Like many people on lesswrong, I probably lie towards the smart end of the bell curve in terms of intelligence, but I’m starting to suspect that I lie somewhere below the mean in terms of ability to focus, concentrate, and direct my attention.
I only recently became concerned about this because it wasn’t much of a problem when I was in school. There, I was able to do acceptably well overall by doing well in the subjects that came easily to me without working hard (science, maths… you know the score) and mediocrely in those that didn’t. Ditto my undergrad/bachelor’s degree.
But I’m currently struggling rather with the thesis project for my master’s degree in computer science. The specifics of the thesis itself don’t matter, other than that it’s a piece of empirical/numerical research involving a lot of coding and a prose write-up. None of the technical aspects of it are beyond me, and yet I feel like in some way it’s the first very difficult thing I’ve ever tried, really tried, at. The hard part is sustaining interest over the whole length of the thing, planning and organizing the overarching, erm, arc of the project as a whole, and forming a ‘narrative’ out of all the hard-won bits and pieces of data. (I suppose the fact that I feel fairly sure that the project is likely to find a negative result (i.e. that the method under inspection doesn’t offer any gains over simpler methods) also doesn’t help my motivation.) Luckily, I did well enough in the taught part of my course that I only need to get a mediocre mark in this part in order to get a ‘merit’ overall.
But I’m also concerned about how this bodes for my future career. I’d like to do well in work, but I’m beginning to wonder whether I’m deficient in a skill which would allow me to do much better.
To convey what I’m talking about: often when I’m trying to work at home I flit between coding for work, reading, coding for fun, listening to music, etc., etc., etc., and consequent don’t engage with any of them very deeply, or get much done. Also, I have almost always taken a very long time to get to sleep, often an hour or more, because I find it hard to ‘switch off’ my brain when I’m in bed and have decided it’s time to go to sleep. (I’ve recently been making the paradoxical attempt to try very hard to switch my brain off and stop thinking in bed, with, surprisingly, some limited success.)
I feel like I lack the five-second level skill to suppress (or at least, to decline to pursue) any old interesting thought which appears while I’m doing something else.
Things I’ve attempted:
Meditation. It seems plausible that meditating could help to ‘train’ deliberate attention direction in other aspects of life. Does anyone have any experience with this? I tried checking the literature, and found only one weak-ish study supporting such a hypothesis, but I’d be open to anecdotal evidence. I’ve tried to meditate a few times (less than ten), for about half an hour each time. The first couple of times I became weirdly aggravated and agitated at how bad at it I was: I was frustrated by the realization that something as simple as focusing on one thing and avoiding other thoughts was beyond me. After the first couple of times, I no longer find it aggravating, but I have yet to find it rewarding, either. I haven’t yet managed to obtain the focused, quiet state which I understand is the aim, at least for more than a handful of seconds a couple of times. (Is this normal beginner-level performance?)
Pomodoros. I’ve had some success with doing pomodoros of work, including beeminding them, but I find that they’re best suited to well-defined, discrete tasks. Tasks which are more nebulous seem less suited to it. Also, I find it hard to do pomodoros unless I’m feeling high-willpower, but perhaps this is fixable with, erm, the application of more willpower.
Things I’ve considered but haven’t attempted:
Medication, self-. Is this the sort of thing which would be amenable to a course of Modafinil, or some other nootropic? I could be open to trying this, if it were likely to work.
Medication, other. I could try seeing a doctor to see if what I’m talking about warrants a diagnosis of ADD, and a prescription of Ritalin or a similar drug. I have no idea whether what I’m describing would be considered drastic enough to warrant either of those, though.
Any experience with any of the above, speculation on which of them might bear fruit, or suggestions of completely different ideas welcome.
Is this the sort of thing that can be ‘trained’ through willpower? It seems like a fairly ‘deep’, even a fundamental, aspect of brain function, so I wonder how plastic such a thing is. Any thoughts on this welcome also.
