A trick I've learned is to lie to yourself. Say you're excited to do it, that you can't wait, and that you enjoy it. Your brain is easily convinced if you're willing to let it be.
Sometimes this is not the case, because your brain entertains the idea that it can stop doing the activity it doesn't want to do. Once you are able to convince your brain that is not an option, this mental energy is returned to you as well. i.e. Pain is mandatory, but suffering is optional.
And then my brain realizes that that's actually true, it's being silly by procrastinating, and I get to work.
It's strange that it's necessary, but it is.
I don't agree with a lot of Alcoholics Anonymous' philosophy, but the concept of 'white-knuckling' is quite a powerful metaphor for the trap we get into of trying to force ourselves through a difficult activity, and it speaks to a somewhat tortured value judgement around the relative value of doing a task at all versus doing it yourself. Like you'd rather have mold in your house than pay some guy to fix the shingles on your roof.
I've consumed as much if not more of my favorite ice cream in the last year, but it tends to be reserved for conscious choices: I'm going to make a difficult phone call or work on my billing, then go for ice cream, rather than whenever I just feel stressed. It is certainly not the only tool I have added to the toolbox, but it complements others and the end results have improved my outlook. And since motivation and mood are spirals (which I think you were trying to say?), that's a big deal.
It reminds me of in David Copperfield, where Mr. Murdstone asked his wife to be "firm" all the time.
I think the fact that qualities that are classified as weak or strong, is ultimately a type of bullying. Sometimes, it's a person bullying another. Sometimes, it's the culture bullying individuals, giving extra punishment to people already in distress.
Action by self-bribery is better than strong idleness, and there ought not to be no shame in self-bribery if that helps people to live a better life.
Instead, find the next impossible task, and apply ice cream there.
Princess Aura: Look! Water is leaking from her eyes.
The Emperor Ming: It's what they call tears, it's a sign of their weakness.
At work (temporary gig):
- manual labour == free workout. Whenever I have to crouch for a file.. I do it in a slow and perfect squat. I grab the file and stay down to strecth, then I go up swift .. I'm happy to have that file because I gained something. Other task like archive defragmenting I tried various ways to find the most agreeable one, then I go full speed.
- mundane tasks (print copy, input):
I make a chase waste game out of it (what programmers do). I organize the thing to be as lean and fast as possible and turn a 100+ repetitions into a smooth flow .. like a choreography.
I time most things to make it a game. Coworkers are shocked (whatever their reasons) but I produce twice in half the time and zero rants coming from my cubicle.
For tasks that I really don't like to do.. I gained a mental compartment to remember not to ever trigger that task again. I do it as a debt to my mistake and get done with it.
Fundamentally, there's a trap. It's a short trip from "I can avoid this if I'm good enough" to "I didn't avoid this, so I'm not good enough (bad)." That's toxic dialog. If this is the way you think about anyone, including yourself, you're not being a good friend, and there will be consequences.
And I realize the irony in this statement, but if you like to out-clever problems, you should think about whether you are failing to maintain a diversity of rich, long-term relationships with people. If so, this is probably not a coincidence.
I like it. Here's to not ever making the mistake of doing my taxes again! raises glass
Your brain isn't a separate part of you. And you should simply be mindful and fully aware of life, do what you want and enjoy doing, when you feel like doing it.
No wonder there is such an issue with anxiety and depression when culture seems intent on mind-games that trick people into spending life doing things that they don't really want to do.
The internet has provided me with sufficient distractions-and they are immediately enjoyable enough-that longterm enjoyment/skill-building just doesn't provide me the sense of 'I want to do this' that other shortterm, immediately rewarding activities do.
Half the battle of accomplishing anything in life is priming your subconscious mind with the right line of thinking for the task at hand. If you reframe it that way this is fantastic advice.
Edit: I might also add your subconscious mind could very well be considered a separate entity considering it exists out of the full range of your conscious brains influence.
It's not 'lying' to yourself, it's the higher part directing the lower part to do its job.
