You cannot read this, but you can tell how it appeals to you - <AUTHOR> https://www.moneymonk.nl <comment><USER3> Non designer here. I like the overall design, but I do have a few things I'd personally change (nit picky, might not change my desire to click through):

1) The top screenshots coming into foreground is a nice touch, but something seems choppy about the animation. I think it's less to do with the currently hovered image, but what happens to the previous image you had selected. It seems to just drop away in one frame, which looks awkward. Maybe moving it to background instantly, but putting a delay to slide back down would be better; it's difficult to visualize though.

2) Nobody really clicks through carousels anymore, and waiting for them to move automatically is irritating. Not sure what would be better, but consider something else if that information is important.

3) The sticky header at the top is not my favorite thing, and this may just be personal preference. I will actually close a website that does that to me. I may be alone here.

<comment><USER4> > Nobody really clicks through carousels anymore

Is there a data point to back up this statement? I know I definitely do click through carousels, if I'm intrigued enough about what might be there.

<comment><USER5> In my humble opinion, I put them on par with pagination of articles (not good).

Of course you click through _if you're intrigued enough_. I'm not sure carousels are meant to create intrigue about a product. I'm not really sure what their purpose is. Every carousel I've seen has been probably better off being displayed all at once rather than one at a time. This is the Internet, many people (barring disabled/elderly users, who shouldn't be ignored) are used to consuming a lot of data simultaneously, most don't want it fed through a tiny straw.

I see them as a design fad that are typically asked for because someone's friend/competitor has one, or "ooh, ahh" 'ed at by clients who didn't know animation on web pages was possible.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, this is my typical feeling on it. I think they do have a use case (primarily as an image slideshow for something unimportant like a header image), but they are way overused these days. But, I'm not a designer, so they may know something I don't. I am a user though, and they seem like noise on the page to me, so maybe I know something designers don't, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "You cannot read this"

That's a little presumptuous, don't you think? I can read it, as can many other people who have commented. Don't assume no one here can understand Dutch or any other language for that matter.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're totally right. It was a little presumptuous. You know the saying: "Assumption is the mother of all..."? From an autistic, mathematical point of view you are right, but if I look into the stats of my Google Analytics, I see less then 4.1% Dutch. If I take into account that especially Dutch people would click on a link ending with .nl, I think I may assume the percentage of Dutch HN readers is even low.

What I meant of course is: most of the people cannot read it. So, lets trigger them to judge the design, just by its design. This gave me a lot of new insights I want to thank everyone for :)

<comment><USER7> I'm German and I know that most germans could read this. :) It's funny how similar Dutch and German are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> (I can read it; and, I also like the anchors in the main nav.)

The pricing table seems a little silly, since most of the points are similar across all three price levels... It's a table for the table's sake, I guess.

Also, I personally think the pricing is fairly steep for what you're offering. I actually have an eenmansbedrijf and I spend very little time per year doing invoicing and taxes, let alone per month. Maybe you need different price differentiation, i.e. make it cheap for < 20 invoices / year. That would actually let me ease into it.

<comment><USER9> The pricing is based on the length of the term that you want to pre-pay. If you pay monthly it's going to be be €19, if you pay yearly it's €190 - <USER2> you 2 months of fees, if you pay for 2 years its €342 - saving you 6 months of fees. It's a standard pricing paradigm, but I do agree that this specific table doesn't really highlight the fact that it's the same PLAN for each price point. They should lay out this information differently so that you can see it's one plan and make it that there are discounts for pre-paying.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're both right. Personally I hate it when I go to a restaurant and they ask me if I want some bread already, or when they ask me if I want ketchup with my fries. Yes, yes, yes, of course. Why they ask? Because when you get the bill, you see 50ct for the ketchup.

I don't like such an experience. This is exactly why I don't differentiate in functionality, but only in price based on the commitment. Our target customers are freelancers, our companies with at most two employees.

We only have one plan: THE AWESOME PLAN. Depending on how long you're willing to commit, you get a discount. I agree the table could point that out a little bit better.

<comment><USER10> It's not about what features are and aren't included.

You offer different plans to make one sound like a bargain, you offer an expensive one to make the others look relatively cheap and you offer a cheap one too. No-one chooses the cheapest wine.

It's a human psychology thing, nothing to do with features. If you aren't using this trick, you probably shouldn't present it like that as it's confusing.

You can use support levels instead or something to make an expensive premium plan if you want to take advantage of this marketing 'trick' that everyone else uses.

<comment><AUTHOR> I offer a cheap plan for monthly payment (the product is very low margin, especially compared to the large players in the market where one would easily pay at least 75e per month for the same functionality), a small discount if you're willing to commit for one year, and even a bigger discount if you're willing to commit for two years.

In the beginning we need cash flow, cash is king. So we hope lots of people buy the 2-year-deal. We are not trying to trick anyone. And I want an easy product, not a complicated one with different kind of support levels etc. No, I target a very specific audience, where there is no room for feature differentiation, imho. But who knows, this is just my feeling right now, we might change the offers in the future.

<comment><USER10> My point was you're using a product display that is linked to a very specific marketing tactic without using the tactic. So it makes no sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When scrolling the "Probeer MoneyMonk 14 dagen vrijblijvend!" button moves into the header but only for a very short time.

I don't think many poeple will actually click through the carrousel "Dit kan MoneyMonk voor jou betekenen..." so it might be better to condense it down a bit and make it into a long-form page.

Also, that the screenshots at the top move up is nice but I still can't see enough to figure out what they're actually saying...

But al met al zeker wel een mooie site...

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, I guess I was wrong you cannot read it ;) The button moves to the header to make sure a Call To Action button is always visible. The CTA in the header disappears if a CTA button on the website is visible.

Good point about the carrousel. I might want to track some events to see if people actually use it. But if it is a long form, doesn't that hurt the experience? On massive long page?

You are actually able to click on the screenshots, but I guess we could make that more clear? Thanks for the feedback! Much appreciated!

<comment><USER11> Ah OK. I have a 30" monitor so for me there was no CTA visible for only a tiny fraction of the page. As far as the carrousel is concerned, ideally you should just A/B-test what works of course.

Concerning the business model I just wanted to say that I feel the biggest opportunity in this area is actually for a site where you can just send all your digital correspondence and have it either stored or processed by a bookkeeper.

You can combine that with a service that will receive all your mail and digitize it for you or offer a discount on a Fujitsu ScanSnap (doable for yearly plans e.g.) and have the scans sent straight to your service.

In the Netherlands Yuki gets close but their UI is bad and costs are too steep to also send non financial documents there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can read it and it does appeal to me. The flow and explanation is really good. I'd like some more screen shots but then the lack of them might make people more likely to sign up and see for themselves. Bookmarking for later.

By the way, I dig the anchor name of the pricing section.

</comment><comment><USER13> Locks up Firefox 18 with a "busy script" warning.

<comment><USER8> It's fine in Firefox 19 (Aurora), OS X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You will be happy to know that with Chrome and clicking the translate button, your site translates well.

<comment><USER15> That's because Dutch and English grammar and syntax are remarkably similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The site has some issue's ;) <http://imgur.com/PvdrJ>

<comment><USER16> hint: try to resize your screen

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Dunno how I could have missed that one :)

<comment><USER17> body { min-width: 980px; } seems to fix the problem

(Temporary hack while you add in @media queries, I assume)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Within the Netherlands there are far more appealing solutions, such as MoneyBird. They've been rockin' at it for a few years now. To be honest, to me MoneyMonk looks like a limited clone of MoneyBird.

(I'm a happy customer of MoneyBird)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am glad you are a happy customer of MoneyBird. This tells me there is at least a market of 1 person ;) I am quite surprised you can tell from only a couple of screenshots, MoneyMonk is a limited clone.

Of course there are similarities, giving the fact we target the same audience. But I really think we have a different kind of product. This sort of competition is only a good thing. It keeps us all motivated to make the best software for our customers. In the end it is the customer who wins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This served as my annual reminder that Google Translate really is very good.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does it keep a ledger, i.e. double entry? As far as I can tell no, how would one generate a balance and profit-and-loss statement from this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it actually does. Where classical accountancy software (Unit4, Exact, etc.) focusses on the ledger aspect, making it hardly impossible for human beings to use the software, we take a different approach.