Finally, am I just worrying too much about this? I was recently heartened to come across this Nassim Nicholas Taleb quote:
If you get easily bored, it means that your BS detector is functioning properly; if you forget (some) things, it means that your mind knows how to filter; and if you feel sadness, it means that you are human.
Perhaps I just have a very stringent bullshit detector. Evidence in favour of this proposal: I think I am able to focus extremely well on personal projects (typically things that I code for fun and find intrinsically rewarding). In fact, when I stop those, it’s less often from boredom and more by guiltily tearing myself away in order to get back to my “real” work. (On the other hand, perhaps there’s such a thing as a too-stringent bullshit detector—one so stringent as to give false positives.)
Summary: I’m concerned that my focus/concentration skills are significantly worse than average, and that this could be detrimental to my outcomes in life. How can I improve them?
I just want to say that this is extremely similar to my struggles with a Master’s degree. Mine is in geology, so your username continues the parallels amusingly. I’m a bit further along, with some marginal successes in efficiency. Here are some of the tactics that I have tried:
*Excercise. My diet is pretty terrible, but regular exercise to offset that has been invaluable. I used weight lifting (if I have a high-calorie diet, then I might as well put the energy to use)- the 5x5 schedule is a good way to gamify things a bit without introducing more complexity than its mindshare allows. This is probably the most useful habit that I have been able to maintain.
*Nootropics. Cautiously. 500mg Choline and about 1600mg Piracetam per day. These are cheap and extremely safe, with moderate-to-questionable benefits. Under this regimen, I have seen quantifiable improvements, including competitive game performance and concentration length. The placebo effect is a strong contender, but rationality means winning, so why not? Previously, I relied on caffeine as my performance enhancer, but the addictive downsides became distracting at the volumes I was using. I don’t know much about Modafinil, however.
*Pens. This one may be very specific to me and my response to tactile stimuli, but the consequences are good enough to be worth a shot. For the prose sections of your thesis, write in pen on paper. The paper doesn’t matter, but make sure to use a very comfortable pen (the Pilot G2 is my brand). This has three benefits- one, it adds a physicality to the process of writing, which helps to fight distraction with a range of physical inputs that a computer doesn’t provide. (Roughly similar to the process of reading or writing in a public place with white noise and background activity, I think.) Two, it is very hard to delete everything you just wrote and start over. This increases the volume of writing your produce in any given time interval, although it will need considerable editing after the fact. Three, it means that you can write in a room without computer or internet access. Leave your phone elsewhere, and you’ve taken away a large majority of potential distractions. If your brain is missing a detail, it is often possible to just bracket the [thing you don’t remember] and keep writing, rather than stopping to look it up and risking an infinite Wikipedia loop.
*Meditation. I tried this also, with some success- that is, I can achieve the mental state usually described as the desired goal. Detachment, hyper-awareness, etc. Philosophically, it has been extremely interesting to see the consequences of this achievement, but it didn’t improve productivity any. In fact, the results may have been negative (see ‘detachment’). Piercing the veil of the self is not a particularly efficient way to accumulate utils, but it does lower stress.
*Natural light patterns. Try to find a workspace with large windows and plenty of sunlight. Then, avoid turning on room lights except during ‘daylight’ hours. If you live in high latitudes, you may prefer to artificially extend your light periods to a full twelve hours during the winter. After the sun/‘sun’ goes down, dim your monitor significantly. This will regulate your sleeping schedule (and thus help build other habits). It will also keep you connected to other humans a bit better, which can stave off loneliness and increase happiness in subtle ways. And of course, this is also a good way to keep up your vitamins and so on.
*Accountability. I am much more productive when I am making regular status updates, with explicit expectations, to the people around me. My proposal was rapidly completed as soon as I began weekly meetings with my advisor, for example. But interested friends can be just as useful, as long as they’re reasonably competent to understand what you have achieved, and willing to spend a few minutes at regular intervals discussing your accomplishments. This is up there with my lifting routines in terms of importance, but your mileage may vary depending on your relationship with social power structures.
To emphasize, none of these were a magic bullet that changed my overall lifestyle. There’s still a very obvious pattern of procrastination, distraction, and last-minute binge work, and like you, I’m getting really nervous about how this will manifest itself in my career.
