think you've highlighted the difference between efficiency and efficacy. Efficiency is doing the thing you're doing well, efficacy is doing the right thing. You can have efficiency without efficacy if you're optimally performing the wrong tasks.
I think this leans into the cookie cutter self help trends too much. Especially in the tech demographic, there seems to be this idea of a one way path to productivity. Things like meal prepping, a strict workout regimen and a generally strict structured routine are being pitched as the quick and simple remedy to being “unproductive”.
To me, turning yourself into an efficiency robot is a recipe for disaster. I think instilling this need to always reach a higher level of output is going to have an opposite effect that makes people more stressed, especially with this idea that fun=bad.
Also I don’t think people can work solely using external motivation as the author seems to suggest.
“When something is boring, ask yourself: Why do I need to do this? Find and reinforce the why behind the work.”
If you consistently don’t enjoy doing something, it might be a sign you should be doing something else.
I just try to accept I go through spurts of inspiration and low energy. Forcing myself to do work when I don’t want to us a recipe for burnout. It’s often unavoidable, when the situation forces it on me. But TBH I’m my own worst enemy: driving myself when I should be in a rest state.
This post echoes some of my own personal findings, but the biggest problem remains. It's difficult to live a narratively meaningful life, especially in a professional setting. There comes a point where you would love nothing more than to just contribute something useful to the world and not just learn interesting things for their own sake, or to have novel experiences and make decisions that matter as a free agent in a wide world. These possibilities are so fragile and hard to maintain.
On a more positive note, the effectiveness of reducing addictive activities cannot be overstated. Essentially, you have to remind yourself that you can access a more pleasant neurological state if you first start by getting some of your daily activities under control.
I work to have a life and fun, not the other way around. I won't be doing any job that won't allow me to have fun.
These are horrible advices.
EDIT: What worked for me was to divide my work day (that's when I work) in 15 minutes chunks on a paper. Luckily I have reMarkable with graph paper made of 36 cells vertically. This nicely makes each cell 15 minutes making upto 9 hours.
I wonder what side of the stimulation standard line the author would put reading his article? Sometimes I think productivity porn like this article is a self-perpetuating problem.
I made it about 200 words before the anticipation of a sales pitch or call to action drove me away. I don’t know if they’re selling something, but it feels like it, and I don’t want it.
Thanks I'll check it out(I see a Tayasui Sketches if it's that one). I'm not sure if you consider yourself to be good at drawing, but the drawings look good. They come together nicely :)
"Have less exposure towards super fun things". "Get bored". These describe the same general concept as dopamine fasting. The third bullet point can be reduced to "focus on what you have to do, until you can focus on it" which is circular.
I'm not buying in. Maybe I'm getting old but "failure to start" is starting to sound like a meme to me perpetuated by vultures trying to exploit creative personalities, hackers included.
I think what we need to do, is to step back and appreciate ourselves for the effort we continually expect from ourselves. As hackers in one way or another, we are constantly putting up our ego as collateral in order to take on challenges that threaten to knock us down a peg or two if we fail. For many of us, failure is a threat to the core of our identity, yet we dive on in anyway. Exhaustion from that sort of loop is to be expected.
Most people don't live like this. Most people reduce the flux in their lives instead of seeking to increase it. Why? Because most people cherish their egos to the point where they cannot commit to a goal with an uncertain outcome. They would rather work a 9-5, which is fine, but it doesn't describe our community. We are addicted to risk if it means building something new and that we can call our own.
So appreciate yourselves more.
And get better sleep.