We thought: what is accounting about? It is about registering financial facts. That's what we actually do. We optimized the user interface for normal human beings registering financial facts. We are then able to derive the entire accountancy fundament with double entries, ledgers, etc.

Suppose one transfers 100 euro from their bank book to the cash book. This should be registered using a cross post (don't know if this is the correct term). No human being (freelancer) understands this. But if they can select: oh, this was a cash withdrawal, Money Monk knows how to register the financial facts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can read this :D

<comment><AUTHOR> And you're living in Utrecht as well I see :) If you want to grab a coffee the other day, drop me an e-mail. My username at gmail...

<comment><USER22> I spend a few days in Utrecht, it was lovely, welcoming, and really relaxing. We went kayaking through the canals, one of the best experiences of my life. I'm hoping to make it back sometime soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks nice. Small note: the top logo does not fit in IE8.

How does moneymonk compare to moneybird?

<comment><AUTHOR> As I said in another comment, I haven't tested in IE entirely. Going to buy a windows laptop today :). I don't know MoneyBird that well (except for the invoicing part), so I can't tell you exactly. What I do know is, we have streamlined the entire process of sending invoices and reminders. We take a fundamental different approach to MoneyBird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm not the target audience, but I can read it. Love the anchor names!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) I would never have thought anyone would actually notice the silly language joke at all... If you happen to know Dutch freelancers who still do their accounting in Excel, you know where to send them to ;)

<comment><USER25> Hi! ZZP-er, still using Excel. (Well, Google Docs).

However, my first language is English. I do struggle a lot with Dutch taxes as my speaking is generally better than reading/writing. I wonder if it would be worth you offering an English localization of your site? I know there are a lot of ZZP'ers in the Netherlands whose first language is not Dutch (my gf works for a recruitment company, and they recruit heavily from Italy, Spain, and India).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> is this the dutch version of billmonk?

<comment><AUTHOR> I had never heard of it, but billmonk seems to me more for personal use. MoneyMonk is accounting software targeted to freelancers and people running a company without employees (ZZP is the Dutch abbr), including tax reports etc, creating invoices.

<comment><USER16> Im freelancer in the NL and i'm using MoneyBird, for dutch / english freelancers. What do you offer more than MoneyBird? Open API || a link with dutch banks?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats on the pretty design. As a student of UX, I would be fascinated if you could summarize in a short braindump the UX design principles and thought processes that went into making this. You already mentioned how you think about the CTA in another comment, how about all the rest of it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Good suggestion. The original design framework (color scheme, font's etc) is made by someone else. That design was absolutely beautiful, but not from a conversion point of view. There were no clear CTA buttons, etc.

The past couple of weeks I've been reading a lot of great articles online, viewed a couple of inspiring TED talks and other video's, and I used that information to build the landing page.

Tomorrow I'm going to try to recap which articles I read, which video's I watched, and I'll write about it in a blogpost.

<comment><USER27> I'd like to read that. What is your blog URL?

<comment><AUTHOR> My blog is a little bit rusty (non-existing). Tomorrow I'll put a simple blog online :) <http://jorgenhorstink.nl/></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Node.JS and Joyent Agreement - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/956a3431b1d9e937?pli=1

<comment><USER2> Is Joyent any good? I was one of the original "VC"s on TextDrive where they sold a lifetime account for $400 back in '04. For the two years I tried to use that account there was a never ending string of technical problems that was swept under the rug by a rabid fanboy contingent in the forums. It left such a bad taste in my mouth that even today I doubt their technical competence even though their platform is completely different.

<comment><USER3> We've been using their Smart Javascript Platform (based on SpiderMonkey) for the past year. They are supposed to be migrating that platform to Node.js soon. The last outage we had was 236 days ago. Our current uptime for the past year is 99.968%. We also began using Smart Machines 3 months ago in Emeryville, CA and Andover, MA data centers and so far have 99.999% availability on those.

<http://www.joyent.com/technology/smartplatform/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm really not sure how I feel about this. I've been churning it over and over in my mind since I heard about this via the grapevine whilst in my favourite bar tonight. The only thing I've left with thinking is this: for better or worse, Node is the most successful CommonJS platform available today. Server- side JS should thrive, but I'm not sure Node is the thing to do it.

Node, to me, feels like it's the thing that JavaScript the language _should_ be on the client-side; JavaScript on the server-side is beholden to the slow pace of the client-side and is not developing the things it needs, at the pace it needs.

I can't help but feel that JavaScript is the wrong match for this. Maybe Clojure is better. Maybe something else is. I just can't ignore this gut feeling that thing isn't write with this picture.

<comment><USER5> What bars do you go to where people discuss server-side javascript frameworks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great move by Joyent. I just hope Ryan got a fair deal here.

</comment><comment><USER7> Maturity is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER8> why would anyone want to be the next php?

<comment><USER9> Because nobody wants to be the next Rails.

<comment><USER10> I think I'm lost on the joke; nobody wants to be the next overhyped (and polarizing) framework that is beloved by a large niche of programmers and launches a new segment of the industry?

Care to clue me in? (being honest; maybe I missed some news recently)

<comment><USER8> php sucks</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Advice using Stoicism/Meditation/Zen Buddhism,etc. to buildup resilience - <AUTHOR> I'm still relatively young (20-25) and have launched a side project while working. Its been quite stressful and I have seen a lot of negative energy come out especially with those who work with me on the project.
So I have thought of relying on meditation and related literature to help calm me down and keep me mentally resilient as it seems that these techniques have helped others in the past.
Any actionable advice on how I can start this and buildup mental resilience? <comment><USER2> Repeating mantras is awesome. I like to use these:

> "Dear God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the > courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Basically Stoicism in a nutshell. I like this one and I like to practice it but I don't repeat, chant this one often in my mind now that I think about it ... the next 2 I repeat daily, nay, hourly, nay, even more probably.

> "There is never enough time to do everything, but there's always enough time > to do the most important thing."

It's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the whole world (trust me, I've been there) but there is no escaping this. In the long run we're all dead anyway. There is basically always an infinite amount of things we can do but often there is only ONE thing that adds the most value or is the most important thing RIGHT now.

> "Look at how far youve come already."

For some reason this one motivates me because of all the hardships I've experienced already. I'm alive. I'm breating. I'm here. I'm going where I want to go. I have overcome all adversities in the past why should I not overcome this one? Let's go!

The first one is basically

Besides this, earplugs are SO nice. Just not hearing so much noise really really calms me down.

<comment><USER3> >> "Dear God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

This is like a long-winded version of one of my favourites:

>"Fight battles small enough to win that are big enough to matter."

<comment><USER4> Maybe it's just because I'm more familiar with the former version, but I find it...catchier? And that's important in a mantra.

<comment><USER3> Each to there own ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Firstly I would start with some introspection. Techniques from afar can help, but you may find that you have resources well known to you, near at hand, that may offer some immediate relief. What springs to mind if you imagine "running away"? Where and what would you like to run away to? What do you associate with joy and freedom? If you spend a little time introspecting & remembering, you might already find you know of some things to do, whether it be surfing or reading or walking in the moonlight. In my case a good run, or certain types of gigs, offer peaks that can counter much day-to-day difficulty. These resources can become a bit hidden by the daily grind. Digging them up and allocating time for them might be useful.

Secondly, if you're a reader I think Jon Kabat-Zinn's book _The Mindful Way through Depression_ is an excellent intro to meditation. Don't be put off by the title -- it's useful for more than just depression. It's a decent read, is very secular in tone, offers various ways in to thinking about and approaching meditation that have been fruitfully used in clinical settings, and has a set of guided meditations on the associated CD that are easier to start with than trying to remember instructions.

Thirdly, if meditation appeals to you, why not find a local zen or vipassana group? There's something a little heightened about meditating with a group that can be motivating. Many such groups offer a weekly sitting, and are usually pretty relaxed (not demanding you believe anything, join up, etc).