It’s also the case that a master’s degree is really, really hard to get, and the ability to summon an entire thesis from the ether is a part of that difficulty. Most people probably could not achieve such a degree at all; framing your struggles in terms of a deficiency relative to some loosely-defined average is unrealistic and unhelpful. This is true for your colleagues as well- each is an outlier, and the motivating factors that got them to this point are not likely to be directly comparable to your own. You are awesome enough that the bell-curve is not a useful self-assessment, so focus on tactics and not on placing yourself along a continuum.
Exercise: I recently started a regime of 2 x 1 hour bodyweight sessions / week with a friend of mine, but we haven’t had a session in a while because he recently took an injury boxing. I think I’ll start running on my own so I’m not so tied to that one activity (and in accordance with the advice in Optimal Exercise).
Pens: I actually like this advice. On the other hand, I use vim, a programmer’s editor, to write everything (including my prose), and I love love love it. (I’m even writing this reply in it.) The ‘feel’ (not only tactile) of being able to shunt text around so effortlessly (at the paragraph, sentence, clause, word level) is so pleasant that it’s hard to give up. On the other hand, there is some sense to what you say about working without a computer.
Natural light patterns: Good thinking. I work in a room with great sunlight during the day; so far so good. But a while ago my monitor broke, and I was able to fix it only by jettisoning its buttons. (Long story.) End result: my monitor is stuck on full brightness all the time. I just checked, though, and I found a linux program (Redshift) capable of adjusting the monitor brightness and colour temperature based on the time of day. I installed it and it seems to work; perhaps it will help. The lamp I use for reading at night also has a slightly harsh, blue-ish hue to it, though it isn’t excessively bright. I’ll see if I can do something about that, too.
Accountability: Hmmm. I’ll think about this. It’s certainly the case that periods of poor work correlate with seeing my tutor less. The causation isn’t just one-way, though: I’m also less likely to want to see him when things are going slowly. (Perhaps there’s something of a nasty positive feedback loop going on here.)
It’s also the case that a master’s degree is really, really hard to get, and the ability to summon an entire thesis from the ether is a part of that difficulty. Most people probably could not achieve such a degree at all; framing your struggles in terms of a deficiency relative to some loosely-defined average is unrealistic and unhelpful. This is true for your colleagues as well- each is an outlier, and the motivating factors that got them to this point are not likely to be directly comparable to your own. You are awesome enough that the bell-curve is not a useful self-assessment, so focus on tactics and not on placing yourself along a continuum.
You also might wish to consider the ways in which you learn or like to take on large projects. Personally, I am a list maker. I like to have a map a plan if you will. When I’m working on a novel I do the same thing and it may get revised several times before the work is completed. When I was in my Master’s program I had my system down so that I could wrote a 25 page paper on International Relations and associated topics in 3 days starting from research to final completion. To do that required caffeine, medication, and no sleep but it was what I had to do at the time to get the job done. You have to create a system, a habit, to do this. If you can find a reliable way of working rather than working ad hoc then you will be able to do more easily and tackle large projects in the future.
But I’m also concerned about how this bodes for my future career.
Then get a job where you will have a boss who keeps you on track by monitoring your short-term progress. For many people college is the only time when they have neither a parent nor boss who pushes them to succeed.
Warning: such high-overhead jobs are often less well paid. And a lucrative and low stress path for you, programming, often has hard-to-measure short-term progress and are usually not closely monitored.
From your description I take it that the expectancy of the task is moderate (you reliably gain a degree), but its value is partly low: Personally you gain a degree but the thesis itself provides little value on which you could build and which might be intrinsically important for you.
The main problems seem to be delay as is often the case with thesis work. I’d think that your experience with pomodoros should help here: You could break down the thesis into parts, espl. the prose parts.
I’m not clear about your impulsiveness. It appears that you never had to work hard and were able to follow your interests. I can relate to that as it was the same for me. It is kind of a flaw of our society to make some things too easy (not that I’d cry about it). It can hurt us in the long run though. I got out easy: I found a motivation to work hard: Family, esp. my children.
