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Things that aren't doing the thing
- Revisional_Sin 11mo agook
- realitydrift 11mo ago[flagged]
- AstralStorm 11mo agoYeah sure. The tricky part is if you even know which action to take. To actually do that you need to research enough, conceptualize the end goal and envison a rough but workable plan. Most people don't and blindly stumble going after short term to mid term reward. Then later life crashes them hard, except for the lucky few. And the truth is, now some people have many more luck coupons to spend than others.
- johnfn 11mo agoMarketing is absolutely doing the thing; ignore this to your peril. I don't think reality is quite as binary as this post suggests.
- bix6 11mo agoBut that would be doing the thing after you’ve done the thing no?
- pointlessone 11mo agoThat depends. If OP’s job is marketing then doing it before is doing the thing even if it pisses off the people who’ll have to do the thing OP made up.
- johnfn 11mo agoI think you really want to be marketing concurrently with doing the thing. Saving it all for the end is probably a mistake. And a lot of projects don't have defined "end"s, like open source projects, or websites.
- wavemode 11mo agoMovie trailers come out before production is finished. In fact sometimes before production has even meaningfully started.
- vaylian 11mo agoMarketing can also lead to you receiving feedback for what the users actually want. Doing the thing does not imply doing the right thing. You can be super productive building the wrong thing that no one wants.
- thomascountz 11mo agoI'm inspired by this and want to extend it, perhaps telescopically, by discussing what the thing is. Sometimes we see our task as being, "do C," and we forget the "B" and "A" that come before. Maybe you can't do "C" without discussing it ("B") or researching how others did it ("A"). In these cases, we shouldn't simply think the thing is "C"—the thing must first be "A," then "B," and then, "C." If we forget this, we're bound to think "C" is the only thing of value, that it should take an hour and not a week, or that people doing the "A's" or "B's" to enable the "Cs" must be doing nothing at all!
- acestus5 11mo agoYou pay a doctor for a consultation. saying you paid the doctor for medical school and for the legacy of doctors that came before him is.... wrong.
- hinkley 11mo ago$5 for adjusting the screw. $495 for knowing which screw to adjust.
- valiant55 11mo agoIt's not wrong, that's exactly what I'm paying them for. If they didn't have the education then they wouldn't be a doctor, and I wouldn't be seeing them for a consultation. I'm well compensated not because I'm good at googling things, but because I have a proven track record of being good at googling things. If a junior was able to produce the same results they wouldnt be paid more.
- AstralStorm 11mo agoWho's paying to school them at googling? Certainly not you...
- idiotsecant 11mo agoIf paying for medical school is not what youre doing why not just do your doctors appointment at Burger King?
- bix6 11mo agoObligatory https://youtu.be/mofRHlO1E_A?si=aEimHOsDYa3FkGYv https://youtu.be/mofRHlO1E_A?si=aEimHOsDYa3FkGYv
- mcdonje 11mo ago-Nike
- brettgriffin 11mo agoThis gives very strong War of Art (Pressfield) vibes. As simple as it is, just remembering this is enough to make me go do the thing. And on that note, back to the thing.
- Scarblac 11mo agoDidn't that roughly end with "dying of cancer isn't doing the thing"? I distinctly recall it becoming a bit extreme in the last chapter(s).
- mjd 11mo agoLinkedIn is over there.
- orblivion 11mo agoSo obnoxious. More bullshit to make us self-conscious.
- gentooflux 11mo agoWriting a thing about things that aren't doing the thing isn't doing the thing unless the thing happens to be writing a thing about things that aren't doing the thing
- behnamoh 11mo agoWriting a comment about a thing that talks about things that aren't doing the thing isn't doing the thing unless the thing happens to be writing a comment about a thing that talks about things that aren't doing the thing
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo agoWriting a Python program to write N deep nested sentences on how writing a comment about a comment about a .... (N times) comment is not doing the thing is not doing the thing.
- nagisa 11mo agoIf you have no idea how to do the thing, isn't reading about how others did the thing doing the thing?
- manmal 11mo agoNo, you’ll still need to do it.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo agoYes just do it without knowing how to do it! That always works out well.
- jader201 11mo agoBut learning about, while possibly a prerequisite, still isn’t getting it done. The point is: don’t stop at learning how to do the thing. Actually do the thing.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo agoSo skip medical school and grab a scalpel and cut out brain tumours?