I think that we would waste away pretty quickly into nothing if we just 'did what we wanted'.
Even creative efforts take considerable amount of focus and discipline. Nothing is really just 'all fun'.
It takes a considerable amount of social training to hold our civility together.
Our complex socialisation is the only thing that separates us from being animals.
Even primates don't just 'do whatever' - even they have social rules.
Our 'higher selves' are the parts of us moving us forward, we can put our 'lower instincts' on cruise control from time to time (and that's probably healthy) but no question the 'thinker' has to be in charge in the end.
There's lot of "hurdles" to "just being" nowadays. Even if you don't apply elaborated psychological methods on you everyday life, a big portion of your environment does do it — Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, ..., they all try to hack into your brain and suck you in. How do you prevent falling for these things without employing a bit of brain-hackery yourself?
Also, even if you manage to not succumb to the calls of Facebook et. al., a big portion of worthwhile, fulfilling and healthy things require you to be uncomfortable in the short term (e.g. exercise) in order to reap the benefits in the long run. How can you start doing these things without any rationalisation? (i.e. without trying to persuade the brain: Yeah, I know we'll be sweating, but it's worth it, trust me — you'll thank me in 20 years!)
What would you recommend to read more about the Alan Watts topics you reference?
It's usually true. Lots of social anxiety evaporates. And sure, sometimes you put yourself in an embarrassing position because of it. But the benefits are worth it.
The technique I finally learned was to attempt to cultivate an enjoyment of the task I didn’t want to do. But I wonder if what you’re suggesting isn't really just a different way of looking at the same thing.
You might be “lying to yourself” telling yourself that you’re excited to do something, but the brain will start synthesizing that into what it might indeed find enjoyable about the task. I found I could easily get myself to fold laundry by focusing on the satisfaction of a folded shirt - it sounds silly, but I somehow hooked that process up to the right dopamine trigger, and now I rarely procrastinate this particular chore.
The process was similar for exercise. Whether it was “I’m going to tell myself I’ll enjoy this” or “I’m going to find something I enjoy about this” is perhaps not as clear-cut as I originally imagined, but either way, my epiphany was this: I will always find a way to avoid a task I don’t want to do, while I will always find a way to do something I’ve learned to enjoy.
There's a fantastic idiom in English to express this idea: "to make virtue out of necessity".
> When I say to lie, I'm a bit tongue in cheek. I don't really consider it a lie anymore. It's simply a acknowledgment that this task will not be painful the way that I think. It's much more Zen than my initial post made it sound, but I hoped that would help translate to people who are getting started with self discipline.
I think this is what most of hypnosis or meditation techniques do. They try to bring mind in a more suggestive state and then suggests that you like(or hate) the good(or bad) activity.
I have a friend who was a 6 cigarettes a day guy actually quit smoking after few sessions of hypnotherapy. He said his hypnotherapist suggested in sessions that you hate the smell of the smoke, and he started hating it. I had hard time believing it and I remember researching about it.
I agree with your point on lying. I have tried it before but it takes a lot of mental effort to trick my brain and even then, it's a precarious situation where one loose thought can bring it all tumbling down.
I know one or two people who have a lot of chaos in their lives who cannot do this. One in particular gets positively defensive if you ask in the car what you plan to accomplish by going into this store.
You can hardly call it 'buying extra things' if you refuse to articulate what the expected set of things was in the first place. She spends so much time de-cluttering and often doesn't have money for group activities despite being in essentially the same income bracket. Ten seconds making a plan doesn't have to turn into a whole avoidant 'ruining the experience' vibe of the trip. Also, no store is designed to make you enjoy it. It's merely designed for long- versus short-term ROI, and certain kinds of enjoyment can benefit one or the other. Enjoying a trip to the mall is expensive as hell.
I must have discovered the same approach as this author.
I stopped any kind of thinking about it and focused on observing myself drive to the gym, get in the pool, do the strokes, etc.