You have to make your mind up on this. I’m not even entirely clear whther procrastination is a bad thing: It’s our sobconscious way of telling us that the work has no or may not have long-term potential.
Compassion meditation. It doesn’t seem as cool as attention-focusing meditation, but it associates pleasant feelings with meditating. Such associations can be useful when you later need to calm yourself down while doing the attention-focusing meditation.
My problem with work is often that I try to avoid even thinking about the work. When I should be doing the work, it is difficult to focus, but when I don’t have to work, I completely avoid it in my mind. The problem is, with the things I am successful at, this doesn’t happen. It’s the other way round: even when I’m not doing them, I keep thinking about them. And I suspect that this thinking is a critical component. So now I sometimes try to think about the work when not working. It’s emotionally easier, because it is without the pressure of having to do it right now. And sometimes I have a good idea, which I can use later. Maybe a good strategy would be to go away from the work physically, for a few minutes, but stay with the work mentally. Not typing on the keyboard isn’t the problem; not thinking about the project is.
Also, organizing my thoughts is easier when I keep notes on paper. It is easier to split a big problem to smaller parts, when I write them down. Especially when my mind tries to not think about the topic. I mean, if in my mind I realize this problem has a subproblem, and the subproblem has a subsubproblem… that feels like the right moment to run away from everything. However, if I write the subproblem and the subsubproblem on the paper, then I can decide to just focus on the subsubproblem, and temporarily ignore the rest. The algorithm is: “Either it’s easy, and I solve it immediately, or it is difficult, and then I write down why specifically it is difficult, what needs to be solved first… and then I resursively focus on the subproblems. At some moment the subproblem is so easy there is just no excuse not to do it. (And if you have an excuse not to do the task, you don’t have an excuse not to write down why specifically the task is so difficult.)”
The usual disclaimer: what works for me doesn’t have to work for other people.
Huh—I’ve found that pomodoros help me stay on task tremendously. I generally keep a timer tab open, and my brain seems to think “Oh, I can avoid facebook for another five minutes… let’s keep working!”
Difficulty focusing and difficulty to sleep can be symptoms of underlying emotional issues like depression. In countries with universal health care a consultation with a psychologist is usually free for a number of sessions to rule out something like this. Though the symptoms are quite similar to “being tired and having a headache” w.r.t. somatical issues as they appear with nearly every syndrome.
First of course check if you do the bare minimum: Eating healthy and exercising at least two times a week. Then you should worry about underlying issues.
Thanks. I had actually already wondered about whether I was depressed. I don’t think I am, though this was not at all obvious to me, and I had to consider the possibility for some time before rejecting it. I perhaps have a slightly flat affect compared to some, but I think I enjoy life and have a basically happy disposition.
I recently starting a bodyweight exercise regime with a friend (2 x 1 hour sessions / week), but we haven’t had a session in a while because he recently took an injury boxing. I think I’ll start running on my own so I’m not so tied to that one activity (and in accordance with the advice in Optimal Exercise).
The life hygiene issues of exercise, sunshine, good sleep, social support are all helpful in getting stuff done.
Beyond that, don’t rely exclusively on your working memory for keeping track of all of the things you need to do. You are already taxing that with learning, and offloading everything you can to external aids is helpful (todo lists, experimental journals, daily 3 page mind-dump journaling). A regular review cycle of what you have written can give you a sense of accomplishment, which can be lacking in multi-year projects with few intermediate wins. Count volume of output as a goal, and use beeminder or something similar to remind you to track it, and show you what you have accomplished (pages written, commits made, hours worked...).
Regarding the mediation, I had a professor of Eastern Philosophy speak at one of my clubs, and he led us in a meditation. When I asked him how long it took before he saw results from his meditation practice, he said about six months, so it’s not maximally effective immediately. Anecdotally, I can say that I I have noticed my ability to focus during the meditation to have improved, though I haven’t maintained it for six months yet.