- jader201 11mo agoI don’t believe I ever said “don’t learn how to do the thing”. But many learn how to do the thing, and still never do it.
- Jweb_Guru 11mo agoIn software, where the consequences for initial failure are extremely minimal, sometimes it does actually work well.
- rtpg 11mo agoThis hints at the antithesis to this article Doing a thing involves doing it, but it's very unlikely that doing a thing will involve exactly one atomic movement. So you have cutpoints at doing the thing. So to do the thing you first have to decide to do the thing. You have to decide what the thing is, or at least have enough of a vision of the thing to take the first step at doing a thing that might look like the thing. So "doing the thing" involves a lot of doing things that aren't the thing, but without which you won't get towards the thing. In other words: sitting down and writing down what the thing is _can very well_ be part of doing the thing. There's a sort of philosophical point too, about whether the thing is what you think it is. Plenty of people have had the "I thought this feature was going to do X, you thought it was going to do Y, and we all realised the mismatch very late in the process". I think both visions of the world are valid, and things you can keep in your mind at the same time to deploy as needed.
- cadamsdotcom 11mo agoI wonder what thing the author was avoiding when they published this thing ;)
- hanslovsky 11mo agoyep hev forgot to add "riding this blog post" to the list
- jader201 11mo agoMaybe his thing was “write an article about things that aren’t doing the thing”. :)
- runjake 11mo agoIIRC, the author said somewhere that this essay was effectively a “note to self”.
- swyx 11mo agodid they tweet about doing the thing while not doing the thing?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- onionisafruit 11mo agoHaving a meeting about doing the thing isn’t doing the thing
- afandian 11mo agoOne day, when I get enough spare time, I will make the thing. I even have some components ready. Until then I daydream of how I will make it and how it will fit together. If I never get round to it then that time will have been wasted. But if I do, all that daydreaming will have been useful mental prototyping. But was it «doing the thing»?
- makeitdouble 11mo agoAnd now we have a whole post about not doing the thing, which is also not doing the thing.
- the_af 11mo agoIn order to determine if something is or is not "doing the thing" you must first know what "the thing" is. If it's writing your thoughts on your blog, then this is indeed doing the thing. Not doing the thing would be: planning to write a blog post, tweeting that you're going to write a blog post, reading articles about how best to word your blog posts, watching some YouTube videos as inspiration, etc. I think the advice here is an anti procrastination advice: do the thing, don't just think about doing the thing.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 11mo agoRight but I see this taken too far. Getting side eyed for creating a Jira ticket not doing it now. Dude, I am creating a Jira ticket because I have 100 things to do and need to actual priorise this! If I do stuff in the order of serendipity I will definitely be inefficient.
- fuzzy_biscuit 11mo agoIf you don't create the ticket, it may never get done, too! That not doing the thing might lead to convincing others the thing needs to be done which directly leads to doing the thing. It may not be doing the thing, but it enabled the thing to be able to be done at all. Cheers to the precursors, the planners and the annotators. Through you, more things are done.
- shadowgovt 11mo agoI am creating a jira ticket because I will forget I have done the thing. I am also creating a jira ticket because 11 months later when another engineer is trying to figure out if the code they're staring at is still actually valuable or if they can rip it out safely, they are going to use git blame to find the pull request where the thing was done, that pull request is going to mention the jira ticket, and the jira ticket is going to reference the design document that justified why we did the thing. If we don't do those things, that engineer is going to yank that functionality out and something way over there is going to break without anybody realizing it broke. Your mileage may vary. Some teams make the PRs detailed enough that they don't have to fall back on jira. Other teams try to encode this information into unit tests (that helps but it's circular reasoning; the unit test will tell you that somebody at one point thought that this was important enough to verify that it keeps doing the thing; they won't tell you why the thing matters or what customer wanted the thing or whether the thing was the thing we did before we pivoted to doing the new thing cuz the old thing didn't make money).
- AstralStorm 11mo agoIt's called documentation. Somehow people forget to include a non-external service dependent version with their code these days. Probably because "nobody is paid for doing that".