If my verbal ("thinking") centers of my brain needed to say something I would only let them describe what I was doing ("You are driving to the gym", "you are putting your swimsuit on", etc.)
Never did I let any other "thinking" or "reasoning" enter the picture. It was all observation. I was able to keep an exercise routine for years this way.
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I think her post fails in the last section "Do the easiest part first". This is too much thinking, reasoning and I think will backfire. She should delete this section. I think this idea is hard for people to understand. You want ZERO REASONING to come into the picture when the time comes, not even a shred. Only pure observation of you doing the task.
If you give yourself a chance to think about it, you probably won't do it.
It scares me because it feels similar to the mindset I have when watching a movie. What if I become more interested in the plot than the well-being of the main character?
I respectfully disagree. This approach absolutely works for me. I usually start a big difficult task by removing trivial inconveniences (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...)
For example, when I'm about to write a spec, I first do the easy trivial stuff, such as creating and naming the document. Or, when I write a difficult email, I write a rough version of it in a blunt caveman language.
I'd keep this section intact.
You have to come up with a background, a connection to your past and your being, a story that makes sense why this is who you are.
How this looks can be entirely personal. It may be a rugged individualistic stubbornness story to learn to face adversity, a story of family, about health and treating your body as a temple, or whatever else.
If you have a stronger competing story for your identity (eg my kind of person doest jog, that's some silly Instagrammer avocado soyboy thing, my kind of person drinks beer and watches TV) then you'll not keep doing it even if you successfully force it for some days or weeks.
Stories carry and propel us through life to a large extent.
This has been the way I've worked for decades.
I've found that stuff gets done, once it becomes habit. It doesn't always become enjoyable, or even effortless, but it does get done.
There's a saying: "Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don't want to do, as William James suggests, just for exercise."
I usually have the second part down by 7AM. The first is not always guaranteed, each day, but I pull it off, every now and then.
Getting Things Done has been my pattern since I was eighteen years old.
This being HN, I have also learned to "think less" while coding. I've established coding habits; often with the help of LINTers[0], and now produce a lot of good code, at a blistering pace. My designs are almost fluid; often reconfiguring in the middle of implementation, as I take a "JIT" approach to design[1]. That's not something that can be taught. It only comes with a great deal of experience.
In my experience, the less thought I have to give stuff, the better.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/swiftwater/swiftlint...
[1] https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/evolutionary-design-speci...
For me, the biggest barrier to getting started on something is all the boilerplate and ceremony around actually doing the thing. Right now, I can go from a resting state in bed to sitting on my rower or running outside within 90 seconds. The same cannot be said for most other physical hobbies.
I rationalize it along lines of "If I start right this second, I can be done with cardio before 8am". For me, the time cost is way more painful than any physical cost. This ideology allows me to squeeze exercise into time windows that would otherwise be impossible if I had to travel somewhere or meet other people to engage in the activity.
Ultimately, I feel that physical fitness is about recognizing the benefits and engaging them at any cost until you are at a point where the cost becomes relatively negligible. The physical and emotional aversion are a temporary thing, and it will ultimately boil down to how much time you want to spend on your own health.
It will if you walk up hills.
Even walking a few miles a day in flat areas is still good exercise; getting yourself outside and moving is a very good start.
I think walking to work or class is also good for thinking and getting your brain working.
Walking/hiking in nature is also great if you are near a trail of some sort.
But now that gyms are closed (I wouldn't go if they were open anyway), I don't have a good substitute. And bodyweight exercises take significantly longer to get the same "pump".
At the gym, I'm forced to get through the workout. At home, it's so easy to hop on the laptop during breaks between sets and get distracted.
I only really enjoy swimming - but it's too much work to prepare yourself for the pool - and carrying things - the other day me and a few frineds helped my other friend move ten station wagons worth of stuff - but that isn't a particularly healthy activity.
Has the author asked themselves why they feel guilt about not wanting to do "everything"?
Is it possible that the form of discipline being promoted here under the tag "Productivity" is entirely unnecessary for a satisfying human existence, and that it is primarily caused by cultural forces?