It’s hard to say, since there are confounds to changes in my mental state, but it does seem like I’m calmer and more self-aware, and if I make the connection to meditation I can quickly focus on my breath and change my focus.
Request for advice:
Like many people on lesswrong, I probably lie towards the smart end of the bell curve in terms of intelligence, but I’m starting to suspect that I lie somewhere below the mean in terms of ability to focus, concentrate, and direct my attention.
I only recently became concerned about this because it wasn’t much of a problem when I was in school. There, I was able to do acceptably well overall by doing well in the subjects that came easily to me without working hard (science, maths… you know the score) and mediocrely in those that didn’t. Ditto my undergrad/bachelor’s degree.
But I’m currently struggling rather with the thesis project for my master’s degree in computer science. The specifics of the thesis itself don’t matter, other than that it’s a piece of empirical/numerical research involving a lot of coding and a prose write-up. None of the technical aspects of it are beyond me, and yet I feel like in some way it’s the first very difficult thing I’ve ever tried, really tried, at. The hard part is sustaining interest over the whole length of the thing, planning and organizing the overarching, erm, arc of the project as a whole, and forming a ‘narrative’ out of all the hard-won bits and pieces of data. (I suppose the fact that I feel fairly sure that the project is likely to find a negative result (i.e. that the method under inspection doesn’t offer any gains over simpler methods) also doesn’t help my motivation.) Luckily, I did well enough in the taught part of my course that I only need to get a mediocre mark in this part in order to get a ‘merit’ overall.
But I’m also concerned about how this bodes for my future career. I’d like to do well in work, but I’m beginning to wonder whether I’m deficient in a skill which would allow me to do much better.
To convey what I’m talking about: often when I’m trying to work at home I flit between coding for work, reading, coding for fun, listening to music, etc., etc., etc., and consequent don’t engage with any of them very deeply, or get much done. Also, I have almost always taken a very long time to get to sleep, often an hour or more, because I find it hard to ‘switch off’ my brain when I’m in bed and have decided it’s time to go to sleep. (I’ve recently been making the paradoxical attempt to try very hard to switch my brain off and stop thinking in bed, with, surprisingly, some limited success.)
I feel like I lack the five-second level skill to suppress (or at least, to decline to pursue) any old interesting thought which appears while I’m doing something else.
Things I’ve attempted:
Meditation. It seems plausible that meditating could help to ‘train’ deliberate attention direction in other aspects of life. Does anyone have any experience with this? I tried checking the literature, and found only one weak-ish study supporting such a hypothesis, but I’d be open to anecdotal evidence. I’ve tried to meditate a few times (less than ten), for about half an hour each time. The first couple of times I became weirdly aggravated and agitated at how bad at it I was: I was frustrated by the realization that something as simple as focusing on one thing and avoiding other thoughts was beyond me. After the first couple of times, I no longer find it aggravating, but I have yet to find it rewarding, either. I haven’t yet managed to obtain the focused, quiet state which I understand is the aim, at least for more than a handful of seconds a couple of times. (Is this normal beginner-level performance?)
Pomodoros. I’ve had some success with doing pomodoros of work, including beeminding them, but I find that they’re best suited to well-defined, discrete tasks. Tasks which are more nebulous seem less suited to it. Also, I find it hard to do pomodoros unless I’m feeling high-willpower, but perhaps this is fixable with, erm, the application of more willpower.
Things I’ve considered but haven’t attempted:
Medication, self-. Is this the sort of thing which would be amenable to a course of Modafinil, or some other nootropic? I could be open to trying this, if it were likely to work.
Medication, other. I could try seeing a doctor to see if what I’m talking about warrants a diagnosis of ADD, and a prescription of Ritalin or a similar drug. I have no idea whether what I’m describing would be considered drastic enough to warrant either of those, though.
Any experience with any of the above, speculation on which of them might bear fruit, or suggestions of completely different ideas welcome.
Is this the sort of thing that can be ‘trained’ through willpower? It seems like a fairly ‘deep’, even a fundamental, aspect of brain function, so I wonder how plastic such a thing is. Any thoughts on this welcome also.