- saulpw 11mo agoIn the Viable System Model[0], "doing the thing" is System 1. Yes of course you need System 1 or the thing won't get done. But in any viable system, you also have the "meta-systems", Systems 2-5: - System 2: coordination between multiple Systems 1 (which includes prioritization, communication, and exceptional conditions) - System 3: resource allocation and process development - System 4: strategy and risk management - System 5: values and holistic organizational design As a human, you are also striving to be a viable system. You can't only just "do the thing", you have to: - prioritize which thing to do - take notes and keep records to communicate between past and future versions of yourself - make sure you have the requisite resources for doing the thing - construct your environment and processes for long-term success (habits not motivation) - consider what happens when the thing is done and how it fits into your larger strategy - keep your head and heart connected to make sure you're doing the right thing None of these things are doing the thing! But they're also rather essential for getting the right things done well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model
- chairmansteve 11mo agoThing is, you have to start doing the thing to figure out what things you need to do the thing.
- satisfice 11mo agoYes. Also, attempting to do the thing and failing is indeed doing the thing. (although you may only know in retrospect)
- atoav 11mo agoWell, to really know how things would pan out, you have to indeed do the thing. And it happens that people will procrastinate with preparation. But as someone who does not and is fast at doing things I can tell you that if I want something done really fast preparation will be a good chunk of a projects time. If I want to toy around and the project doesn't matter that much, just doing the thing may do the trick. Now the advice on that site aims to get people started with the actual work part and tries to do so by telling you preparation doesn't matter. That is not true. But it is true that people prepare forever because they are afraid to cross the threshold where they start translating grand ideas into concrete, protentially flawed reality. That means actually good advice would deal with the question where this fear comes from, how to address it and how to notice you have been preparing too long. If you want to build a house, drawing the plans and finding the right location where to put said house is part of building a house. Or you could just mash bricks on top of each other in your backyard and then realize you forgot the foundation.
- pac0 11mo agoWriting about what things aren't doing the thing is not doing the thing.
- jkhanlar 11mo agoThe thing about that kind of writing is that the thing is a uniquely characterizable thing that is distinguishable from other things that are not the thing, thereby enabling the realization of the thing to be a thing, rather than not a thing.
- andy99 11mo agoI see this as a kind of inspiration / perspiration thing, and I’m on Tesla’s side that you perspire less if you think more. I like to not do the thing for a really long time, and then do it quickly, having thought it through. I see some people that jump into things without thinking, and take what is imo the more difficult route, with worse results. I know there are some things you need to start to really understand what’s going on, but as much as possible I’d rather mull over things a lot and gather information and clarify my thinking before doing the thing.
- macrocosmos 11mo agoA: There's the right way, the wrong way, and THEN THE MAX POWER WAY! B: Isn't that just the wrong way? A: Yes! But faster!
- roughly 11mo agoHonestly sometimes that's the right way.
- HexPhantom 11mo agoSometimes "not doing the thing" is actually the most productive phase, especially when you're consciously incubating ideas or working through complexity in your head
- NaomiLehman 11mo agoI like to think this advice is aimed at things that can't be done by thinking them through and doing them, but that have to be started and done repeatedly to be successful.
- croisillon 11mo agoi'm pretty sure there is a "oh no!" comics (https://webcomicname.com/ https://webcomicname.com/) saying the same but i couldn't find it
- penr0se 11mo agohttps://webcomicname.com/post/183722270609 https://webcomicname.com/post/183722270609
- croisillon 11mo agothank you!
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- Almondsetat 11mo agoI am replying to this post without planning whst to actually say
- RossBencina 11mo agoSee also: "brain crack" (2006) https://archive.org/details/zefrank-theshow-080 https://archive.org/details/zefrank-theshow-080
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- alentred 11mo agoHere's my take, in no particular order: - Ignoring that all people are different does not make you an expert in human psychology - Discovering what procrastination is (and still failing to name it or provide actual coping mechanisms) does not make you an expert in human psychology - Failing to recognize elementary human behavior does not make you an expert in human psychology - Utterly neglecting the act of double creation (first imagine, then create) does not make you an expert in human psychology - Being energetic and with only a few tasks at hand and writing off everyone else as lazy does not make you an expert in human psychology - Writing a post about human psychology does not make you an expert in human psychology I would continue my list, but gotta go. To do... , you know.
- jkhanlar 11mo agoToday I learned that I know what the thing is, not because I know what the thing is, but because I was informed that I know what the thing is, and that to know what the thing is merely requires to be informed that I know by any person willing to allege such possession of knowledge, thereby eliminating any effort on my part to know the thing and appropriating such effort imposed on other persons whom are able and willing to indicate to me that I know the thing.
