7 ms·
The best way to get unstuck
- CharlesW 3y agoRelated recommendation: The War of Art https://stevenpressfield.com/books/the-war-of-art/ https://stevenpressfield.com/books/the-war-of-art/
- lyxell 3y agoI immediately thought of this book too. For the comment section readers: The War of Art is a book about Pressfields idea of 'resistance', a force the artist/maker must overcome in just about any important (to them) creative endeavour.
- jstrieb 3y agoAt the risk of being overly negative (but in the interest of possibly saving someone else some time), this may be one of the three worst books I've ever read. I am not exaggerating – I keep a list of every book I read, and it's at the bottom. If all you need is a barely-sensible motivational speech, go for it. Otherwise, don't waste your time. I don't use goodreads, but went looking for reviews to see if I was crazy, or if I was missing something, or if it really was as terrible as I thought. These selected reviews sum it up better than I could have: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/55761871 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/55761871 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/732294700 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/732294700 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/735909209 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/735909209 The reviews seem fairly polarized overall, so maybe the book really does help people. At the very least, I encourage you to read some of them before picking up the book. If the positive reviews seem like they come from people you'd agree with, then by all means, go for it. Otherwise, stay away. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1319.The_War_of_Art https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1319.The_War_of_Art
- CharlesW 3y agoThose reviews are amazing! I wouldn’t have imagined such vitriolic responses to what I recall as a fairly lightweight work, and I’m glad you posted them. I guess I need it read it again, because I don’t remember the bits about Hitler and erections.
- jstrieb 3y agoYeah, when I found those reviews, I felt so validated. I had also missed those bits you mention, but even without noting them, I came away with a really negative impression of the book based on its (in my opinion) condescending tone and lack of substance. I truly had mixed feelings about replying so negatively to your original comment, but I felt it was important to highlight that even though the book is the kick in the ass some people need to get motivated, it can just as easily be an irritating waste of time for others. To each their own, I suppose!
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoI agree. Because it is recommended so often I kept reading it through to the end in the hope that I would find something useful. I never did.
- pmzy 3y agoOP here, I've read this book a while back. Now I'm thinking that it might (among other things) have very well influenced this blog post :)
- squigglydonut 3y agoI'm not stuck but nothing is moving. As an inventor I just keep building but the silence can be deafening sometimes.
- tazu 3y agoThis is why I try to stop when things are "unfinished", leave a note for myself, and pick things up from an easy starting point later. Another way I "get unstuck" is a heavy dose of mushrooms and a long walk in a forest. But that might not be for everyone ;) And it's more of a 1-2x/year type thing.
- boredemployee 3y agowalking/shower/not looking to any screen has the same effect to me
- bronco21016 3y agoA long walk in the forest does wonders in our current state of affairs. At least for me. It’s so easy to fill your time while stuck with endless distractions. Detaching from those distractions, sometimes physically leaving connectivity, is the only way I can find a way out.
- eptcyka 3y agoAfter a long walk in the forrest, all I want to do is sleep for 12 hours and not do anything. It often has a negative impact on my productivity.
- bandergirl 3y agoThis is probably the best trick I learned. It’s much easier to come back to a task that I left unfinished, maybe with a comment saying what’s next. When I’m really done with something and then come back later, it feels like starting from zero.
- uptime 3y agoLearning to put work away for easier re-engagement is the exact thing I am determined to improve this year.
- fipar 3y agoRobert Pirsig spends a good number of pages discussing stuckness and what he calls gumption traps, I think that part of the book may be interesting (and perhaps even useful; it was to me) for people who found TFA interesting.
- herbertl 3y agoThis blog post resonates, and three creative prompts for doing something come to mind: 1. Roll the dice: “In The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, authors Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber quote the late Professor Salvador Luria of the University of Illinois as praising “controlled sloppiness, which states that it often pays to do somewhat untidy experiments, provided one is aware of the element of untidiness.” In any case, the idea here is to trend toward chaos, entropy, and randomness in your work—a sense of controlled sloppiness.” More here: https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-doing/sections/roll-the-dice?ruid=9e2d86eb-c75b-4c01-8bf4-51969f5863fe&utm_source=share_section_link&vip_code=FRIENDS https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-doing/sections/roll-the-... 2. Relinquish results: “In his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman recalls an art class when he was instructed to draw without looking at the paper. He was impressed with the results, noticing a “funny, semi-Picasso like strength” in his work. He knew that it would be impossible to draw well without looking at the paper, so he didn’t consciously try. He writes, “I had thought that ‘loosen up’ meant ‘make sloppy drawings,’ but it really meant to relax and not worry about how the drawing is going to come out.” The solution is to do something without caring about the results.” More here: https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-doing/sections/relinquish-results?ruid=9e2d86eb-c75b-4c01-8bf4-51969f5863fe&utm_source=share_section_link&vip_code=FRIENDS https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-doing/sections/relinquis... 3. Treat your current work as a draft: “Think of everything you make as a demo, a sketch, or a draft. Remove all ideas of expectations and goals, and focus simply on the process and taking a draft to a state where you declare it finished and acceptable as a working version.” More here: https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-doing/sections/draft-demo-and-sketch?ruid=9e2d86eb-c75b-4c01-8bf4-51969f5863fe&utm_source=share_section_link&vip_code=FRIENDS https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-doing/sections/draft-dem...