Finally, am I just worrying too much about this? I was recently heartened to come across this Nassim Nicholas Taleb quote:
Perhaps I just have a very stringent bullshit detector. Evidence in favour of this proposal: I think I am able to focus extremely well on personal projects (typically things that I code for fun and find intrinsically rewarding). In fact, when I stop those, it’s less often from boredom and more by guiltily tearing myself away in order to get back to my “real” work. (On the other hand, perhaps there’s such a thing as a too-stringent bullshit detector—one so stringent as to give false positives.)
Summary: I’m concerned that my focus/concentration skills are significantly worse than average, and that this could be detrimental to my outcomes in life. How can I improve them?
I just want to say that this is extremely similar to my struggles with a Master’s degree. Mine is in geology, so your username continues the parallels amusingly. I’m a bit further along, with some marginal successes in efficiency. Here are some of the tactics that I have tried:
*Excercise. My diet is pretty terrible, but regular exercise to offset that has been invaluable. I used weight lifting (if I have a high-calorie diet, then I might as well put the energy to use)- the 5x5 schedule is a good way to gamify things a bit without introducing more complexity than its mindshare allows. This is probably the most useful habit that I have been able to maintain.
*Nootropics. Cautiously. 500mg Choline and about 1600mg Piracetam per day. These are cheap and extremely safe, with moderate-to-questionable benefits. Under this regimen, I have seen quantifiable improvements, including competitive game performance and concentration length. The placebo effect is a strong contender, but rationality means winning, so why not? Previously, I relied on caffeine as my performance enhancer, but the addictive downsides became distracting at the volumes I was using. I don’t know much about Modafinil, however.
*Pens. This one may be very specific to me and my response to tactile stimuli, but the consequences are good enough to be worth a shot. For the prose sections of your thesis, write in pen on paper. The paper doesn’t matter, but make sure to use a very comfortable pen (the Pilot G2 is my brand). This has three benefits- one, it adds a physicality to the process of writing, which helps to fight distraction with a range of physical inputs that a computer doesn’t provide. (Roughly similar to the process of reading or writing in a public place with white noise and background activity, I think.) Two, it is very hard to delete everything you just wrote and start over. This increases the volume of writing your produce in any given time interval, although it will need considerable editing after the fact. Three, it means that you can write in a room without computer or internet access. Leave your phone elsewhere, and you’ve taken away a large majority of potential distractions. If your brain is missing a detail, it is often possible to just bracket the [thing you don’t remember] and keep writing, rather than stopping to look it up and risking an infinite Wikipedia loop.
*Meditation. I tried this also, with some success- that is, I can achieve the mental state usually described as the desired goal. Detachment, hyper-awareness, etc. Philosophically, it has been extremely interesting to see the consequences of this achievement, but it didn’t improve productivity any. In fact, the results may have been negative (see ‘detachment’). Piercing the veil of the self is not a particularly efficient way to accumulate utils, but it does lower stress.
*Natural light patterns. Try to find a workspace with large windows and plenty of sunlight. Then, avoid turning on room lights except during ‘daylight’ hours. If you live in high latitudes, you may prefer to artificially extend your light periods to a full twelve hours during the winter. After the sun/‘sun’ goes down, dim your monitor significantly. This will regulate your sleeping schedule (and thus help build other habits). It will also keep you connected to other humans a bit better, which can stave off loneliness and increase happiness in subtle ways. And of course, this is also a good way to keep up your vitamins and so on.
*Accountability. I am much more productive when I am making regular status updates, with explicit expectations, to the people around me. My proposal was rapidly completed as soon as I began weekly meetings with my advisor, for example. But interested friends can be just as useful, as long as they’re reasonably competent to understand what you have achieved, and willing to spend a few minutes at regular intervals discussing your accomplishments. This is up there with my lifting routines in terms of importance, but your mileage may vary depending on your relationship with social power structures.