- tshaddox 11mo agoDoing the thing without preparing to do the thing is, depending on your exact definitions, either unwise or impossible.
- meken 11mo agoI see lots of comments focusing on cases where there is necessary research still to do. Which I think misses the point - which is there are times when you’ve already done enough research, but you’re afraid to act so you procrastinate. i.e. not doing the thing.
- AstralStorm 11mo agoIf you haven't started doing the thing while researching it, you're doing archeology or historiography, not research. (Different scientific fields. Research requires experiment.)
- shadowgovt 11mo agoAll true, but worth noting that sometimes making that to-do list is the first step to doing the thing because picking the first item off the list and taking 10 minutes to do it is doing the thing. If you aren't doing the thing because it's a monolith in your brain that is going to consume the next 6 months of your life and you're paralyzed by its enormity, salami slicing 10 minute chunks off the front of it can be a good way to get started.
- RajT88 11mo agoI had this Ah-Ha moment a while back when I was presenting on how to shorten cloud outage times, by aggregating impact into a list of details, and hustling around to make connections to support engineers and their customers and the poor backend engineers running around trying to make sense of it all. Putting a little bit of structure to it, so other people can realize they can make a difference in a large organization. I had a colleague make a passive aggressive comment about it being really cool how I put together "obvious" stuff. Well, it is obvious. At the same time, I have never seen him do this "obvious thing". Doing the thing is being a performer. Making the thing happen somehow is called leadership. It's all about doing the thing, and not just seeing and understanding the thing - that's the easy part.
- seizethecheese 11mo ago> Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing. Don’t agree. Planning steps is part of doing the thing.
- epolanski 11mo agoI was thinking the same, but at the end of the day the author has a point and it's not doing the thing.
- seizethecheese 11mo agoSuper reductionist, is the moment between clicks on the keyboard also not doing the thing?
- Dilettante_ 11mo agoIf doing the thing without preparation would have taken 50hrs, and sitting down to plan cuts that down to 20hrs, I'd argue that planning did "get a chunk of the thing done".
- 1970-01-01 11mo agoI'm trying to do the thing, but the thing is horribly documented and doesn't work. And nobody seems to know why. So am I still doing the thing if the thing isn't doing its thing?
- utopman 11mo agoThen the thing becomes : Understand how to do the thing Do the thing Write down fresh documentation about the thing
- 1970-01-01 11mo ago1st line: >Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
- dwaltrip 11mo agoIt doesn't matter how fast you are moving if you are going in the wrong direction. Nonetheless, these are good points.
- wavemode 11mo agoWell, if you learn something along the way that teaches you what the right direction is, then you still made progress.
- AstralStorm 11mo agoUnless you wasted years by going in the wrong direction which could have been avoided by a week of serious thinking and planning... (Or even a year. Some mistakes are extremely costly.)
- the_af 11mo agoI must add: discussing (or showing HN) To-Do apps or systems on how best organize yourself to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
- pizlonator 11mo agoTo be fair though, for any cool thing I've done, before actually doing the thing, I've also spent time doing the things that TFA says aren't doing the thing. Helps me get pumped up or whatever
- rjh29 11mo agoMeaningless platitude. All the things mentioned (visualisation, scheduling, breaking into smaller tasks, etc.) are proven to work. If you cannot do a task but you do the above things, you will eventually be able to do the task. You know what isn't proven to work? Willing your brain to "just do it" like this article implies.
- doitLP 11mo agoAgreed. But there’s still a type of Zeno’s paradox if you don’t start and continue and finish the thing. As someone that has no trouble planning or starting but a lot of trouble continuing to the end, I find this kind of stuff helpful to completing what I set out to do. As Jobs said “real artists ship.”
- HexPhantom 11mo agoThey're easy to get stuck in instead of taking action. It's calling out the trap where we mistake prep for progress
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- begueradj 11mo ago> Reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing. Reading about how other people did the thing isn't doing the thing." > Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing. Clearly defining and understanding the thing or, as they say, understanding the problem is half the solution. Real life experiences totally crash the OP statements.
- andrewflnr 11mo agoY'all saying things like "but you still need prioritization and tracking, bro!" are not the target audience of this post.
- fragmede 11mo agoWhat's the thing? If we're being shitty about systems neurodivergent people use to get their laundry done, stop. If you're complaining about the overhead it takes to manage a project with 10,000+ people, yeah no. If there are 2 ICs, 4 managers, a TPM, a PM, a other "P" PM, a UX person, an HR person and a lawyer, yeah you might have a point.
