Comment by Helmut10001 6 days ago
I often trick myself imagining life is a game that throws boring or difficult tasks (boredom often equals difficult ) at me that I need to survive. It often helps because I I can picture finishing these things as rewards that help me get to the next "level". It was particularly helpful getting beyond difficult times (many bad events coinciding). Not sure if this can be transferred to others, or if it works because of my brain chemistry.
> This stops working after a while.
yeah and i figured thats fine !
I take time spent on HN as an example. I used to think if i limit my HN time to under 10-15 mins a day, would be ideal. But the slippery slope was stopping. It felt rude. And i had no one but myself to get angry on. Weird loop.
I then go the opposite, allow myself to binge. Kinda forced looking at HN every occasion i had a few mins. I get bookmakes to avoid typing the url. Browse on every device. Add comments, browse past lists, front page, best comments, etc. All the dopamine boosts. And I notice the dopamine effect reduces. The fun in comments, upvotes and finding something new just evaporates. A day or two of this makes me sick of the orange banner and the beige background. I delete bookmarks, remove everything. Make a new account to start fresh. Add a rule to block the domain, all out of a natural reaction, mind you.
i dont have real stats but it feels like over 2 years of this, i've spent less time on HN, than before. I'm not constantly fighting myself. It comes and goes in waves, like seasons of nature. Right now its spring and slowly getting into HN summer as explained by my flurry of comments past few weeks.
Pretty sure my commenting pattern is similar. I write a bunch of comments in a short period then none at all and just lurk for a while. All the HN comment data is published, right? (BigQuery?) I wonder if we can find cyclic comment patterns for individual users. It might be harder to find patterns if the user creates a new account every cycle like parent, but maybe just users that have been active for 2+ years.
That’s also occurs with me, but in games! Sometimes, I feel “obligated” to play, the urge of playing that unique game, then suddenly, it disappears.
I’m not a psychologist, but I believe that occurs often, some things just lose that sparkle with the time, and it’s okay, you just need to find a new way to make your task. This article is a good example of how you can do this, and, with some time, change your methods!
I believe that having urges come and go is the natural way human motivation works. Doing something every day, whether you feel like doing it or not, is the artificial thing that you need to be trained to do.
Some things require larger blocks of time. For example, you need several days in line to take a vacation; you can't simply take "5 minutes of vacation" every day. Some things are done much better if you dedicate an entire day, or at least a few consecutive hours to them: whether it is learning something new, writing a blog article, relaxing, hanging out with your friends, etc.
It would be more natural to work 16 hours a day when you feel like it, and then take a day off.
My approach is to gather HN articles via RSS (then convert to maildir) a couple of times a day. That has two effects:
- It reduces the subconscious slot-machine mechanic (compared to refreshing a Web page) since I know there won't be anything new in my feed for the next several hours.
- There are also tangible benefits to using a proper feed reader, like only seeing unread items. That also discourages "cheating", since reading things outside of my feeds will require me to mark them as "read" after the next update.
I receive comment-replies via email, filtered into an IMAP folder that refreshes a bit faster than the RSS feed, to allow conversations.
These don't have notifications, but if I'm in the mail reader I can see their unread count (usually zero; and hence can be dismissed with a glance)
Yeah. Sometimes the reason you can't focus on something is that some part of your brain is trying to tell you that you shouldn't.
Unfortunately, that part of the brain usually sucks at coming up with an alternative plan, and "do something else, anything" is not very actionable. And you still need to pay your bills somehow.
The natural reward for work is work done. I don't need a motivational system to do the dishes. The motivation is seeing the dirty dishes gradually disappear, and the kitchen become cleaner. I don't need to create pieces of papers to represent that, because it is already happening right there, in real life.
If I work on a project, it helps to specify all things that need to be done (as opposed to working on something open-ended), so that I can see how I am getting closer to the moment of "done". A nice thing about test-driven development is that you produce a set of checkboxes first, and then you gradually check them off. Even if the work is open-ended, if I keep thinking about new features that would be nice add, it helps to specify a "version 1.0", and after achieving it, a "version 2.0", etc. The idea is that after each version I can take a break and feel that my work is done.
The least motivating thing is probably the job, as an employee. You work for 8 hours a day (generously assuming no overtime). There is no way to complete those 8 hours in e.g. 4 hours of working harder and then take a walk. In theory, if you do Scrum, you should have a certain reasonable amount of work assigned per sprint, and if you do it faster, then I guess you can take a short break and do something enjoyable (such as refactoring). In practice, almost no one does Scrum by the book; you will probably be randomly interrupted by extra tasks, and given unrealistic deadlines to avoid the possibility of completing the work earlier.
Another demotivating thing about the job is that there is no personal consequence of completing a project; you immediately start working on a new one. The natural response to completing a work is to congratulate yourself and take a break. But at work, the vacations are mostly unrelated to projects. Also, you are paid per time spent working, not by the number of projects finished. So it is all disconnected.
So I guess it all needs to be a part of some greater project, which can possibly be completed one day. Such as, putting your money in index funds, and planning to retire as soon as you reach a specified amount. Then each day you can congratulate yourself for getting 0.01% closer to the goal. (Or you can save money for other specific things, if that is what you desire.)
Or if you work remotely, lie. Complete your projects and do whatever you want with your newly minted free time. You still need to be available and maybe keep a status indicator green but otherwise you should be free to reclaim 10 - 20 hours a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. Thoughts?
Really, most people's adult lives are just a constant stream of boring/difficult tasks they need to grind in order to get through: School, work, paying bills, managing money, doing taxes, cleaning the house, cooking food, doing dishes, fixing this, maintaining that... If you don't have a way to trick your brain into grinding these things over and over, you're not going to get very far.
This stops working after a while. The real deal is you begin the realise the 'points' you accumulate playing this game can't be redeemed to do something fun or satisfying. This game begins to appear totally pointless as you age(Points are less useful as you age, and dying with lots of points means time and effort was spent to acquire a thing that can't be spent now). Which causes even more procrastination.
I think humans crave freedom and free time, with good health more than anything else. This frees you up to care about doing things which we feel more rewarding and fun.
Several times you are better off skipping the drills and rituals and just focus on making lots of money as quickly as possible. And of course competing to accumulate more money just for the heck of it is equally demotivating as well. Focus what you want from the money and that is likely to move you along better use of your time and effort.