The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth, to flossing.
Common Distractions: Social media (Fb, Hackernews, Quora, F365), messages (Whatsapp, Messenger, Email) , memories, other people, ink pill, chores to do (cleaning, dietary supplements).
People who do well
Anders, Helena, Stuti
When I did well
When I failed
A windmill might look like it’s spinning so fast, but still it doesn’t go anywhere. Focus on expanding your strengths. Don’t confuse action with motion . Instead of running around in circles, take clear action steps towards your purpose. Feeling like you are always doing so much and keeping yourself busy is a waste of energy.
Make it stupidly small. You predict failure when you don’t understand what you need to do. Never, ever, ever have an ominous task on your list. Even “do my taxes” is too vague. How do you do that? Where do you get started? More importantly: what is the smallest step you can do today and make any progress towards that goal? Break down a big idea into small bits. Collect “stupidly small” tasks you can knock out with minimal anguish. We’re looking to build a good predictive model where you succeed at doing things, no matter how small.
Deep Work: “Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
Don’t go out too hard. Novice runners often mistake running for sprinting. They go out for a “run”, sprint for a mile until they’re out of breath and then vow to never repeat the experience. Sprinting is hard! Don’t start with that. Maximize enjoyment. Run at the easiest pace you can manage. Find a scenic place. Enjoy the fresh air, if you can find it. Your goal is to make memories that are pleasant. Similarly, you’re working through a project, try to start off my making it as fun as possible. One way to do this is to split a problem into small, bite-sized components, since it’s satisfying to mark something as done. Or reward yourself by working on a novel part of the problem first.
You only learn from deliberative practice.
A mistake is an evaluation of an action. An action is in your control. The evaluation should be left to others. 1
“Fake it until you make it” gets it wrong. It makes you feel like an impostor. If you’re mindful of faking it, you’re not practicing the thing, but practicing faking it. If you learn to act like someone who is a good storyteller, you won’t be a good storyteller, but you’d be a good actor.
“From the very first session, I could sense something different,” he said. “I don’t know, something. Not just him, all of his staff. The way we trained, the way they saw football, the way they worked, prepared games. A relentless, even intimidating, work ethic. It really struck me. And I said to myself: “I can’t waste a year of my career not working with this coach.’”
If you identify as an athlete, and you talk to yourself and others with that expectation, then that is much more effective than “I need to get in better shape”. When you identify with something it compels your actions, almost by default, much more than willpower alone. Trust yourself and then performing to the full potential in full presence with full application of the mind Link
It matters that you believe in yourself and trust yourself rather than being pessimistic, understating your abilities, or thinking the task before you too hard.
Whether you believe you can or can’t, it’s true.
Visualization. Just fantasize. What will you do when you pay your taxes? Direct a movie in your mind. Some parts of it will provoke a neutral reaction. Some will be negative (“ugh, gotta assemble lots of documents… BORING!”). You’re feeding your brain positive training data to make the act of doing the task less daunting. You’re demystifying it. Athletes who visualize their sport find improved performance. Become an Olympian in productivity.
Celebrate success. Once you achieve something challenging, your goal is to remember it as much as possible. You want your mind to store the positive moment as motivation fuel for next time. With running, some of this comes for free (the biochemical effects of a “runner’s high”), but you can get it for other tasks as well: tell your friends what you did! If you made it through a book, discuss it with others. If you finished some part of a side-project, show it off! It’s fun to get feedback from other people, especially if you respect them.
Talk to others. Talking to other people accomplishes three goals:
They might have good ideas about it. It’ll make you more accountable, especially if you tell them you’ll get it done. It forces you to clarify your own thinking. Talking to others is a forcing function to think. And a more specific, detailed task is easier to accomplish.
You can also make your task itself more appealing, more engaging, by looking at it in a different light. Even if a task at first seems boring, look for the variabilitie. Look for the uncertainty. You might time yourself. You might see if you can do it a little differently. You might see if you can do it a little bit better.”
Just show up
He’d been innovating extensively. He’d been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn’t. They just couldn’t think of anything to say. One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman …. It just stumped him. Now he couldn’t think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: “Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.” It was a stroke of insight
He was furious. “You’re not looking!” he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn’t looking and yet somehow didn’t understand this. He told her angrily, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.” Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”
Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.
He experimented further. In one class he had everyone write all hour about the back of his thumb. Everyone gave him funny looks at the beginning of the hour, but everyone did it, and there wasn’t a single complaint about “nothing to say.”
In another class he changed the subject from the thumb to a coin, and got a full hour’s writing from every student. In other classes it was the same. Some asked, “Do you have to write about both sides?” Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence-building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else’s. Classes where he used that coin exercise were always less balky and more interested.