- mycall 11mo agoWhat about reading about the thing which is about reading a thing is then the thing of doing the thing.
- scuff3d 11mo agoIt's amazing how many people utterly missed the point. I think the first 6 or so top comments just totally wiffed it. There is nothing wrong with planning/scheduling/marketing/whatever. But a LOT of people use all that as excuses and never actually do the thing. If you are the kind of person for whom which those are useful, great. Or if you have the self-displine/self awareness to do all that stuff and still follow through, great. But some people just need to do the fucking thing or they never will. Source: I'm one of those people.
- lutusp 11mo agoGranted the humorous intent, it's a reductionist outlook. If we were to embrace the premise, then life would be about spawning replacements, or, as is sometimes said, "A chicken is an egg's way to make another egg." When expressed that way, I must differ. Reproduction per se is the least interesting part of human life. Talking about reproduction is much more interesting ... wait, I think that's called "literature."
- khazhoux 11mo ago[flagged]
- bvanderveen 11mo agoSometimes doing the thing is just doing a thing and then you get done with some milestone on the thing, you're like "why am I doing this thing. am I crazy for undertaking this thing?" And yeah you probably are. Only in retrospect will it be knowable if it was worth it or not. Perseverance is necessary but rarely sufficient.
- Aurornis 11mo ago> Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing. For some types of work, the work we call prep work is 90% of the work and most of what determines how well the finished product turns out. Painting is a good example. You can grab a bucket of paint and paint brush and start “doing the thing” by slapping paint on the surface. Your paint job is going to be very poor and fail early relative to a professional who properly sands, cleans the surface, preps the work area, and does it right. You might save some time now by skipping straight to doing the thing, but you might also lose more time later when you have to repeat the job because the paint is peeling or you’re cleaning up a paint mess that spilled on to another surface because you didn’t prepare.
- markburns 11mo agoI think in this example those prep work items _are_ doing the thing. But then telling people about a new product could also be doing the thing. There’s definitely something to be said for defining what the thing really is being an important part of doing it, but that can also spiral out of control into not doing the thing. I think thingness is more of a variable property of the current thing you are doing. Than a binary is or isn’t the thing. All we can really do is regularly check how much the thingness of the current thing is aligned with the main thing’s thingness.
- wongarsu 11mo agoI'd say for the purposes of this article anything that is required in order to have done the thing is "doing the thing". If you need to read something to get the thing done you are doing the thing. If you already know everything to get started but still read another article you are procrastinating. If you need to sand this part to do a good job painting it, then you are doing the thing. If you just continue sanding with no benefit you are no longer doing the thing, you are now just delaying the next step
- moron4hire 11mo agoAdditionally, a lot of people will describe doing completely unrelated things as "(mentally) preparing to do the thing." I catch myself doing this. I will put off writing a job requisition by spending time on code. I will tell myself, "ugh, I'm just not in the right mental state to write a job req right now. Let me focus on some code until I'm ready." Which never works. I end up getting into a code flow state and that's all I work on for the rest of the day, or until I get interrupted by a meeting. And then I get back from the meeting and say, "I got interrupted, I should just finish what I started and then I'll write the job reqs." And that never happens. I always pick up yet another coding task instead. The only way I am ever able to get through admin paperwork is to just admit to myself I hate it but it has to get done, it has to get done right now, no amount of procrastiworking is going to make me stop hating it, so I should just get it over with so it's not sitting like a lead weight in the back of my head. And then when 5pm rolls around, I won't hate myself for letting yet another day go by without having the job reqs written. But right now it's the weekend.
- koliber 11mo agoAt the core, doing is paramount. But doing the wrong thing, poorly, is also not doing the thing. To avoid that, you need to do some of the things that the post mentions. That concludes my morning dose of Zen.
- code_biologist 11mo agoI have a print out of this on my wall. I also have pretty bad ADHD. It's been on my wall a year and I still haven't done the thing (really a series of small aversive, timeliness and administration heavy things). I oscillate between trying to do the thing, and trying to treat ADHD or at least not regress (sleep (difficult), exercise, nutrition, intoxicants socially only, stay away from digital dopamine sinks (really hard)). Then I have a burst of panic that trying to improve executive function is itself not doing the thing.
- podgorniy 11mo agoStruggle is real. Don't take too seriously the ones who incapable to relate.
