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There are strategies that tend to have better success rates than others—and to be clear, I think this blog post gives good advice—but I'm suspicious of any "suc

There are strategies that tend to have better success rates than others—and to be clear, I think this blog post gives good advice—but I'm suspicious of any "successful" strategy that is merely the most recent in a long line of attempts. I think people change slowly—much more slowly than we usually assume. Every time you try something to fix your life and you fail, you actually make a little bit of progress on yourself, just not enough to switch your behavior into something recognizably better. When you try a new strategy and succeed, there is a strong chance that you would not have been successful had you not made all of that incremental progress on yourself from all your failures. That's why it's important to never give up on yourself. I've had "breakthroughs" that were basically just me trying the same thing I tried (and failed at) years earlier. The difference was that I'd gotten stronger in subtle ways over that time. Then, 6 months later, I'm back to my old habits. This is depressing, but when I remember that this is the first time I was able to stick with something for months instead of weeks, I realize I've actually made progress on myself. Even though this isn't strictly about productivity, I think the best lesson from OP is that things get easier as you practice them. This seems obvious, but when we talk about building skills, we often frame it as us rising to the challenge. I.e., there's this very hard thing we want to do, and we need to become stronger to be able to do it. This isn't wrong per se, but I think it's bad for motivation because it frames progress as doing as doing increasingly more difficult things. Instead of thinking about getting better, I think it's more helpful to frame progress as things becoming easier. No matter how weak you feel you are, the things you find difficult in life will become easier as you work on them.

WalterBright 6y ago
You're quite right. It's amazing what one can accomplish if one lets oneself be satisfied what incremental progress, no matter how small. For example, I dislike doing pullups. Many times over the decades, I embarked on a program of daily doing as many pullups as I could. I failed because it just took too much willpower. I finally hit on a solution. I started with doing 3 pullups a day. 3 pullups are easy. It didn't take much willpower at all. After a few months, I "graduated" to 4, which then was just as easy. After several years, I am now up to 10, which is easy, and something I had kept failing at before. You might think "why wait several years", but my goal with this is long term, so that doesn't bother me.
- achillesheels 6y ago
  So many projects are stillborn because of the paralysis caused by assuming things are done through heroic feats rather than mundane tasks such as setting up a bank account. Concentration on the effort, consistently, and holding oneself accountable to consistent standards over time compounds. It's the willpower to be self-accountable which forms good habits.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    People often ask me how to deal with periods where one's motivation to work on a project vanishes (it happens to everyone now and then). What works for me is to say to myself "I'm just going to work one minute on it today." It's amazing how that works. 1. The project stays fresh in your mind, rather than winding up in the "garage" of your thoughts. 2. It's surprising how much you can get done one minute at a time. 3. Sometimes you discover that one minute had turned into a couple hours without thinking about it. 4. My motivation returns a lot quicker than if I just set things aside.
- jeremycw 6y ago
  This is good advice. However, I've seen this advice before and the example is usually something where it's easy to imagine what an incremental step is. The advice is when you want to do n just do < n. This is great for some things but I find it doesn't work for everything. So I'd like to just expand on this for tasks where doing < n doesn't really make sense. For example, if you're trying to solve a difficult bug it can be overwhelming and you feel like you're not making progress and you procrastinate because you don't have the time to dive in for five hours and you feel like spending thirty minutes isn't enough to accomplish anything. My advice, if you're struggling with tasks like these is to make excessive notes. Save the link to the Stack Overflow question you looked at. Write down file names and line numbers with your thoughts. Copy bits of relevant documentation right into your notes. The basic idea is that if you can ramp up from your notes in less time than it took you to make them then you have made progress.
  - rsanek 6y ago
epinards 6y ago
"Instead of thinking about getting better, I think it's more helpful to frame progress as things becoming easier." That's a huge insight when you actually become able to stick to habits over the long haul. Doing all those things I mentioned in the article aren't just possible now, they're easier and in fact feel better than my routine before. I wish someone had told me this years ago... for some reason I thought that routines just continued to be hard forever, because I usually gave up before the point where they became easy.
openfuture 6y ago
This heavily resonates. I want to add a small tip to your excellent formulation: Identify your "life long practices" and try to find room to work on them in every day, week or month cycle. Life long practices are sometimes discovered and sometimes chosen. Personally, I lift them from the stories I tell myself and then slowly accept them as descriptions of me. This makes it easier to iterate (i.e. fail), you draw strength from having accepted yourself as someone who does this thing and that gives you the patience to not give up as easily. Of course this patience develops over time. For example, programming is something I have been coming back to, with increasing frequency, for multiple years now.. and it's only recently that I am able to do it every day. Regarding getting better vs becoming easier, I think that touches on something orthogonal to patience which is being able to set reasonable goals for each session and putting the original lofty goals (that get refined rather than dismissed) to the back of your mind. This is your skill of evaluation - it develops with experience and is also a great enabler of iteration. tl;dr Patience :: Faith -> Determination -> Courage Evaluation :: Experience -> Understanding -> Trust