To emphasize, none of these were a magic bullet that changed my overall lifestyle. There’s still a very obvious pattern of procrastination, distraction, and last-minute binge work, and like you, I’m getting really nervous about how this will manifest itself in my career.
It’s also the case that a master’s degree is really, really hard to get, and the ability to summon an entire thesis from the ether is a part of that difficulty. Most people probably could not achieve such a degree at all; framing your struggles in terms of a deficiency relative to some loosely-defined average is unrealistic and unhelpful. This is true for your colleagues as well- each is an outlier, and the motivating factors that got them to this point are not likely to be directly comparable to your own. You are awesome enough that the bell-curve is not a useful self-assessment, so focus on tactics and not on placing yourself along a continuum.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
Exercise: I recently started a regime of 2 x 1 hour bodyweight sessions / week with a friend of mine, but we haven’t had a session in a while because he recently took an injury boxing. I think I’ll start running on my own so I’m not so tied to that one activity (and in accordance with the advice in Optimal Exercise).
Pens: I actually like this advice. On the other hand, I use vim, a programmer’s editor, to write everything (including my prose), and I love love love it. (I’m even writing this reply in it.) The ‘feel’ (not only tactile) of being able to shunt text around so effortlessly (at the paragraph, sentence, clause, word level) is so pleasant that it’s hard to give up. On the other hand, there is some sense to what you say about working without a computer.
Natural light patterns: Good thinking. I work in a room with great sunlight during the day; so far so good. But a while ago my monitor broke, and I was able to fix it only by jettisoning its buttons. (Long story.) End result: my monitor is stuck on full brightness all the time. I just checked, though, and I found a linux program (Redshift) capable of adjusting the monitor brightness and colour temperature based on the time of day. I installed it and it seems to work; perhaps it will help. The lamp I use for reading at night also has a slightly harsh, blue-ish hue to it, though it isn’t excessively bright. I’ll see if I can do something about that, too.
Accountability: Hmmm. I’ll think about this. It’s certainly the case that periods of poor work correlate with seeing my tutor less. The causation isn’t just one-way, though: I’m also less likely to want to see him when things are going slowly. (Perhaps there’s something of a nasty positive feedback loop going on here.)
Thanks. This actually did help.
You also might wish to consider the ways in which you learn or like to take on large projects. Personally, I am a list maker. I like to have a map a plan if you will. When I’m working on a novel I do the same thing and it may get revised several times before the work is completed. When I was in my Master’s program I had my system down so that I could wrote a 25 page paper on International Relations and associated topics in 3 days starting from research to final completion. To do that required caffeine, medication, and no sleep but it was what I had to do at the time to get the job done. You have to create a system, a habit, to do this. If you can find a reliable way of working rather than working ad hoc then you will be able to do more easily and tackle large projects in the future.
Then get a job where you will have a boss who keeps you on track by monitoring your short-term progress. For many people college is the only time when they have neither a parent nor boss who pushes them to succeed.
Warning: such high-overhead jobs are often less well paid. And a lucrative and low stress path for you, programming, often has hard-to-measure short-term progress and are usually not closely monitored.
If you work somewhere they do pair programming that can help with a lot of the issues though.
This makes sense.
Did you try lukepros Algorithm for Beating Procrastination?
From your description I take it that the expectancy of the task is moderate (you reliably gain a degree), but its value is partly low: Personally you gain a degree but the thesis itself provides little value on which you could build and which might be intrinsically important for you.
The main problems seem to be delay as is often the case with thesis work. I’d think that your experience with pomodoros should help here: You could break down the thesis into parts, espl. the prose parts.
I’m not clear about your impulsiveness. It appears that you never had to work hard and were able to follow your interests. I can relate to that as it was the same for me. It is kind of a flaw of our society to make some things too easy (not that I’d cry about it). It can hurt us in the long run though. I got out easy: I found a motivation to work hard: Family, esp. my children.
You have to make your mind up on this. I’m not even entirely clear whther procrastination is a bad thing: It’s our sobconscious way of telling us that the work has no or may not have long-term potential.