As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself. – Robert Pirsig
The ego is the enemy of the imagination. Anything that you think about writing when you’re not writing, is a product of the ego and is absolutely wrong. One hundred percent, all the time, wrong. And if take a step back and think how much time you spend trying to purify yourself in order to get ready to write, that’s like 95% of the time. And the reason for that is the ego has a stake in perpetuating the behavior that you’ve already engaged in. We do not think our way to right action; we act our way to right thinking. So what I do is I start writing. If I think about my writing before I start to write, what I’m really doing is justifying not writing, because … I’m not writing. … I’m going to find a way to keep not writing. So what I say is I don’t have the idea yet; it’s not fully realized yet… Not only that: I don’t have pencils; my pencils are not sharpened; I don’t have the right notebook. … Whoa! Eleven-forty five already. Time for lunch. … When you think about exercising, what you invariably say to yourself is, “You know, I’m too fat. What’s the point? I’m too old; I’m too fat; I’m too old; I’m too slow; I’m too this; I’m too that…” And all you’re doing is justifying the fact that you’re not exercising. People went to “get in the zone,” because they hope to write something inspired or perfect or smart immediately. I don’t know any professional writers who expect that. Instead, we just start writing and let whatever garbage we spew out land on the page or screen. Then make a second draft. Then a third, and so on, each time, pruning away a bit more of the garbage, keeping the few gems that somehow found their way into the garbage can, and shaping some of the semi-garbage into something useful. - “Getting into the zone” is not writing. When I want to write, I write. When I don’t want to write, I write. Because that’s what writers do. TV writer David Milch, creator of “Deadwood.”
When I know what needs to get done, even if it’s tedious, it’s not so bad to put my nose to the grindstone and work through it. But when I’m not sure how to approach a task, suddenly every distraction in the world is more appealing. You often see the suggestion to break up big tasks into smaller, baby step chunks to avoid this analysis paralysis
I stared at that off-white screen for several long minutes without typing anything. I don’t have anything to write about, I thought. Also, I’m not even a good writer…maybe I should look online for some tips…
But that was a bad idea and I knew it. So I swallowed my pride and just started writing:
Why I think creating stuff is a good thing. An essay by Tom C. This was going to be rough. I think people consume too much, and don’t create enough. This is bad I think. Like, really rough. But I kept typing; pouring inane, kindergarten-level drivel into my phone. I know a little bit about the “sales funnel.”…you need 500 cold calls to make three sales. You need to write 500 words to get three good ones. Or 500 sketches, business ideas, or recipes. If you’re really really good, you can increase your overall conversion rate from 0.6% to 1%—but the most reliable way to get better results is to just produce more crap. So I kept at it. week after week. Sometime in the middle of the fourth week I had 3,000 words in my Notes app. That’s when I started editing. Editing is hard because you realize how bad you are. But editing is easy because we’re all better at criticizing than we are at creating. The good thing about forcing yourself to produce a bunch of garbage is that you don’t feel bad deleting it. You’re not married to any of your work, because you wrote it half-awake on the 1BX while some crazy dude negotiated his fare with the driver. I gleefully deleted hundreds of words, trying not to think about the neanderthal who must’ve written them.
Structured procrastination
Procrastination often stems from deeper emotional issues or an unacknowledged clash of priorities (for example, when you try to force yourself to do something that you don’t, in fact, want to do, the deeper issue is that you haven’t resolved the clash between your short-time desires and your long-term goals).
Software Engineering Specific
Record Rubber-ducking Start screen recording software and dictate your thoughts as you go through the research/brainstorming phase. Don’t often go back and view the recorded sessions, it’s the act of recording and speaking out loud that helps.
Comment driven development. Stub out functions just with comments, write deeper comment blocks inside a procedure where you have a rough idea of what needs to happen.
I paste in table and API definitions as comments too, to avoid having to flip to a different screen which inevitably leads to distraction. Once the program is completely laid out in comment form, and compile/runs with just “STARTING” and “STOPPING” displaying, then I start implementing what’s in the comments outside-in (from highest to lowest level). I run the program frequently while doing this, each successful compile/run is a small dopamine hit. As I’m going through, remove any comments that are duplicated by code - all that should remain are comments explaining “why”.
If you’re interview prepping, and don’t see a solution immediately, it’s easy to think you’re not good enough, and that distracts you from finding a solution. That doesn’t happen if you’re doing it for fun. Interview questions are easy if you are confident in your abilities, have all the time in the world, and look at problems as a game. ↩