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER6> All of those things can, in this day and age, be somewhat usefully summarized like this:

 _Airplane mode!_

That is to say: turn off your radio for a while and just sit down, or maybe go for a walk or a swim.

Marshall McLuhan, who was extremely interested in the nervous and mental changes brought on by network technology, wrote in 1966:

 _With the telegraph Western man began a process of putting his nerves outside his body. Previous technologies had been extensions of physical organs: the wheel is a putting-outside-ourselves of the feet; the city wall is a collective outering of the skin. But electronic media are, instead, extensions of the central nervous system, an inclusive and simultaneous field. Since the telegraph we have extended the brains and nerves of man around the globe. As a result, the electronic age endures a total uneasiness, as of a man wearing his skull inside and his brain outside._

<comment><USER7> Hey mbrock, off-topic question, but I came across an interesting discussion you had here on HN a few months ago on formal verification of Solidity/EVM and some related work you were doing. I run a conference at Stanford in January on this, would you have any interest in giving a talk on your work there? Contact me if interested.

[http://cyber.stanford.edu/bpase18](http://cyber.stanford.edu/bpase18)

[http://twitter.com/byrongibson](http://twitter.com/byrongibson)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hi there,

I'm in the same boat as you with working on a startup while working so I can attest that it is definitely stressful. But it's definitely possible to build up your mental resilience.

I practice Nichiren Buddhism and chant daily to keep my spirits up. Happy to share my experience with you. I also read quite a bit of different sorts of material as well.

For actionable advice, the easiest thing you can do at this very moment is to take deep breaths (not-related to Nichiren Buddhism but which I found useful as well) and really let your mind wander about the great things that have come your way through life. Many people are significantly less fortunate than we are to be here. The fact that I can do so much with my time is what I feel thankful for.

<comment><USER8> I realize this may be a personal anecdote but I feel we get stressed when we're in great uncertainty, there's an endless list of tasks, and we don't seem to have control of anything. Sometimes I plan out breaks where I step away to do something else other than work and projects. The spiritual practice and the readings help to re-emphasize that even when I am deep in the trenches, I have a choice to take a break. It also helps to realize that I can be happy despite the circumstances, uncertainty and endless work. It's taught me to be little more patient, to be less harsh when things don't work out and persevere. Happiness within the chaos. You'll have to find what works for you but it's definitely there if you're seeking it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a whole manual on this, what to do and why: [http://www.vipassana.com/meditation/mindfulness_in_plain_eng...](http://www.vipassana.com/meditation/mindfulness_in_plain_english.php)

A lot of insights I've learned there, like why people sit straight and full lotus cross legged instead of leaning back in a chair. Or how just sitting down doing nothing helps you reach enlightenment.

</comment><comment><USER10> You need to go through it to unmask it. It's about getting terrified/stressed and then coming out on the other side relatively unharmed a number of times until your mind starts making association that every time you felt this way before and told your self that it will be alright, everything did indeed turn out ok. Thus the term : learning to trust your self.</comment>


5% of Israel is vegan and the number is rising - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/17/there-is-no-kosher-meat-the-israelis-full-of-zeal-for-going-vegan <comment><USER2> I just want to point out that veganishm isn't cruelty free.

[https://www.boredpanda.com/vegan-lifestyle-not-cruelty- free-...](https://www.boredpanda.com/vegan-lifestyle-not-cruelty-free- rosasdesal/)

So is it really a great thing that Isreal is doing?

<comment><USER3> Yes. This is such a bizarre argument. Anime welfare and human welfare are two completely different issues. The fact that people are not treated amazingly farming plants shouldn't stop us from treating animals well. Also, what do we feed animals? Plants. And due to the high feed ratio necessary to get meat out of animals, you need more plant agriculture to eat meat. All of this completely ignores the environmental impacts of meat. So please stop posting things like this.</comment></comment>


Fallacy of Data Scientist Shortage - <AUTHOR> http://www.datasciencecentral.com/m/blogpost?id=6448529%3ABlogPost%3A19735 <comment><USER2> At my current company, I am the only 'data scientist'. Until recently they had no idea I could build classifiers and such. I was just a data warehouse engineer. In a sense I created a job opening and requirement for myself.</comment>


I had an Apple store experience from hell - <AUTHOR> https://flipboard.com/@flipboard/-i-had-an-apple-store-experience-from-he/f-6424969055%2Fbusinessinsider.com <comment><USER2> I have experienced the same disorganization the few times I have visited an Apple store. Simple signs or different color shirts could go a long way towards directing people to the right employees.</comment>


Notes on Technical Writing - <AUTHOR> https://mkaz.blog/misc/notes-on-technical-writing/ <comment><USER2> A lot of technical writers focus on the style of the text. For example, I've seen tech writers have long discussions (more than 3 hour-long meetings) about title capitalization in our organization.

I wish tech writers would channel their focus elsewhere:

\- If you haven't got it working, don't document it. Getting information by talking to SWEs is not enough. Your docs will lack depth and preciseness, and it will show. A lot.

\- Show fully qualified imports in code samples. If you don't know what that is, ask SWEs. Given a computer with installed dependencies (such as Maven, Pip, npm, etc.), even your (grand)mother should be able to follow the docs.

\- Create automated testsuide for your code samples.

\- Mandate that lack of docs be a blocker for a release.

When there are docs written in perfect style and English, yet none of the code samples works, or when I have to spend 30 minutes finishing the "obvious" parts of the code to get it to work, that's when I get really frustrated.

The article seems to be deeply focused on the style. I can't remember when I got frustrated with documentation because the style was bad, or because the sentences were too long.

<comment><USER3> A fair observation. I do think there's some value to concerns over style, but far too many tech writers give them undue prominence.

I couldn't champion your bulleted points harder. Honestly, if I had a say in it, any tech writer working on developer documentation should be able to code/build/perform/use whatever task or api they're documenting _without_ the help of an engineer. They should be able to read and understand code, and they should be willing to do so, even more so than the average engineer using some library code. They should be capable of understanding a library _deeply_ and synthesizing and summarizing that understanding for users of the library.

Just as tech writers in the medical field need to know quite a bit about medicine, tech writers in software should be required to know quite a bit about engineering software. There's plenty that do, but there's also quite a few that don't--I think it's a side effect of the field's relative youth.

I really wish more writers would code and do exactly the things you mention, such as implement robust code sample testing, etc.

The ideal technical writer, at least for software engineering documentation, is a hybrid of a traditional technical writer and a software engineer[^1].

[^1]: This excludes user-facing software documentation, which is essentially a totally different field than those that deal with writing for developer or engineer audiences.

<comment><USER4> How does one become a technical writer? I'm a software engineer, and e.g. I recently applied to Google for both a tech writer position and a software engineer position, and they interviewed me and offered me a job for the software engineer role but they gave me a form rejection for the tech writer role. I worry I'm stuck as a software engineer because that's what's on my resume.

<comment><USER5> Writing something substantial and posting it online would help your chances. I was offered a job as a technical writer partly on that basis. I agree with the other comment that software development is preferable for the money, but on the other hand it's easier to switch off from technical writing at the end of the day or do your own projects after work than it would be if you were programming all day.

While I'm at it, being a technical writer convinced me that software engineering and technical writing shouldn't be separate roles, because a lot of my time spent asking for clarification about things led to software engineers realizing they shouldn't have done it that way in the first place, and then changing it. If they had to write about it themselves, the feedback loop would have been tighter. Making them separate roles and paying technical writers less money probably started as some business guy's idea of division of labor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I first saw the title I thought to myself, "shit, another random, possibly misleading post about technical writing?" but on quick review this seems to be a well-researched overview of the field. If you were to ask a practicing technical writer to present a summary like this, it wouldn't differ much.

If the author is here, I'm curious if they took that definition of technical writing from my post? [1] To the best of my memory I feel like I came up with that definition on my own but also wouldn't be surprised if I subconsciously took it from somewhere else.

[1] [https://kayce.basqu.es/blog/metrics/](https://kayce.basqu.es/blog/metrics/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am here, and I have read several of your posts, thanks for wonderful resource. So yes, it is quite possible I took the definition from you, I collected the various notes over time, so I'm not always positive where they come from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > In this time, I've read various resources on technical writing and > documentation. These are my notes, both to help me remember later, but also > as a tool to help me think about writing now.

and later, in an apparent contradiction ...