Is it possible that such a focus on this relentless productivity, caused by our society, is related to the feeling of guilt that comes with perceiving oneself as 'undisciplined'?
Anyone who is commenting on how this opposes the nature of zen or other mindfulness lineages is on the right track and anyone who is still justifying cramming as much activity into every moment of their lives in the name of productivity is doomed to repeatedly feel the guilt and shame that comes along with not living up to these cultural standards.
On the other end of the scale are people like myself, who have a real problem motivating themselves to do tasks which really do objectively need to get done (e.g. mowing the lawn, cleaning the bathroom). Why do they need to get done? Because if they don't they would have a net negative effect on your quality of life / even basic hygiene. It's people closer on this end of the spectrum that I think benefit from advice like this.
Certainly there is no absolute law that says you "have to" do anything. That's freedom of choice which we all ultimately have. In practical terms though, unless you are willing to accept an extremely low standard of living, certain basics do need to get done. People with depression will probably be able to understand where I'm coming from with this :)
In terms of the basic activities of living, it can still help to address the aversion to the task head on by realizing the actual nature of the task.
The task isn't what it appears, but is in fact just a concept we impute to aggregate phenomena.
Is washing dishes standing at the sink? No. Is washing dishes the running water? No. Is washing dishes holding a single plate and sponge? No. Is washing dishes dispensing soap onto the sponge? No.
Washing dishes is the combination of several interdependent causes.
Tasks that we're averse to are simply aggregations of various other imputed concepts, and so the unified activity that triggers our sense of aversion isn't actually based on anything substantial.
Speaking personally, aversion arises for me a lot of the time as a sense of lost time to one activity or another, but the concept of 'just being' suggests that whatever activity you do is perfectly fine on a fundamental level.
No time is wasted because every activity you do is 'of one taste' essentially - it's all the same in terms of being aggregate phenomena wrapped up into a unified concept by humans that triggers aversion based on our individual conditioning.
So realizing that the aversion isn't real and substantial, reflect on the positive nature of completing the task and the positive effects it will have. Instead of repressing your negative thoughts (forcefully not thinking), see them as insubstantial.
Thanks for your reply :)
That I can quit as soon as I get too bored or hit a block of some kind - this relieves me of all the concerns that I might need to worry (think) about upfront, I waved those requirements when I allowed myself that quick exit.
Most of the time you just end up persevering, and due to the nature of these unimportant tasks - not planning just doesn't make any meaningful difference.
For particularly anxiety-inducing tasks I have been known to use a 30 second time box ;) Safe to say, this always tends to build the requisite momentum to follow through with a much greater bracket of time, even if it's not a conscious decision to do so (this is probably the key point - the mental shortcut).
Another tactic which can be useful when the procrastination is driven by perfectionism: embracing the notion of "wrong action". Simply by initiating some kind of action in the interests of the task at hand, and it doesn't matter how "wrong" you think that action might be. Obviously, since you have a base level of expertise, even your so-called "wrong" action will in fact be a useful step towards the goal. This is a bit like the "beginners mindset": stripping preconceptions that are obstructing any kind of progress.
I'm sure it wasn't an effective strategy for information retention, and I developed pretty terrible sleep habits which plagued me for years after. But the homework got done...
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/logen-ninefingers#:~:te...
I just watched Joe Rogan's interview of David Goggins[1], and he lives the essence of what this article is trying to express. I think his perspective is far more succinct and sharper, its sort of an anti-motivation motivation. Its definitely worth a watch if anyone is interested.
You can also barter with yourself. Have a list of harmless splurges to reward yourself with. Kyoto cold brew, a Sapporo black beer, or a few hours of gaming are on my list.
I recon the most professional approach is to clear your schedule, remove all distractions, and simply give yourself enough time or even unlimited time to do it. I often find they get done faster than expected, since most of these tasks aren't particularly difficult. Like taxes. The problem isn't that they're hard or challenging. They disgust me :/
I've found: 1. I can fit a lot of things into my day, than I assumed. 2. I often overestimate how long things take, on top of that.