- nowittyusername 11mo agoYes, holy shit yes.... This has been my sentiment for a while now. I see lots of people everywhere especially on social media talking about the thing and no one actually did the thing or is even attempting to do the thing. Honestly thats why i dont have youtube channels or write blogs or anything past casual posts here or reddit... i always think to myself why waste time talking about the thing when i could be doing it now... anyways ima go back to doing the thing. cheers. !
- atoav 11mo agoIt is certainly a truth that many people have a fear to cross the threshold of doing something for real. That fear is usually a fear of committing to a potentially substandard result or a fear of getting started on the meat of what feels like a herculean problem. In short it is the fear of failing. As an university level educator that helps students with mostly technical projects (so stuff neither I nor them have ever done): This fear is very common. But what I dislike about this advice is that preparing the thing is often in fact a necessary step of (A) deciding whether the thing is feasible and worth doing and (B) a part of what is needed to do the thing. Drafting the general layout and data flow and UI for your software can save you hours later. Having a good and fleshed out concept for a game may tell you if it is even worth putting years of your own time into it, what resources you will need, a research essay on different ways to detect motion may e what makes or breaks the result of your interactive art installation etc. So preparation is necessary, but true experience only comes from going beyond the preparation phase. Feel it is impossible to start? Usually that means there is something that you feel insecure with. E.g. your game might need an inventory system and while you have a great idea how it should look and work, you have no idea how to actually program it. And if that small part of your task looks impossible, it makes the whole task appear extra-impossible. The best way to deal with this is usually tackling the problem head on and make it a proof of concept. The problem is you can't program that inventory, and there are many ways to go at that particular problem, but if you can get a draft inventory going that means your biggest worry is taken care of. That means dealing with the hard part first, even if you tell yourself it is just a proof of concept that won't land in the final thing is a good approach. Divide and conquer. The whole thing seems impossible? Break it down into smaller steps thst seem more managable.
- satisfice 11mo agoFor skilled, innovative, and complex work, all the things he says is not doing the thing: are part of doing the thing. This post is foolish and self-destructive. If I trace backward from the ideas that earn me money and prestige today, every one of them is rooted in playful or apparently unproductive behavior.
- ivanjermakov 11mo ago> Reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing In my book, doing research/understanding the domain is a crucial part of "doing the thing". Often reading about how to do the thing makes you reconsider doing it at all.
- evilsetg 11mo agoI also think this is true, but one thing distinguishes the two and that is commitment. Resarch opens up new possibilities while doing the thing narrows them. Many people (myself included) have difficulties with that. Reading will only get you so far and I think that is what the poem adresses.
- DeathArrow 11mo agoThere's a Romanian proverb: Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. Corollary: Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today, put off until the day after tomorrow, maybe by then it won't be necessary.
- d--b 11mo agoI am sitting on the toilet right now, and while reading this article, I am really actually doing the thing.
- olq_plo 11mo agoCorollary: Doing the thing and not talking about it in a hammer tweet is also 'not doing the thing'.
- mmaunder 11mo agoNot doing the thing is a habit that's hard to break. Doing the thing is a powerful habit. Especially when you stop thinking about it.
- planb 11mo agoI’m missing one: Scheduling a weekly status meeting about the thing is not doing the thing.
- podgorniy 11mo agoFor someone without ADHD's `executive disfunction`, one of the code ADHD struggles, this post reads as nonsense. Thus only minority could relate to the post: the ones who have ADHD ones who think they understand ADHD.
- Dilettante_ 11mo agoI've got ADHD and Preparing to do the thing, Scheduling time to do the thing and Making a to-do list for the thing are actually what enable me to Do The Thing in the first place. If you're gonna build a house, building scaffolding is not a waste of time.
- jibal 11mo agoI was just reading about Ron Jeffries' disastrous attempts to write a Sudoku program because he dogmatically refused to do any preparatory work--including spending any time at all thinking about the nature of the problem and what sorts of data structures would be suitable for solving it.
- varjag 11mo agoAs I see it he was doing exactly the opposite: prep work in terms of doing the tests.
- jibal 11mo agoThat's obviously not "prep work", and in any case obviously not the sort I'm obviously referring to, so obviously not "exactly the opposite".
