After reading The Motivation Hacker, I decided I desperately needed some success spirals to build upon. I picked out four things that sounded simple enough, and planned on doing them within 48 hours of completing the book (the two hours following that period were precommitted to preparing for my interview for App Academy).
I failed miserably at all but one of those 4 tasks, and was feeling absolutely awful by the morning of the last day. I felt like I wanted to get to the point where I could truthfully say whether or not the techniques in the book work for me (and, well, I really want to stop failing at everything), so I gathered what will I had left and started planning out that day, based on the time of the interview.
By some rationalist voodoo, I rebounded so spectacularly that I’m still riding the ensuing success spiral almost a full week later. I started monitoring my happiness levels with an hourly prompt; I disconnected the internet and started coding for an hour and a half, then made a call to Radioshack (I still didn’t have enough information to determine if they had the battery I needed, but this was still pretty significant for me). The interview itself fell apart on a professional level—my screen reader and computer really did not like the tools the interviewer preferred for the coding challenge, and verbal backspacing while talking through code does not make one sound all that great, but I did fine on the challenges themselves.
I’ll also add that I’ve been applying every antiakrasia technique I could think of during the past week—this includes working outside with a braille display, monitoring diet and moving around and thinking aloud whenever there are no social costs, playing music while working. (The braille display is pretty much necessary to program with music playing!).
The weather has not been cooperative on every day, and the day that I felt the worst was the one when I was unable to work with music and braille, yet I’ve still kept up that coding block in the morning, and have been adding new blocks in the past couple days.
Something I noticed on the first day, thanks to a combination of The Motivation Hacker and comments I read on LW, was the point where I hit mental resistance in coding. In the past, it was typical that I could start a project and hammer out the class structure, variables, and some of the simpler methods, but when things got slightly more complicated, I hit a lot of mental resistance and could not willpower my way through it. This particular incident was a different sort of more complicated (in this case, it was basically copy-editing my notes into code, after I’d been defining lots and lots of variables), so I took the advice of mentally rewarding the fact that I noticed this happening, and realized that my brain was functioning in “super easy” mode, and I needed to get up to “kinda easy” mode (I’ve been using a gear-shift analogy). Explicitly pausing, noticing, and deciding to shift into a higher gear helped tremendously.
Also, I cannot stress enough how insanely little music I was listening to compared to the average productive person, simply due to the inconvenience of setting up and using a braille display with a laptop. Productivity and happiness both improve dramatically with music.
After reading The Motivation Hacker, I decided I desperately needed some success spirals to build upon. I picked out four things that sounded simple enough, and planned on doing them within 48 hours of completing the book (the two hours following that period were precommitted to preparing for my interview for App Academy).
I failed miserably at all but one of those 4 tasks, and was feeling absolutely awful by the morning of the last day. I felt like I wanted to get to the point where I could truthfully say whether or not the techniques in the book work for me (and, well, I really want to stop failing at everything), so I gathered what will I had left and started planning out that day, based on the time of the interview.
By some rationalist voodoo, I rebounded so spectacularly that I’m still riding the ensuing success spiral almost a full week later. I started monitoring my happiness levels with an hourly prompt; I disconnected the internet and started coding for an hour and a half, then made a call to Radioshack (I still didn’t have enough information to determine if they had the battery I needed, but this was still pretty significant for me). The interview itself fell apart on a professional level—my screen reader and computer really did not like the tools the interviewer preferred for the coding challenge, and verbal backspacing while talking through code does not make one sound all that great, but I did fine on the challenges themselves.
I’ll also add that I’ve been applying every antiakrasia technique I could think of during the past week—this includes working outside with a braille display, monitoring diet and moving around and thinking aloud whenever there are no social costs, playing music while working. (The braille display is pretty much necessary to program with music playing!).
The weather has not been cooperative on every day, and the day that I felt the worst was the one when I was unable to work with music and braille, yet I’ve still kept up that coding block in the morning, and have been adding new blocks in the past couple days.
Something I noticed on the first day, thanks to a combination of The Motivation Hacker and comments I read on LW, was the point where I hit mental resistance in coding. In the past, it was typical that I could start a project and hammer out the class structure, variables, and some of the simpler methods, but when things got slightly more complicated, I hit a lot of mental resistance and could not willpower my way through it. This particular incident was a different sort of more complicated (in this case, it was basically copy-editing my notes into code, after I’d been defining lots and lots of variables), so I took the advice of mentally rewarding the fact that I noticed this happening, and realized that my brain was functioning in “super easy” mode, and I needed to get up to “kinda easy” mode (I’ve been using a gear-shift analogy). Explicitly pausing, noticing, and deciding to shift into a higher gear helped tremendously.
Also, I cannot stress enough how insanely little music I was listening to compared to the average productive person, simply due to the inconvenience of setting up and using a braille display with a laptop. Productivity and happiness both improve dramatically with music.