> You don't need to tell the reader what you're going to tell them. Just tell > them.

I think this point could be fleshed out better.

Any piece of nonfiction writing, technical or otherwise, that doesn't give me a clear idea about its content may not pass my filter. I see this the most in long-form journalism. But it also pops up when authors focus on themselves, their struggles, and their aspirations in the first couple of paragraphs.

Telling the reader what they're about to read in the first paragraph of a technical piece is a courtesy. People are busy, and they don't have time to wade through a bunch of throat-clearing at the start of a piece. They'll just close the tab and move on.

<comment><USER3> This is a good counterpoint. After all, academic journals have abstracts for a reason--when people need to get something done, a synopsis quickly helps them make a decision as to whether or not they actually found the appropriate resource.

It goes both ways. I think this aspect of the craft is a bit more of an art than a science. At certain points it's appropriate to signal what you're about to discuss, at others, it's just noise.

In general, anything that functions similarly to an academic abstract is probably useful (saves the reader from potentially wasting time, gives an overview of the general subject matter and idea without delving into details, takes about 1 minute maximum to read).

<comment><USER8> Abstract or "executive summary" is the paragraph right under the title that does this in everything I wrote for the exact purpose to give someone the opportunity to see whether this is his/her go-to document for a purpose or note. I always like to add/read the ToC, that is also a quick read to see if this doc is what I am/people are looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I always try to understand the readers before writing a word. Why they are reading. And what they expect to be able to do better as a result of reading, or what decision they might be making.

If an author can't answer these questions, they will likely write something that is perceived as irrelevant, wrong, or simply 'meh'. This is especially true when writing 'technical reports' as opposed to documentation.

<comment><USER6> "Know thy audience" and "know thy audience's purpose" are the cardinal rules of technical writing, as mentioned in Marcus's post. Often times there are limits to how much I can know about my audience. In that case it's especially helpful to put an "Assumptions" or "Intended audience" section at the top of a doc.

<comment><USER8> +1 on that "thy audience", and the audience is not just the end-users. It is the 10 extra layers/people that will get to carry an opinion (and whose opinion matters) by glancing a document for 1min or less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Don't tell the reader something is extremely complex; likewise don't tell the reader something is simple. The reader will make up their own mind about a concept being easy or hard."

I think this is great advice, and applied to teaching. I can't tell you the number of times a professor has said "and then obviously it follows that" or "it's easy to see that". Nearly every time that was uttered in a lecture I wanted to hurl my textbook at the board.

Looking for alternatives? "Is it easy?" or "It might be obvious" work fine. Maybe use those moments as opportunities to check in with your audience. In the written context, maybe offer end/footnotes explaining why it might be obvious/easy.

<comment><USER11> Related: don't say someting is interesting. For example, "It's interesting that . . . " I see this preface more often than "simple" or "complex." Also there is a type of person for whom your introduction will come across as a dare to find it uninteresting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most documentation is so bad and so often out-of-date that I can answer my question faster by reading the source (or tests).

Everything is so extremely verbose. I don't want to read a 7 paragraph essay about how this or that feature was developed and evolved over time; I just need a one line hint and maybe an example. Believe it or not, your software is not special. We've seen something like it before and get the gist already. I like the style of man pages, where everything is on one page and organized by the flag, i.e. actual usage (puts a hard limit on meandering bullshittery).

<comment><USER13> _> I like the style of man pages_

You are in the minority, mate. Man pages are walls of text that cover too much detail in too little space. A lot of them lack examples.

Most people will take a simple task-oriented tutorial over an all-encompassing man page. That's something that Microsoft understood very well back in the '90s, providing copious amounts of examples and tutorial on top of basic reference material. It's part of the reason they saw orders of magnitude more adoption for their stack.

<comment><USER14> Walls of text are great, just use / and search for what you want. Between that and command history, I think this is the best way to navigate software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is well done!

> Support error recognition and recovery.

I totally agree with this. You have to teach critical concepts a couple different ways in case one gets skimmed over or misunderstood. We rely on visuals for this--the text should stand independent of the photo / diagram, and vice versa.

I wrote a handbook on technical writing summing up what we've learned over many years of writing iFixit repair guides. [https://help.dozuki.com/Tech_Writing/chapter/0](https://help.dozuki.com/Tech_Writing/chapter/0)

<comment><USER6> Another hugely important reason to support error recovery: this is how many people find documentation. They see an error when using an application (or writing code) and they copy-paste the error into a search engine. If you provide that error text verbatim in your documentation, you will capture that search engine traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tech Writing is a waterfall job.

What's needed is something more like peer review, where the "tech writer's" job is to ask hard question from the user POV during development - for varying values of "user", which would include customer, API consumer, and so on.

This wouldn't be code review, because it's about features, interfaces, and expected behaviours, not the fine details of implementation. And it wouldn't be a PM job, because it would be peer feedback in the form of dialog, not management in the form of requirements and specs.

And it should be continuous, so the doc base evolves in parallel with the code base.

And it should not be an afterthought.

This job does not exist yet. And it should, because virtually all orgs have a problem where individual developers become repositories of The Important Knowledge. If they leave it becomes hard to characterise system behaviours and architectures well enough to understand how they work well enough to replace/improve/reverse engineer them.

So IMO there's a niche for people who are competent developers, competent listeners, and competent communicators, who can pull it all together, stay on top of changes, and leave a readable record of the current state of institutional knowledge about projects, practices, stacks, and interfaces.

</comment><comment><USER17> I worked on designing and implementing a data architecture at a FAANG. One of the things we found worked well was bringing documentation as close as possible to source - that way, making changes to one but not the other has a high rate of getting caught during code reviews and documentation stays in sync. The challenge with this approach was then accessibility for non technical customers who don't care for nor have reason to look at source. Instead of building documentation pages, we leveraged a system that was a registry of datasets, individual columns, use cases, and sample queries... it was tricky to get right but we implemented a pipeline where documentation from code would get propagated to this system automagically.

In terms of general technical writing, style is less of a concern I have. The real challenge is writing efficiently to convey sufficient information to the audience, without staying too high level but also not providing too many details. I often suffer from writers blockz

</comment><comment><USER18> Anyone know where I can get legit technical writing gigs? I used to get paid to write about Elasticsearch for a company's blog and that was pretty cool. Would be keen to do something like that again. I can write about anything in the sysadmin/devops space or in the penetration testing space. Thanks

<comment><USER2> Apply to a large company. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, all of these and _many_ more have tech writers as a full time position.

Of course, there are not gigs. I know nothing of gigs to be honest.

<comment><USER18> Thanks, but I don't know if I'd wanna do this full time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I actually found this article a bit confusing to read. I suppose they are "notes" but I found myself having to reread stuff a few times and it wasn't organized in a particularly clear way.

Here are some notes I had:

This is a very weird sentence:

> In the 1980s, they developed a minimalist approach and created a wonderful > Operator Training Manual for the IBM Displaywriter, imagine having to > introduce someone to using a word processor for the first time.

There is also a misspelling in "the four principals of minimalist instruction".

In that same section it is confusing to bullet point the four principles but include a summary of the principle at the end of the bullet point. This makes it hard to skim. (It's also self-referential, which the previous section recommends against.)

<comment><USER20> You will do really well as a proof-reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm a software engineer, but I have a degree in English lit. I find I love technical writing. Maybe it's because I'm often writing about systems I built, so I understand them well and the writing comes fluidly — it might be less fun to write about systems I don't know as well. Still, I find technical writing one of the parts of my job I most look forward to: presenting to my colleagues a proposed implementation, for example, is both a social aspect of engineering and a way to make sure your design is comprehensible and hence simple (simplicity being a hallmark of good design). I tend not to stress too much over whether I'm writing well: the goal is just to communicate ideas, after all, not to make art.