- varjag 11mo agoHe was coding everything around: checking the validity of moves, auxiliary code, win conditions and on. Anything but the algorithm itself, likely for the lack of experience. Doing the thing here would have been figuring out the algorithm and sitting down to code it which probably felt intimidating. So yeah it was exactly the opposite.
- jibal 11mo agoSomeone doesn't know what "opposite" means or pretends not to.
- thethingundone 11mo agoThat text is describing my life since 10 years or so. I am in my 30s and lost the capability to do the thing, _any_ thing, with the exception of going out with friends/family/my partner to do social activities. Everything else is literally impossible for me to do. I’m currently kicking off my second attempt to fix this by talking to a psychologist about it. But I am not very hopeful. Still searching for the root cause. I have all the ground works set to having a good life, except that I am incapable of moving to start that damn thing. Where is my interest in stuff gone? Why do I prefer my couch over just typing "git clone" and play with some new tech? Why is my 3D printer sitting dusty in the corner even though I was one of the first adopters? Why is the act of hand-craft wood working, that I am dreaming of since forever and would now be able to do, impossible for me to start? My motivation is high. My brain thinks whole projects through. I start fixing things in my head. But I am not even capable of dumping all that planning into an speech-to-text-LLM to build an actual design document out of it. It feels like I played everything through already, so no point in starting that thing. What the fuck is my problem?
- Terr_ 11mo agoAt the risk of making unqualified self-diagnoses, the phrase that always comes to my mind is "anticipatory anhedonia": On some level I do not expect the thing will actually be that fun, and I'm not filled with bubbly joy now about how awesome it'll be when it happens tomorrow. I may have fun during the thing, but beforehand it's mostly trying to plan for what might go wrong, and afterwards it fades to the satisfaction of checking something off of a list. https://www.britannica.com/science/anhedonia https://www.britannica.com/science/anhedonia
- thethingundone 11mo agoThanks, will read about this!
- tillcarlos 11mo agoYou probably lost the “finish” muscle. That happens when you lack wins for a long time. Best way to to train yourself to win again. Start, finish, and celebrate a 1h task. Then half day. etc
- thefluffytoucan 11mo agoI find this applies pretty well to creative work, at least from a general mindset perspective and helps those of us who are prone to procrastinating. It also goes hand in hand with the Cult Of Done Manifesto really well: https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2ff13 https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2f...
- jonplackett 11mo ago> “If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it” These people defo do not have kids… Go have some kids, then lecture me about how to get things done.
- 2b3a51 11mo agoLess drastic alternative: start a small kitchen garden growing some salad and herbs. Same result.
- Abimelex 11mo agoDid I just get trolled on HN? Reading the thing wasn't doing anything.
- HexPhantom 11mo agoIt's wild how easy it is to get trapped in the performance of productivity
- lokimedes 11mo agoAmen. Now, let’s dream of doing some things!
- roman_soldier 11mo agoIn other words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXsQAXx_ao0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXsQAXx_ao0
- chaidhat 11mo agodamn i was really excited to read about how my toaster wasnt actually intended for toasting bread or something like that
- bfung 11mo agoDoing the thing that nobody wants is doing the thing.
- andai 11mo ago>Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing. To be fair, for me, not making the list is even less like doing the thing, in terms of how frequently it leads to the thing being done!
- belabartok39 11mo agoThe main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
- thomascountz 11mo agoI think the transition between things being done is maybe a bit more interesting. "Build a house," is a thing, but at which point of the dreaming, designing, planning, permitting, architecting, financing, contracting, acquiring, installing, verifying, reworking, coordinating, inspecting, styling, unpacking, cleaning, landscaping, repairing, upgrading, and waiting, are you doing it? Perhaps each discrete thing is itself a thing, and when you do a thing, or transition between things, is the matter needing clarifying. If you are coordinating on how to do a thing, you are doing the thing, as long as the thing is coordinating on how to do the next thing. This "coordinating a thing" is a discrete thing we should not confuse for any other thing. TFA's examples are unforgiving in that they suppose there is only ever one thing and all else should be nothing.
- irq-1 11mo agoWhen are you rebuilding the Ship of Theseus?
- layer8 11mo ago> Reading this essay isn't doing the thing. Writing “$thing isn't doing the thing” 13 times isn’t writing an essay. That aside, I thought this was going to be about products that fail to fulfill their advertised purpose.
- tyleo 11mo agoI agree with most of this but not the todo list part. I think more successful projects tend to have upfront planning and consider it a real part of the work. Even more successful projects will continue to revisit and update their plan as the project is ongoing. As I like to put it: not having a plan is not a plan.