Point 2 is particularly interesting, since I know if I just bang out my tasks, I'll keep find "free time" that I over-planned for. By the end of the day, I get a couple free hours to do whatever I want, and it's lovely.
First, as a sibling comment said, having a notebook always on hand is a huge help to me (I like Field Notes as they fit in my pockets and hold up to abuse well). Writing things down with a pen avoids all of the possible distractions of picking up your phone, and frees you from any structure imposed by task apps.
I write stuff down constantly--sometimes I write down tasks, random ideas, or just doodle. Later (ideally in the evening or first thing in the morning) I read my ramblings and organize the ones worth remembering into a more permanent place. Tasks go into a digital todo app, notes and ideas into OneNote, etc.
While this scribbling thoughts and organizing them later is barely a routine, its proved to be enough to get me through crazy times and back into a "real" routine.
The second thing: don't worry about your routine collapsing. It happens, it's natural. Accept it, write down the crazy business in your head, and slowly start building a new routine.
Something that helped me was instead of building a new routine, I went back to the old one but in stages. There are things I don't absolutely have to do, so they get tacked on the end and are optional so I can just skip them without much disruption in turbulence.
Whatever is the quickest to get me to a list of reminders that I can choose from.
And I do best when I can sort those by effort required to complete. Refill cat food bowls, minimal effort, QED. Find contractor for back porch rework, not as simple. So I break it down and find a smaller step I can do and list that.
Even if I get knocked out of my list, I always have it to get back on track.
Tasks.org is my current tool, after trying many many others.
On my worst days I set a repeating alarm to get my attention and look at the list again. Sometimes exhaustion, sometimes lack of desire, but I have a wife and animals to provide for so one way or the other I make it happen.
"Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments."
To understand this, one must realise that a horse can only go full out (<20 HP) for a minute or two, and even at 80% will be exhausted in under 15 minutes. Infantry may, and does, grind, but cavalry relies on timing[1]. (Why use cavalry then? Because, properly deployed, they turned minor routs into decisive victories. Consider Guagamela.)
[1] There is a nice anecdote about von Seydlitz and Frederick the Great. Von Seydlitz is waiting with his cavalry squadrons for opportunity to ripen. Frederick sends a messenger to him to attack. Von Seydlitz responds, "later." A new messenger comes, "you are ordered to attack." Von Seydlitz responds, "in due course." Finally a messenger arrives, "the king says if you do not attack instantly you will be beheaded." Von Seydlitz responds, "please inform his Excellency that my head will be at his disposal after the battle, but during the battle I still need to use it in his service."
it's like my mind is rationalizing itself to settle for a sub goal.
At the end you oscillate in-between.
I don't think you can really get away from it.
But then around my mid 20s, working out just got boring. My body started deteriorating, which made working out even harder.
Sad to say, these days I can't even do a light jog without something to distract me from the jogging itself. Either music in my ears, or some TV-screen on the treadmill.
But once I can focus on something else, I can work out just fine.
The presumption here is that I've already thought about how long the task will take and what I'll need to complete it, plus I'm aware of what else is going on and taken that into account, so I have no real excuse for not doing the task right when the reminder pops up.
It's a bit of moderated procrastination, but it works for me.
It may be several hours before I actually go on that run, but now the task of running needs to be executed before the clothes can be taken off.
It starts small.
“I’ll just stick on my shoes” “I’ll just walk to the gate” “I’ll just run to that post” ...
Before you know it you’ve completed the thing you didn’t feel like doing.
Yes.
Once you've started it will be easier to keep going. Also, it's harder to not to finish something the more time you've spent on it.
Both are tools you use to apply to your own exact situation. Person A may vote for Team Motivation, because that works for them. Person B may vote for Team Discipline. That works for them.
The more accurate your self-knowledge and self-awareness, the more effective you can apply the tools (discipline, motivation, etc).