</comment><comment><USER22> At the end of this article the author links to and mentions the four types of technical documentation: [https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/](https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/)

I've found this to be especially useful when writing documentation. If you don't think in this way them your documentation may end up being an impromptu blend of more than one type, and hence may not be useful for a specific use case. Instead I try to structure the documentation for one of these.

</comment><comment><USER23> These are great notes!

I've been writing for years, but I am constantly finding out that I still have a long way to go.

Thanks!

<comment> D-Coder I recommend _Technical Editing: The Practical Guide For Editors And Writers_, [https://www.amazon.com/Technical-Editing-Practical- Editors-H...](https://www.amazon.com/Technical-Editing-Practical-Editors- Hewlett-Packard/dp/0201563568)

<comment><USER23> Thanks! I'll give it a look-see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The third section advises to avoid meta writing. So... get rid of the first two paragraphs of this article?

<comment><USER25> Avoid meta writing when doing technical writing, not when writing about technical writing. It's already meta.</comment></comment>


Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination - <AUTHOR> https://davidthorpe.dev/kick-the-shit-out-of-procrastination/ <comment><USER2> I think I've successfully managed to "beat" procrastination by adopting the pomodoro technique. I've shipped software for years now.

What I've come to realise however is that the brain/body can only do so much work in a day. I can program for a few hours a day (on a good day) and then it becomes increasingly more effort to do more coding. Sometimes, depending on the task, I'll be able to switch to another task. However, my point in all of this is, if you have a serious procrastination problem -- find a way to overcome it, but also recognise that your brain/body only has so much "fuel" each day, and you need to decide what to put it towards (e.g. work, hobbies, exercise, study, family, etc).

<comment><USER3> Listened to "Daily Ritual: How artists work" recently and the most common pattern seemed to be, work intensely for 2-4 hours in the morning, most people being finished by 1-2 in the afternoon, then go out for a long walk before doing light admin stuff in the mid-late afternoon.

It's also been my observation that this is how I actually want to work. I feel ready and able to tackle anything first thing in the morning, but past 1 o clock nothing I produce will be that much good and my productivity will be a shadow of what it was in the morning.

I work freelance so that's how I work nowadays, it feels like it comes naturally in a way that no other method I've ever tried does including pomodoro.

<comment><USER4> I think each one have to find where those 2-4hours lies.

For me they start between 5pm and 6pm.

I can spend the day in front of my screen doing (almost) nothing or admin stuff. And then it kicks on and I'm (a lot more) productive.

The problem is that it's around the time I have to take care of the kids when my wife can't...

<comment><USER5> Weird! I'm nearly the same - I can sit in front of my machine for most of the day, completely unproductive, and then in the late afternoon it's like there's a switch in my brain and suddenly I can work without any distractions at all. What really botheres me is that I finish nearly every day thinking "I'm just going to do exactly what I've been doing now, but first thing in the morning, and then have the afternoon and evening free", and it almost never happens. I just can't find the right focus/frame of mind until after lunch. It's extremely rare that it happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find that a lot of my procrastination comes from the anxiety of the thing I want to start doing not being completed. Literally, because I am worrying that the thing I want to work on is not already completed, I procrastinate from doing it. This is obviously counter productive and creates a feedback loop.

Something I'm bad at but seems to work is to have a conversation with myself that sort of comforts me about the anxiety and says "hey, what does this todo list look like? does it really matter that everything won't be completed today? You've spent years on this project so why would it be done today? Okay now go and address this one thing you have to do."

<comment><USER7> I'm usually very scared of "breaking" something and if there's nothing there to break in the first place, why would I create something that will potentially break at some point.

I'm getting better at knowing that this is my issue though and just think to myself "If I break it, I can go back a few steps or just fix the problem as it comes".

<comment><USER8> That can be another productivity killer. You inherit some app to maintain/modify, and you're afraid to touch it. So you essentially fork the code, start making small tweaks to reassure yourself that you're not breaking anything and it's all good. But at some point you have to take a bigger bite and it's still scary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Procrastination is actually my mind trying to tell me something that I'm not > attuned enough to realise in the first place.

Yeah, procrastination is a teacher. There's a reason why you or I procrastinate. Sometimes it takes only a couple minutes to figure out.

Regarding the fear part, I find re-framing it to be useful.

Fearing failure? Well, if you haven't started yet, you're already failing. What will you learn, even if you fail?

Fearing endless work? Do you enjoy the process? If not, could you make it more enjoyable?

Fearing judgement or putting something imperfect into the world? 1) We're all imperfect. 2) You can create, try, and fail in private. You don't have to show your first bad attempt to anyone. You can work on it until it's good enough and then show it to someone else.

And about that "break it down" advice, yes it does help, but I prefer to think about it as clarifying.

Clarify the work, identify the unresolved issue, hazy details, decisions not made. What am I ignoring? What's unclear? What's giving me anxiety? Any of those questions help.

Hope that helps a bit.

And as you say in the article that you're looking for more tools for defeating procrastination, I feel obliged to point you to the collection of anti- procrastination tools I've built at deprocrastination.co.

</comment><comment><USER10> I see lot of people focusing on some kind of lifehacks and tips to beat procrastination. The truth is(in my opinion) that it doesn't really matter how ergonomic your workflow is, or how distraction free your office/desktop/phone becomes. In the back of your mind you still know about these things. You know you can open youtube any time you want and browse for videos aimlessly.

For me, it's all about stress. Procrastination is a good sign when I feel too much pressure and there's too much weight on my shoulders. Procrastination becomes a way of self-medication, shutting your mind off and forgetting about all the issues you might be facing in daily life. For some people, the only time they have the luxury to be alone and not disturbed, is when they are at work, sitting behind their computer, headphones on -- and that's the best time to procrastinate.

<comment><USER11> I agree that developing "lifehacks", when taken too far, can be a form of procrastination itself. ...and that the underlying cause is emotional.

Nevertheless - we still need to do them.

I think the answer is both simpler and more difficult than most people are characterizing here.

1\. Discipline takes training (preferably from a young age). If you practice overcoming those mental blocks, you will be more accustomed to doing them and recognizing and avoiding those escape behaviors that we call procrastination.

2\. Visualizing and regularly reinforcing the Goal - that final benefit that puts all the work in between in context.

3\. Planning/chunking the work. It's a form of gamification - but don't let it itself become a form of procrastination. 99% of people _already_ _know_ what needs to be done, right now.

Personally, I have a simple system. Three Google Docs. 1. Is a short, somewhat vague list of goals I revisit every year at tax time. 2. Is a list of projects in a rough order of priority (actually it's a folder of Docs with one doc for each project). ...and most importantly, 3. The daily journal, where I add to the top each day the date and a rough list of things I'm working on.

People get lost in making sure their prioritizing is perfect, or adding too many things to their daily TODOs. In fact, in the context of doing what's important, I find that one of the key skills is being militant about things you're NOT going to do - and ignoring requests from others that don't fall in line with your own goals.

<comment><USER12> Very similar to my process.

Most people struggle with prioritising because they think that it is deciding what order to do things in - I like to say that far more important than that is deciding what things you are NOT going to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In my case, procrastination is a sign of depression. It is an escape mechanism. I found myself dropping clients after procrastinating instead of completing their projects because something about them always stressed me, made me hate money or what I do for a living. 30 minutes or 3 hours of shutting my brain off, telling myself I will do it later is my way of escaping. There is something subconscious about it always after I 'meditate' enough to pinpoint what the problem was. These are episodes coming and going once in a while.

<comment><USER14> This is true for me as well. Procrastinating happens when I feel shitty (which is essentially every morning). It's my brain requesting easy dopamine hits like YouTube or CS:GO so that it can feel better. But those things only help your brain feel better in the very short term (ie. while they are occurring). After you're done and you close YouTube or the video game, you still feel shitty so you need another easy dopamine source to stimulate your brain again. This continues the cycle and it's very hard to break out of because each source of easy dopamine leaves you feeling crappy after engaging with it, so you find another one which does the same thing. Once you've started that cycle for any given day it's extremely difficult to break because your brain was built to be addicted to dopamine. This worked when we only got hits of dopamine for following animal tracks to hunt or when we saw the smoke from the sticks we were rubbing together and were about to start fire, but today it just doesn't work.