- mberning 11mo agoIf you work with a bunch of people who “just do things” you very well may wish to spend a lot more time “thinking about things” before you do them. If those things are more complicated and nuanced than “doing the dishes” or “putting away the laundry”. Sure, in those cases, just do it.
- dvcoolarun 11mo agoSometimes not doing the ‘thing’ (in the sense of not jumping into a goal or project) is actually a deliberate, healthy choice — resting, recharging, being in a better mental/physical state. That’s not laziness or procrastination; it’s recovery or self-care.
- anovikov 11mo agoProblem with this approach is someone who follows it will find themselves doing something totally useless almost all of the time. "Just doing the thing" means that usually you are merely doing a hobby - most of the time, being unaware of that, believing you were building a business.
- scuderiaseb 11mo agoThis hits hard, not in my programming work which it also hits but there at least I am sharpening my toolset by reading books, and learning things. This hits the hardest for me training Jiu Jitsu, where I do love the sport but I feel it's so hard to come back to training when I am in such a bad shape. So I say to people that I do Jiu Jitsu, I watch videos, I follow some competitions. Heck I even go with my kids to THEIR training but I only train myself once a month maybe at this rate.
- thenoblesunfish 11mo agoThere is an extreme where you procrastinate on the real work, yes. But half the things on the list are not procrastination, but preparation. If you skip those you hit the other extreme where you are so focused on doing the thing, you waste your time because you don't know the background or context.
- tpoacher 11mo agoIronically, sometimes the only thing that will get you doing the thing is explicitly not doing the thing (but also no other thing either), until there's nothing to do but the thing.
- drdrek 11mo agoWow this article is an amazing rorschach test! Each defensive comment here is a person defending what he thinks this article is personally attacking him on!
- crazygringo 11mo agoWhat you see as defensiveness, I see as reasonable replies to a very silly faux-inspirational post.
- arduinomancer 11mo agoHave you considered the idea that it is just exaggerating to make a point and isn’t meant to be taken literally? Exaggeration is a common technique employed in human language for emphasis.
- crazygringo 11mo agoNot really sure what it's exaggerating? The writing style isn't one I'd characterize as exaggeration. Maybe you can clarify?
- tempestn 11mo agoIt's also unclear to me if people are intentionally ignoring the fact that it's about procrastination, or actually don't realize that in the rush to argue about what constitutes productive work.
- jojomodding 11mo agoI feel personally attacked. Not necessarily by the author but more by the part of my brain telling me to do useful work instead of slacking off.
- hotpaper75 11mo agoIs asking an AI to do the think doing the thing ?
- pxc 11mo agoFor me, sometimes encouragement that what I'm doing is in support of Doing the Thing has helped me not feel so discouraged that I actually just give up on Doing the Thing altogether. Other times it has felt like a cheap excuse that allows me to delay. I'm not sure the function of all the ancillary activities, relative to Doing the Thing, is actually fixed.
- minaguib 11mo agoRelated: "Do the Real Thing" by Scott Young (2020): https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/05/04/do-the-real-thing/ https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/05/04/do-the-real-thin...
- rdiddly 11mo agoI get the thrust of this; it's to help Virgos[0] stop procrastinating by over-preparing. But you do need some minimal level of preparation. So declaring that preparing to do a thing isn't doing the thing becomes almost a tautology, or a meaningless question of what the words mean in the dictionary. [0] Please just let this slide.
- Der_Einzige 11mo agoOf all the birth signs, being a Virgo and the bullying this causes to one for being “forever a virgin” is likely to create a self fulfilling prophecy.
- zkmon 11mo agoYou know what? There is actually nothing to be called as "doing the thing". It is all layers all the way down. You keep peeling the layers, and there is nothing left. When you do coding, you are only writing instructions for a computer about how to do something. So it is not actually doing something. When a computer runs your code, it is only telling some hardware to pass current through some circuits. Again it is not doing something. Current passing through circuits is not physically moving anything through the wires or metal. So again it is doing nothing.
- jk-pasha 11mo agoOversimplifying doing the thing isn’t doing the thing. Sometimes it’s even harmful to doing the thing. But sometimes it’s exactly the right thing to do. Know when you need to oversimplify and when not and you’ll know Zen. And when you know Zen you’ll do exactly the thing.