Ask HN: How do you stay focused when working on hard problems?

5 pointsum3047y ago2 comments

When working on hard problems, which might encompass unknown number of sub-problems, I often find myself procrastinating. Harder the problem, severer the procrastination. A psychology professor says that a person typically fails to begin a project when there is "confusion about what the first steps of the task are" [1].

When working on hard problem, you're bound to hit tasks of which you won't know first steps. You're likely to often find yourself in deep marshes with no way out. How do you stay motivated in situations like these? How do you not give in to procrastination?

[1](https://medium.com/@dr_eprice/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01)

2 comments

Nomentatus7y ago

Don't ever solve a hard problem - let your unconscious mind do that; it's far more capable. That's Bertie's advice.

Bertrand Russell's method was to concentrate with great intensity on the importance of a problem, smack his head against it for some time, for days or perhaps months. Then to forget about it and let the answer pop into his head much later. The idea is to convince your unconscious mind of how critical it is to devote itself to finding a solution - to convince it of the emotional importance of solving it.

"My own belief is that a conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient amount of vigour and intensity is put into it. Most of the unconscious consists of what were once highly emotional conscious thoughts, which have now become buried. It is possible to do this process of burying deliberately, and in this way the unconscious can be led to do a lot of useful work. I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity - the greatest intensity of which I am capable - for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. Before I had discovered this technique, I used to spend the intervening months worrying because I was making no progress; I arrived at the solution none the sooner for this worry, and the intervening months were wasted, whereas now I can devote them to other pursuits." - The Conquest of Happiness

So yes, procrastinate - but only after thumping your noggin into the problem, hard. Don't worry about which first steps to take, you don't know them and probably won't 'till after you intuit the solution if it's a genuinely hard problem. Your frustration is the point; it's how you convince the unconscious to get to work. Idiotic research, cogitation, problem review are all useful activities for this purpose if you really mentally engage and create mental urgency.

Then drop it like a stone. And wait.

I've found this does work, across a wide range of problems. Sometimes I've had to go through the cycle, reloading the problem emotionally, as it were, a few times on problems that took decades to solve.

cimmanom7y ago

There can be other reasons for procrastination, too.

Fear of failure is a common one, which fits the bill if you have more trouble getting started on harder problems.

Personally, the only way I've found to deal with that one is to say "fuck it, what's the worst that happens?" and just do it. But sometimes you have to work yourself up to that.

There are other reasons you might be avoiding it too. I highly recommend cultivating the habit of introspection, and applying it whenever you realize you're procrastinating on something, to figure out what specifically is making you uncomfortable about starting the project.

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