To solve this the steps listed in the article are pretty good actually, but for me it is unrealistic to just remove all the apps on my phone/computer. It doesn't solve the underlying problem and is pretty simple to just download whatever app again or use my tv instead in a moment of boredom/sadness/frustration. The real key is to make each task that you have to do for work so incredibly simple (ie break them down to the smallest units possible) that avoiding the task becomes an absolute joke. I basically start with super specific tasks to get me started, and then ramp up once I'm engaged. Sometimes the first few tasks are literally "Open the codebase", "Change the header text to something better", "make element x have a border radius". One thing I've noticed is that I always try to think of every edge case and what the best way to code something would be before even typing anything. Planning is good, but eventually it hits a point where I get annoyed or stressed because I can't find the most optimal way to do something and then....I procrastinate. So what I've started doing is if I feel this starting to happen I implement the feature or whatever I'm working on in the EASIEST way I can think of at that moment. If I have even a tiny idea of how it could be done, I start working on it that way, and then later as I get further along I can clean it up or reimplement it a different way. That's been pretty useful to me, it kind of goes back to breaking problems down but it's slightly different.

The last thing is exercise in the morning. Starting my day with something difficult sets the tone for the whole day. Sure, I could still go watch YouTube after working out but usually I feel good about the workout and my body that I don't _need_ the easy dopamine hits after that and it's easier for me to get started on work.

I do wish there was an inherent way to make productive work the source of easy dopamine hits but I haven't quite figured that one out, yet. Depression is momentum. If you're feeling bad, it's a spiral down (wasting time watching TV, then your brain is so fried from that that you don't cook dinner and instead just eat an unhealthy meal, then dessert because you're still sad, etc). If you're feeling good it's a spiral up. Keep trying, keep working at it. Harder things (like work and exercise) will help you feel better in the long term. The things we try to avoid; YouTube, tv, video games, will make your brain stimulated in the moment but you fall further and further into depression (or I do at least).

Hopefully any of that was helpful but it may not even apply to you at all

<comment><USER15> A lot of this resonated with me. Thanks for posting it. I've been struggling in my career as a software engineer for several years now. I used to love it and didn't need any "tricks" to get myself to do the job. I have countless theories as to what happened but don't know for sure.

I certainly struggle with the dopamine hit problem. I have a little will power in the morning and then things drop off rapidly. I can force myself to do urgent things like meetings or something like fix production going down. Anything else though is very difficult to chug through. I won't let myself play video games or watch movies during work hours out of some deep seated moralistic responsibility. This doesn't help me work though. Instead, I'll let myself procrastinate on things that I find "acceptable" for people on work hours (but for far less time than what I do them). This is primarily browsing news sites and eating. I can't stock snacks in my home or my desk at work as I will just compulsively devour them if I have resistance to the task at hand. I then also like you say, feel energy drained after something like browsing the web compulsively.

It then sucks seeing other engineers in the field, with far less experience than myself, just pumping out code hour after hour. I've tried different industries, jobs and even moved cities in an effort to fix things. If I don't like programming anymore, I don't know what else I would do that pays even half as much. I've tried engineering management which is a lot more urgent timed stuff with more admin like work. I was able to force myself to do the job but not super well and I faced weekly negative feedback for mistakes I was making which would also zap my energy to perform.

I find a lot of the "tricks" posted in this thread however to be gimmicks. I know that's a bit cynical but to explain, I try them out to keep an open mind, but then within days or a week, they seem to stop working. It's as if my brain is sabotaging itself. Like it's saying -- oh that technique worked yesterday, we can't have that, so you should just not have the will power to do it today --. Makes it feel like there's a deeper underlying issue that needs solved but no amount of contemplation on this seems to help.

I like to think that the right programming role exists for me somewhere, but it's super hard to study for interviews after a day's work. I feel like I have 100 will power points a day, I spend 200 of them trying to force myself to work, and then have nothing left for when the day is done.

Sorry for the long rant but it was refreshing hearing your story and seeing that I'm not the only one with these symptoms.

<comment><USER14> I might be off base here, but the "I feel like I have 100 will power points a day, I spend 200 of them trying to force myself to work, and then have nothing left for when the day is done" line struck me. This is something my mom has always had trouble with. She would spend the ENTIRE day talking about, planning, and getting ready to go to the gym but she would rarely actually go.

To me, it seems that the act of preparing/motivating yourself to do something can be more tiring or drain more energy than doing the work itself. I used to try to wait to do my exercise for the day until I felt like it, which of course rarely ever came. Then I felt bad about myself for not working out and the problem kept getting worse. Eventually I realized that the only option is to ignore how I'm feeling when I first wake up and workout anyways, no matter how hard it is to start (see Mel Robbins' 5 second rule for getting started or getting out of bed). A couple of sets or laps in I usually feel the motivation kick in. This seems to be true of many things, and reminds me of this graph that explains how the things our brain wants to do (easy dopamine / instant gratification) leaves us net-negative over time (depression) vs. the things we should do (delayed gratification) leave us somewhat unhappy in the very short term (ie. when you are getting started each morning) but net-positive (happy!) in the long term.

Here's the graph: [https://s3.amazonaws.com/skinner- production/story_images/fil...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/skinner- production/story_images/files/000/044/184/large/Temptation-bundling-katy- Milkman.jpg?1533223901)

Full source article (not advocating for this strategy just providing source): [https://thriveglobal.com/stories/how-to-overcome- procrastina...](https://thriveglobal.com/stories/how-to-overcome- procrastination-and-boost-your-willpower-using-temptation-bundling/)

It seems like once you understand this and can act on it (some people even do it subconsciously or as a result of how they were raised), you are part of a small percentage of the population that can do big things in this world. Success is heavily dependent on your consistency.

I used to work an office job, and would try to go home and work on my side projects or course work. It was always quite difficult to do. I eventually learned that I was giving myself the _option_ to do the side project after work, and when given the choice I almost always chose to do something else (like watch YouTube and play video games). At the time, I absolutely hated my job and was completely drained at the end of the day so I thought I needed time to relax before starting my other work. Of course once I started playing a video game I never moved on/recovered and didn't start my side project work. So instead of giving myself the option to do the work, I made a rule for myself that when I got home from my job I would start working on the side project, regardless of how I felt. No motivation was needed now, because it was the rule. Doing the work was the only choice available, there's no alternative.

I eventually quit my job and still the motivation to do my side project isn't really there. I finally realized it will never come. Even if you didn't have your job it's unlikely that you would _want_ to study for interviews, but you may (monetarily or otherwise) be forced into a position where it's required, and thus you do it. It may be beneficial to create this position artificially for yourself now. Every day when you come home from work you do 3 leetcode questions (just an example, maybe instead it's writing an answer to a potential interview question or something like that). That's the rule, don't do anything else until those are completed. Somedays, you will feel motivated after finishing those 3 questions and will continue on to other productive things. Other days, maybe you don't want to do anymore after that. But even those 3 questions over an extended period of time will put you much further ahead than you are now. At the moment, you are slowly drowning by doing nothing.

As a general rule, I am personally able to engage myself (to a reasonable extent -- if I hit a hard task or problem sometimes I feel the urge to distract myself) in the work after getting started. The _getting started_ step is the part that trips me up. If that's also the case for you, then I would seriously try to create structure for yourself. Discipline will get you started with the work, and the motivation should come after doing it for 20 or so minutes. If you feel yourself slipping for multiple days in a row then you have to reset yourself and start again as quickly as possible. You build more and more resistance (more stress, task seems more daunting) as time goes on and you're not doing anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you are have a lot of procrastination problems and if you have always had those problems from an early age, don't dismiss the idea that you may actually have ADHD.

There really isn't adult onset ADHD, but there are a fair number of adults who have undiagnosed ADHD. Take an online screening test and that will tell you if you might want to see somebody about a full test.

This article is talking about the idea that we can train our brains to act like we have ADHD and how to break that brain plasticity cycle, but these techniques would be helpful if you also have ADHD.

<comment><USER17> but people should be careful assuming they have it. people should do as you say and simply see professionals about it and be tested for it.

stress and anxiety can present symptoms that overlap with ADHD symptoms.