WalterBright 6y ago

You're quite right. It's amazing what one can accomplish if one lets oneself be satisfied what incremental progress, no matter how small. For example, I dislike doing pullups. Many times over the decades, I embarked on a program of daily doing as many pullups as I could. I failed because it just took too much willpower. I finally hit on a solution. I started with doing 3 pullups a day. 3 pullups are easy. It didn't take much willpower at all. After a few months, I "graduated" to 4, which then was just as easy. After several years, I am now up to 10, which is easy, and something I had kept failing at before. You might think "why wait several years", but my goal with this is long term, so that doesn't bother me.

achillesheels 6y ago
So many projects are stillborn because of the paralysis caused by assuming things are done through heroic feats rather than mundane tasks such as setting up a bank account. Concentration on the effort, consistently, and holding oneself accountable to consistent standards over time compounds. It's the willpower to be self-accountable which forms good habits.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  People often ask me how to deal with periods where one's motivation to work on a project vanishes (it happens to everyone now and then). What works for me is to say to myself "I'm just going to work one minute on it today." It's amazing how that works. 1. The project stays fresh in your mind, rather than winding up in the "garage" of your thoughts. 2. It's surprising how much you can get done one minute at a time. 3. Sometimes you discover that one minute had turned into a couple hours without thinking about it. 4. My motivation returns a lot quicker than if I just set things aside.
jeremycw 6y ago
This is good advice. However, I've seen this advice before and the example is usually something where it's easy to imagine what an incremental step is. The advice is when you want to do n just do < n. This is great for some things but I find it doesn't work for everything. So I'd like to just expand on this for tasks where doing < n doesn't really make sense. For example, if you're trying to solve a difficult bug it can be overwhelming and you feel like you're not making progress and you procrastinate because you don't have the time to dive in for five hours and you feel like spending thirty minutes isn't enough to accomplish anything. My advice, if you're struggling with tasks like these is to make excessive notes. Save the link to the Stack Overflow question you looked at. Write down file names and line numbers with your thoughts. Copy bits of relevant documentation right into your notes. The basic idea is that if you can ramp up from your notes in less time than it took you to make them then you have made progress.
- rsanek 6y ago

epinards 6y ago

"Instead of thinking about getting better, I think it's more helpful to frame progress as things becoming easier." That's a huge insight when you actually become able to stick to habits over the long haul. Doing all those things I mentioned in the article aren't just possible now, they're easier and in fact feel better than my routine before. I wish someone had told me this years ago... for some reason I thought that routines just continued to be hard forever, because I usually gave up before the point where they became easy.

openfuture 6y ago

This heavily resonates. I want to add a small tip to your excellent formulation: Identify your "life long practices" and try to find room to work on them in every day, week or month cycle. Life long practices are sometimes discovered and sometimes chosen. Personally, I lift them from the stories I tell myself and then slowly accept them as descriptions of me. This makes it easier to iterate (i.e. fail), you draw strength from having accepted yourself as someone who does this thing and that gives you the patience to not give up as easily. Of course this patience develops over time. For example, programming is something I have been coming back to, with increasing frequency, for multiple years now.. and it's only recently that I am able to do it every day. Regarding getting better vs becoming easier, I think that touches on something orthogonal to patience which is being able to set reasonable goals for each session and putting the original lofty goals (that get refined rather than dismissed) to the back of your mind. This is your skill of evaluation - it develops with experience and is also a great enabler of iteration. tl;dr Patience :: Faith -> Determination -> Courage Evaluation :: Experience -> Understanding -> Trust