- revskill 3y agoIn my case, i will try to change the input instead of messing again with the solution. Refactoring the input is such an underrated life hack.
- theonething 3y agoCan you give an example?
- revskill 3y agoYou can say: if your function is a mess, or you got stuck, try changing the arguments ?
- Casteil 3y agoOr try using a local LLM as a rubber ducky - that's been working pretty well for me lately.
- glitchc 3y agoWhich one do you use? Llama (1/2) and ChatGPT 3.5 are the ones I've tested so far and they're both kind of terrible at logic.
- someplaceguy 3y agoChatGPT 4 is vastly superior to ChatGPT 3.5 in my experience, although it still fails at logic sometimes.
- Casteil 3y agoMixtral 8x7B. Short of that (high ram requirements), I've also found Mistral v0.2 to be pretty solid for a 7b model. YMMV though - it's going to depend on your use cases.
- pletnes 3y agoDo you have instructions and RAM requirements for running that model? Llama.cpp?
- Casteil 3y agoI just use Ollama[1] - makes it incredibly easy to get going on MacOS, and can be run on linux/WSL also. RAM required will depend, but generally to run Mixtral at reasonable quantization levels (e.g. Q4) you're going to want 36GB or more. [1] https://github.com/jmorganca/ollama https://github.com/jmorganca/ollama
- bandergirl 3y ago> as a rubber ducky What do you mean? What do you type into it to get unstuck?
- cjohnson318 3y agoI had a math teacher in a proofs class that always said, "the answer isn't on the ceiling or out the window; look at your paper and just write whatever you can think of. Either you'll think of something, or you'll show me that at least you know something."
- bandergirl 3y agoI’d hate that teacher. Sad to see instructors not being aware that people focus in different ways. If anything, I thought that “looking into the distance” was the default way to focus? I’m literally looking at my window while thinking what to write in this comment.
- djtango 3y agoIn the context of this article and GP post I think the teacher trying to coach students that the act of trying something/anything has the probability of the solution snowballing out of your head. But often students give up before trying and it's a marker's nightmare. I've seen many people hand in a totally empty answer sheet (something I've also been guilty of in the past). During one of my organic chemistry exams, I saw another student break down because a lot of the questions were unconventional and I could hear the very kind invigilator trying to encourage them mid exam "if you don't try something you can't get more than zero". I read another examiner report for a notoriously hard physical chemistry paper that it was too hard to fit examinees to a curve because there were too many blank answers and the marks were too low.
- cjohnson318 3y agoYeah, the point was, if you're totally stuck, then throw stuff at the wall and maybe you'll notice a pattern, or it'll jog your memory, anything is better than nothing. Your comment triggered long buried memories of organic chemistry, which ultimately made me change my major from biology to math. Thanks!
- magnusss 3y agoI had a teacher who promulgated the same technique for what we called Calc III (similar to a proofs class, I imagine; Spiwak was the text). It was very effective.
- dvrp 3y agojust move around https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fi6xco5UUAAYbqJ.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fi6xco5UUAAYbqJ.jpg
- justanotherjoe 3y agoExplore is the keyword I think. When you are stuck is when you are free to explore. Since there is no 'lead', you can go anywhere. The temptation is to go back into the places you've been before, the rut. But if you keep doing new things, or 'vitamin new' as i call it, new leads will appear.
- charles_f 3y agoFun: I'm very tired and initially read "do nothing", which I interpreted as "problems tend to disappear with time". What the article actually says is probably better advice.
- pmzy 3y agohaha. Good idea, I might steel this theme for the next post ;) Joke aside, I have problems doing "nothing," and I believe that doing nothing can increase anxiety when you feel stuck.
- theideaofcoffee 3y agoI don’t know where I heard it, maybe it’s just a pithy saying, maybe it’s more profound with some history behind it. Regardless, I’ve always had success with: “Begin. The rest is easy.” Which I guess goes along with his point, just do something.