<comment><USER16> Yep, that's why a big part of a real diagnosis is "did you have these problems in elementary school". If they started when you got your first iPhone after university ... it's not ADHD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > On my iPhone I move every single application into a folder named ".". I then > move that onto the second screen. My phone dock has four apps: Phone, > Headspace, Things and SMS:

Yawn. When I read these minimalism tips I always wonder if people giving this advice ever had a real job or if their job is actually giving people minimalism advice. Good luck trying to justify being the only one without Skype/Slack/Gmail

<comment><USER19> Its like the advice "set your watch 10 mins behind" so you always reach on time. No shit I know its 10 mins behind every time I see the watch.

<comment><USER20> Sure, and yet... why is anyone ever late to anything? Let alone why are some people persistently late, in circumstances where that matters, and they know it's an issue?

Rationally that makes no sense so dismissing techniques for resolving it that also don't make rational sense on that basis seems wrong.

<comment><USER19> Not sure what you are trying to say here. Do you mean "because we don't know why people are getting late so dismissing a solution which I know doesn't work seems wrong" ? But you do being the reply with "sure" so was that an agreement ?

<comment><USER20> If you know that it doesn't work for you then obviously that's simply a fact.

I thought you were making a more general statement that this doesn't work because it doesn't make sense (anyone using it would just adjust their timings).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder how beating procrastination can be bootstrapped. A professional procrastinator will also procrastinate reading this article even though they know it's exactly what they need. For example, I clicked the "how to be ultra spiritual" video in that article and was then curious about other videos made by the same person and pretty soon found myself in the usual procrastinator's state, forgetting the article or the fact that I got to this article in the first place by procrastinating implementing an algorithm that I've been wanting to complete for a couple of weeks and instead checking what's new on HN ... I guess one needs to get to a certain point of being determined enough to make a strategic change in one's productivity, and the incentives required for such a change are probably specific to each person

<comment><USER22> For a professional procrastinator, bargaining to defer an onerous task will often include doing less onerous tasks that are more often overlooked.

I know I'm not studying for my final but look at how clean the bathroom is!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A key insight that helped me beat procrastination is to recognise when your brain is trying to procrastinate. We all experience lulls in productivity and instinctively open that social or news website link - when you do this you need to actively tell yourself that your brain is getting distracted.

This comes from a study (which I can't find, but I think it was featured on the BBC not too long ago) - procrastination impulses come and go in waves - when you know how to effectively tackle the wave, you can return to the calm seas of productivity.

</comment><comment><USER24> I like his writing style.

One of the biggest tools that I employ, is a fairly rigid schedule.

I work @home, these days (like everyone, but I've been at it longer).

I get up at 5AM, even though I don't need to.

I do my morning exercise, even though I don't need to.

I start my workday at around 6:30AM, and try to wrap it up by 5 (seven days a week -my GitHub page is solid green).

I plan to do unpleasant, boring things when I set up my projects; for example, configuration management, refactoring, testing, release coordination, and...yuck...documentation.

And then...I do it!

Shipping (as opposed to writing) software has a _lot_ of boring, repetitive, pedantic stuff.

I have to be careful not to fall into the automation trap, where I see automation (especially release automation) as a "silver bullet" cure for boredom.

But that's just me. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER25> I use #2 (blocking distractions by editing the /etc/hosts) and it does work. Mostly because it's already a reflex strategy to go on these websites. Stuck on a problem? Check Hacker News or Reddit for a short-term dopamine trigger.

But just adding the 127.0.0.1 to the 3-5 most frequented websites is enough to stop me from reading them. It's like now I have to consciously decide: "Do you REALLY want to check this website?"

It would be similar to Netflix not jumping to the next episode during a binge watch, but rather pushing you to their homepage after an episode.

You "break the default" in a way.

<comment><USER26> "Stuck on a problem? Check Hacker News or Reddit for a short-term dopamine trigger"

This sucks and it is absolutely true, but to me it's more about boredom, you know that monkey job you absolutely need to do but is terribly boring to the sleep inducing level?

That immediately makes me search for some other thing to focys, fighting it is very hard, I don't smoke but I think this is the closest that comes to my mind when I feel the "rush".

<comment><USER25> Yep, boredom is definitely one reason.

Also, when I was assigned to a new project where I get to work on a modern tech stack and create a proof of concept, I was able to got 6-10 hours of high productivity (sort of like a honeymoon phase with new tech) for several days.

But then I got re-assigned to a project with a tech stack that I really don't like e.g. a "hot reload" would take 5-10 seconds and it would trigger every time I save a file + the project structure doesn't make sense - but people who worked on it have since left the project + I'm not learning anything useful. I've tried focusing on the tech challenges, but my tasks are mostly to fix bugs. Refactoring is not wanted, since the idea is to ship a less buggy version as soon as possible.

Fortunately I'm a contract freelancer, once this project ends in 2 months, I won't extend and will look for a new company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > _One of the biggest things that can get you drawn into procrastinating is to > go into a crazy website checking loop where you loop through Twitter, > Hackernews, Reddit, BBC, etc in the hope for a new bit of information that > probably has no real relevance to your life._

As someone personally familiar with this phenomenon (for example, I remember smiling at [https://xkcd.com/477/](https://xkcd.com/477/) when it was posted in 2008, nearly 12 years ago), and as someone too familiar with procrastination in general, here's one insight I had recently, and an old insight:

1\. Firstly, "epiphany addiction" — I encountered it on the blog of Aaron Swartz ([http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/anders](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/anders)):

> _The irony, of course, is that the books are totally useless unless you take > their advice. If you just keep reading them, thinking "that's so insightful! > that changes everything," but never actually doing anything different, then > pretty quickly the feeling will wear off and you'll start searching for > another book to fill the void. Chris Macleod calls this "epiphany > addiction": "Each time they feel like they've stumbled on some life changing > discovery, feel energized for a bit without going on to achieve any real > world changes, and then return to their default […]. They always end up back > at the drawing board of trying to think their way out of their problem, and > it's not long before they come up with the latest pseudo earth shattering > insight."_

2\. Beware of searching for one true method by which you will finally "defeat" procrastination. I remember this excitement when some trick used to work, and the urge to write a post like this (BTW, congrats on writing and finishing this post — I never got around to writing something so "finished"), having found "the answer". But eventually some trick that used to make you productive may stop helping so much. (Because there are other unaddressed root issues, which seem to find a "workaround": this is the "procrastination as wily adversary" metaphor, as in _War of Art_ etc.) Ultimately, it seems we need a complementary set of approaches, both external (like Steps 1 to 3 in this blog post: changing your habits), and internal (being more aware of your feelings and drives, etc). Procrastination (for many) seems to be discomfort-avoidance, where the discomfort can be some combination of fear, anxiety, distaste, dread, uncertainty, ambiguity, conflict with (some of) one's values, etc. It helps to become more aware about the nature of your discomfort, and get to the root of it. But ultimately you can't think your way out of the procrastination problem. Things like mindfulness, talking to a therapist, good exercise,… all help; just don't pin your hopes too strongly on one of them, to the exclusion of other approaches. (I had given up blocking websites as it had stopped working for me, but after reading this post I just added a major time-waster to my /etc/hosts file, thank you.)

The goal is to get to a state where you don't feel out of control of your own mind, where you can decide to do something and just do it — but it can be a process to get there. Good luck to you, me, and all of us. "You can't think your way into right action, but you can act your way into right thinking."

</comment><comment><USER28> Procrastination is a very delicate problem.

I mostly embraced it. As long as I'm procrastinating good things by doing other good things, it works pretty well.

It also helps to do things you like.

I'm still on my smartphone 90% of the day and sleeping until 12 every day, btw.

<comment><USER29> I think that's it too. It's another thing that is considered odd/not normal when it is probably a perfectly valid condition/feeling that needs to be handled kindly.

I have come to see it as having a parallel in extrovert/introvert - for many introverts interacting with people is just fine, but it cannot be a marathon - we have to recharge after that. Interaction is very brain energy consuming in such scenarios.