Some things I tried:
Compassion meditation. It doesn’t seem as cool as attention-focusing meditation, but it associates pleasant feelings with meditating. Such associations can be useful when you later need to calm yourself down while doing the attention-focusing meditation.
My problem with work is often that I try to avoid even thinking about the work. When I should be doing the work, it is difficult to focus, but when I don’t have to work, I completely avoid it in my mind. The problem is, with the things I am successful at, this doesn’t happen. It’s the other way round: even when I’m not doing them, I keep thinking about them. And I suspect that this thinking is a critical component. So now I sometimes try to think about the work when not working. It’s emotionally easier, because it is without the pressure of having to do it right now. And sometimes I have a good idea, which I can use later. Maybe a good strategy would be to go away from the work physically, for a few minutes, but stay with the work mentally. Not typing on the keyboard isn’t the problem; not thinking about the project is.
Also, organizing my thoughts is easier when I keep notes on paper. It is easier to split a big problem to smaller parts, when I write them down. Especially when my mind tries to not think about the topic. I mean, if in my mind I realize this problem has a subproblem, and the subproblem has a subsubproblem… that feels like the right moment to run away from everything. However, if I write the subproblem and the subsubproblem on the paper, then I can decide to just focus on the subsubproblem, and temporarily ignore the rest. The algorithm is: “Either it’s easy, and I solve it immediately, or it is difficult, and then I write down why specifically it is difficult, what needs to be solved first… and then I resursively focus on the subproblems. At some moment the subproblem is so easy there is just no excuse not to do it. (And if you have an excuse not to do the task, you don’t have an excuse not to write down why specifically the task is so difficult.)”
The usual disclaimer: what works for me doesn’t have to work for other people.
Huh—I’ve found that pomodoros help me stay on task tremendously. I generally keep a timer tab open, and my brain seems to think “Oh, I can avoid facebook for another five minutes… let’s keep working!”
Not a medical professional and so on.
Difficulty focusing and difficulty to sleep can be symptoms of underlying emotional issues like depression. In countries with universal health care a consultation with a psychologist is usually free for a number of sessions to rule out something like this. Though the symptoms are quite similar to “being tired and having a headache” w.r.t. somatical issues as they appear with nearly every syndrome.
First of course check if you do the bare minimum: Eating healthy and exercising at least two times a week. Then you should worry about underlying issues.
Thanks. I had actually already wondered about whether I was depressed. I don’t think I am, though this was not at all obvious to me, and I had to consider the possibility for some time before rejecting it. I perhaps have a slightly flat affect compared to some, but I think I enjoy life and have a basically happy disposition.
I recently starting a bodyweight exercise regime with a friend (2 x 1 hour sessions / week), but we haven’t had a session in a while because he recently took an injury boxing. I think I’ll start running on my own so I’m not so tied to that one activity (and in accordance with the advice in Optimal Exercise).
I think my diet is decent.
The life hygiene issues of exercise, sunshine, good sleep, social support are all helpful in getting stuff done.
Beyond that, don’t rely exclusively on your working memory for keeping track of all of the things you need to do. You are already taxing that with learning, and offloading everything you can to external aids is helpful (todo lists, experimental journals, daily 3 page mind-dump journaling). A regular review cycle of what you have written can give you a sense of accomplishment, which can be lacking in multi-year projects with few intermediate wins. Count volume of output as a goal, and use beeminder or something similar to remind you to track it, and show you what you have accomplished (pages written, commits made, hours worked...).
Regarding the mediation, I had a professor of Eastern Philosophy speak at one of my clubs, and he led us in a meditation. When I asked him how long it took before he saw results from his meditation practice, he said about six months, so it’s not maximally effective immediately. Anecdotally, I can say that I I have noticed my ability to focus during the meditation to have improved, though I haven’t maintained it for six months yet.
Thanks. Do you feel like it’s had much impact on your mental state when not meditating?
It’s hard to say, since there are confounds to changes in my mental state, but it does seem like I’m calmer and more self-aware, and if I make the connection to meditation I can quickly focus on my breath and change my focus.