- xboxnolifes 3y agoI follow a similar mantra: "action begets motivation". You can't wait for motivation to act, because motivation comes from action. Commit to some tiny action, and motivation for the larger actions will follow.
- chopete3 3y agoThis is super simple and a great suggestion. Then I struggled with beginning because by default I was resorting to the comfort zone, where I don't need to begin at all. To solve it, I made myself more "vulnerable" through a few undertakings. Then beginning and doing some work everyday is the only way out to not fail.
- hutzlibu 3y ago“Begin. The rest is easy.” It really depends what you do. Usually yes, after you just start, more ideas are coming in faster than you can implement them - but you also have to know when to stop, when you are going into a dead end.
- sevagh 3y agoI even consider beginning a project to be synonymous with ending it. I put the idea down in my planner, as if one day a future version of me will know how to do it. Then, as the idea weighs on me, I think, well there is no future me, him is me! So I start thinking about how I would achieve it. Then, even by touching the first steps of setting up, before I know it it's underway.
- winrid 3y agoI like to set a timer. "One hour to figure this out". Then I don't work on it for another day/week. The brain solves problems during sleep, no need for me to stress out. :)
- pmzy 3y agothat's excellent advice! I do that too sometimes. Somehow related: Putting a STOP-LOSS on your worries, as Dale Carnagie says in the excellent "How to stop worrying and start living"
- jansan 3y agoI like to looks at problems that I am stuck on before sleep. Although I do not feel that I am thinking about them before falling asleep or while sleeping, it seems that I can solve them much easier the next time I look at them.
- winrid 3y agoYep! No effort required. My first experience with this was with a girl in my teenage years, and we were doing some hand game that I forget now, and she's like "don't worry, tomorrow you'll know how to do it" (????) ... and that basically was my software career in a nutshell :P
- vidarh 3y agoI use timers aggressively for all kinds of tasks, both to nudge myself out of procrastination (I'll decide how long I want to allow, with a tacit "if I still can't make myself stop, at least make the next timer shorter"), or to overcome resistance to certain tasks by time limiting them. I find that often if I set myself a 30 minute timer for $boring_task, once I get into it I'll often then happily continue, or set another timer at least, or worst case time-limit my break from the task before getting back to it. It's not unusual for me to have several dozens timers go off during the course of a day.
- winrid 3y agoOne thing a timer does is it gamifies it. This helps keep me focused. Probably same the psychology used in crappy mobile games ^_^ Sometimes I do go over, too, but I try not to. I try to have something to look forward to afterward (play with kid, do chore, eat candy, whatever) It also increases my happiness because I'm OCD and love lists, and I'll start to assign tasks BY DAY in asana (get these done mon, these Tues, etc) and then I go nuts. But just setting time blocks and not assigning tasks to days I'm just if not more productive and happier.
- jjtang1 3y agoOne of the things at Rootly I started doing is helping everyone identify what are the little habits you can do daily that equate to "making the bed". This helps find the wins that help kick start momentum. For me as the CEO, I try to Slack Huddle at least 2 new people I haven't spoken to in a long time just to see how they are doing a day. I often do this when I am walking my dog or commuting to work. This always gets me in a productive groove.
- leetrout 3y ago> I often do this when I am walking my dog or commuting to work. Do you make it clear to folks you are doing other things while speaking to them? Have you had anyone give you feedback that you are distracted?
- jjtang1 3y agoYup! I told the team at our all-hands I started doing this and usually while I am in motion. So far only positive feedback. I've also been able to get ahead of a few silos that were building at our business too. Fun way to get to know people on a more personal level.
- hasoleju 3y agoBeing stuck because you have too many open loops is what happened to me in the past. What helped well with this was to choose one goal for each day and declaring that the day is a success if that one task or goal can be checked off.
- pmzy 3y agoyes, excellent point. Might be relevant: https://ggnotes.com/progress-is-a-journey https://ggnotes.com/progress-is-a-journey
- neontomo 3y agoWhen I was stuck artistically a few years ago, I made a challenge to draw every day for 30 days. On my off days, I made it devilishly simple, or even a drawing of a character saying, "I'm too tired to make something good today". This project which had a heavy emphasis on imperfection and just getting things on paper turned into a comic book character that is more popular than my more "serious" art works. It was a bit of a shock and a slap to the face to realise that I wasn't necessarily helping myself by being careful with my work.
- d1sxeyes 3y agoThere was a web comic I used to follow, Questionable Content. Every Thanksgiving, instead of a proper comic, the guy would just post a picture of a turkey commenting on the most recent plot arc. Other times, when he needed a 'lower effort' comic for whatever reason, he'd have the robot chatting on the internet, I assume the drawings were just copy/pasted). A bit later, he introduced the Yelling Bird, which was similar to the turkeys, but not at Thanksgiving and quite a bit ruder. It was a way for him to not 'break the chain', without needing to always produce something at the same level as the rest of his content. Your comment really reminded me of this, and I think you're absolutely right, giving yourself an 'out' is good if you are able to exercise enough self-control to only use it when you really need it.
- skrebbel 3y agoNow that we’re sharing, I recommend vacuum cleaning. It gets me unstuck and has this weird side effect that it cleans the house.
- vidarh 3y agoI don't know if it gets me "unstuck" per se, but I'll second the notion of cleaning or doing other menial, "mindless" tasks in really pretty much any situation where you struggle with mental work. Not just if stuck, but if just tired and sluggish etc. as well. A bonus for me at least is that when I'm too mentally tired to focus effectively enough on work or mentally taxing hobbies, my mind is also far less likely to rebel against the idea of doing house work...
- Madmallard 3y agoI’ve wondered if stuckness sometimes just means you need a break, like you’ve worn your brain to fatigue? I work pro bono doing game dev and after 3 months i just couldn’t do any work at all. About a month later I came back and could do it again. If I kept trying to work before I stopped it just felt like unbearable mental stress. Since coming back a month later it is only mild stress. How could people just work nonstop all year? I don’t understand it. Surely it’s just like a similar process to lactic acid buildup but in the regions of the brain you’re most heavily using, right?
- jansan 3y agoI think if the challenges are just at the right level and the work is interesting to you, you can work almost as long as you want. But if the difficulty level is too high and you feel no sxcitement, it becomes stressful and and eventually you reach a point when you cannot go on. I had this with a project that was difficult and that I found not interesting at the same time. I could not go on. I would rather browse amazon or clean the livingroom all day than stting down to work on the project. I felt really miserable for this.
- Madmallard 3y agoWell in my case the work isn’t too hard and I find it interesting. So your description does not seem to apply.
- leiaru13 3y agoThis article definitely resonates. I've found that the best cure to inertia is to start doing things, even if they seem completely unrelated to my work or end goal. Just incorporating simple habits like exercise into my daily routine help put me in the right mindset and generate the sense of momentum.
- cjfd 3y agoI prefer first thinking to immediately doing something. Especially in programming one can easily create an even bigger mess by picking a wrong direction. I tend to think about what the steps were that got me to the place where I got stuck and whether these make sense then I think about different solutions and then pick one. Also, I cannot think deeply with other people in the room. I have to find a room where I can be alone. If I want to think when at home I go lie on the bed with a stack of blank paper and a pen and sketch some diagrams and that kind of stuff.
- sverhagen 3y agoI would add that gold plating, in the software engineering sense, is also a form of being stuck. You may be telling yourself you're doing useful work, like making the code prettier, or lifting test coverage up from 98%, all the way to 98.5%. But in reality, you're just buying time until taking on the next real new task. Because new tasks are scary, and require extra determination, and thus energy (and remember, you're tired!), before you have conquered them to a point of comfort, where the gold plating soon looms again. Rinse. Repeat.
- Aeglaecia 3y agowhat a great concept to project onto procrastination as a whole
- baz00 3y agoSometimes we do gold plating intentionally because the new tasks are stupid or will compromise the business and we’re trying to make them go away.
- jansan 3y agoI think it is perfectly fine as long as it is a deliberate decision. But lines are blurry between deliberate decisions and just trying to push back the next difficult step.
- krono 3y agoAlso known as "yak shaving"[0] or "bikeshedding"[1] 0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving 1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding
- jzb 3y agoNah. Yak Shaving is “I wanted to do X, but I had to do six other things before I could actually do X.”
- 3y ago
- incomingpain 3y agoDo something! I even find doing completely useless/worthless things like posting on social media can get the blood flowing and get out of stuckness. But there's an afternoon cutoff. If you were to actually work fully for your 9 hour shift. Like absolutely crush it, you're going to be exhausted to the point that your life suffers. This is 'living to work'. Dont do that.
- swader999 3y agoAnother HN commenter the other day suggested baby pomodoro to take the first step. Minute on, three off. Then two minutes on. Stretch it out longer and longer.
- srackey 3y agoHow do people write this stuff and not feel ashamed Meaningless drivel. “How do I stop being depressed? Lol just stop being sad” wow so helpful!