Similarly, procrastination is something similar on a different time scale. I can be intensively 'productive' for a long time (2-3 days or so), but then I have to do nothing or, in some rare cases, something else that does not involve, I am guessing, that part of the brain. Rinse repeat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have made "device of purpose" that fixes this behavior over time.

1) Laptop is for work only ( every thing else is blocked )

2) Mobile is for social media and procrastination ( I switch off internet while working. )

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my next thing I want to trial. Complete block on anything non work related on the laptop. Complete block on anything that doesn't further my values on the phone. But then have an iPad for mucking around and consuming junk content. The idea that it's not easily accessible since the iPad won't be with me at work and it won't be in my pocket being constantly accessible.

<comment><USER9> I used to have Twitter (my main source of distraction) on my phone and iPad, now I don't have it on any device and it's helped tremendously.

On my computer, I block all distracting sites with the extension I built until noon, then I have 20 minutes for mostly Twitter, then all blocked until 4PM, another 20 min break, and then blocked until 8PM. 8PM-midnight, I do whatever I want. I've found this a fair agreement with myself that I have no reason to break. It created a rhythm for me.

So perhaps if a complete block is too big a stretch, you can give yourself a couple well-defined "fun breaks".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I may try this, but a couple thoughts I'd love feedback/ideas on:

1) I routinely get into these "browser time loops" while waiting for a build. App's got 30s build time? Ah, I'll check reddit. 30 minutes later ... I have found that autosave has helped, and hot module reload in Webpack, but for server code that requires build (.NET), still looking for a way to reduce that. Similar for publishing code. It takes a few minutes to publish to web host, let's go read the news... I feel like a really good CI would help with this.

2) I value being informed. I use Feedly to monitor news, especially industry news. So part of me doesn't want to block sites on principal. I keep saying "I value staying up to date on these topics. I'll just avoid when I should be working" but never do. A way to time access would probably be worthwhile.

3) I question too much focus on "productivity" as defined by spending time looking at an IDE. I don't have 24x7 cranking out code as a goal. I'd much rather focus on extending time "in the zone" where I'm focused and writing quality code. Pomodoro breaks that for me. Music helps sometimes, but can also distract. Caffeine helps, but requires more and more.

</comment><comment><USER32> For years I was a major procrastinator to the point that it was really affecting my job performance and my relationship.

That all changed when I got a sleep evaluation and realized I had severe sleep apnea. My quality of sleep was terrible. As a result I had zero motivation.

I got a CPAP machine, and after an initial period of adjustment, it was a profound change. The year after I received the machine was the most productive in my entire life.

Take sleeping seriously. It may help you in ways you never imagined!

</comment><comment><USER33> One thing i'd like to post here:

I started talking ritalin when i tried a degree again with ~22?) and it was day and night to the same year before:

My metal wall of starting/doing was gone.

I'm still struggling with even talking ritalin regularly and there are downsides to it, but i do have the feeling that it is something which helps, something i actually really should talk regularly.

Its like 'i don't need glasses' 'holy shit how was i able to walk around without glasses?' 'Oh no wonder why i had to sit at thefirst row while everyone else had no issue at all reading' 'how did that go so bad suddenly?'

</comment><comment><USER34> If you're in your home office, don't keep your private phone around. Put it in a separate room, ideally in flight mode and on silent.

On your work phone, remove all distractions.

Fore Firefox, the "impulse blocker" add-on can be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER35> This article really helped me realise what's behind my procrastination habits. It's not about time management, or self control, but managing emotions.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/smarter-living/why-you- pr...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/smarter-living/why-you- procrastinate-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-self-control.html)

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19482238](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19482238)

</comment><comment><USER36> I would encourage everyone who struggles with procrastination to try CBT techniques as described in "Feeling Good" by Dr. Burns. These address the psychological reasons for procrastination directly.

</comment><comment><USER37> What boosted my productivity was thinking about and realizing that procrastination is a choice you make.

Anything you do, you choose to do so. Even the things that seem like you have no choice. You do.

You dont HAVE to eat. The consequence is that at some point your body doesnt get what it needs but you have the power to choose to not to eat.

You dont have to work on your project. But each choice has a consequence nonetheless.

So in short. What worked for me is realizing that EVERYTHING is a choice. You have to think back from the consequence and then choose what happens if you do something now vs you do something later

</comment><comment><USER38> Is anyone aware a way to identify this window of potential high productivity using a Fitbit/Apple Watch or other device that measure physical body characteristics like heart rate, temperature, etc?

I find that on some days my productivity window comes and goes and is wasted during times I have a meeting, or need to deal with something urgent but simple and then my brain is fried when I need to tackle a complex creative task. Knowing with some certainty that the window has arrived might help more actively block out other things.

<comment><USER39> No, learn how to listen to your body. Heart rate, temperature are side effects in response to an emotional block (e.g. anxiety, fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of the unknown).

We have been taught a giant lie that the head is separate, reigning over the "dumb" body. "I think therefore I am" is a load of bull, or a delusion. Your body is your subconscious, your stomach your primitive brain. Your body is chock-full of hard-learned lessons, all delivered to you subconsciously as instincts. Don't ignore these instincts. We are animalistic creatures, heavily driven by instinct, and rightly so. To discard your instincts is actually irrational!

Observe what your body is telling you. Why is there anxiety? Think to a physical manifestation of your anxiety. Is it tightness in your chest or a lump in your throat, where do you feel that anxiety? Observe it. Do not rationalize it, do not explain it, do not deconstruct it, do not jump to any conclusions. The moment you reach to touch it with your fingers of reason, the truth (body instinct) will slip away. That's why you just have to observe, non-judgementally.

As you observe and think more about the physical manifestation of your anxiety, see what thoughts and reasons rise up. The more in touch you get with your body, the less information you will be throwing out.

You don't need external devices to tell you how you are feeling for productivity potential, you just need to A) accept that observing subconscious reactions is a huge source of information, B) your gut feel is correct, but it takes time to process and understand what the gut is telling you, and C) it will take time to get in touch with all your body.

Urgent but simple — have you considered how much of an emotional toll that takes on you? No wonder that can put you into a state where you feel maybe knocked off rails, or some kind of self criticism starts up and you're beating yourself up for the root cause of urgent task or you're lamenting the team situation that got you there. These are heavy background burdens, though they may be emotional, are still background threads your brain gives slices to. Now your brain scheduler has less brainpower available for your complex task. Another way to put it is: They are clouds in your heads sky, obscuring the sun of creativity and productivity.

Learn to feel the productivity window by feel, by gut. The same gut feeling will also tell you when to stop. Procrastination often involves avoidance of something, for whatever reason. The trick is to _observe_ what you are avoiding and what feelings are there when you think about this avoidance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The only thing that helps me concentrate on work (coding) is exercising. When I come back from bike/run/whatever, catch my breath and take a shower, only after that my mind is calm enough so that I can concentrate well for ~2 hours. After that, you have to eat again, participate in a meeting, read your email, deal with messages from family, check the news, the latest coding tutorial, etc etc, and the concentration is gone, no matter how hard I try again later.

</comment><comment><USER41> I am also a procrastinator! Keeping distractions away, especially the phone, is the most important to me as well, although I don't go to the extremes the author does!

I found that the bigger and more open ended the task is, the quicker I fizzle out and get distracted. The key for me is to get to some quicker reward point. For example I am currently working on an electronic toy project, and my current goal is to only test the music generation. Anything bigger gets hard to focus!

</comment><comment><USER42> I've found that when I procrastinate it's due to the fact when I start a new project I can work on it for days until I realize, why am I doing X when I can do Y? and in this case X could be using a good o'l rest api instead of graphql or a completely new way of fetching data.

Then I stop working because I did realize I can use something else that will be smarter and more efficient in the long run, So then my mind goes: OK! lets start working on that, and there the endless cycle begins. Because when I start working on the thing that will make the first thing better I also realize a day or two in, that this is stupid and I need to get back to the original thing but I can't do it because X is not as efficient as Y would have been. Then I try to think of something else for Y. So in a sense I'm stuck in a cycle where I try to improve and get my self to write less code before the project even has taken off in a meaningful way. It's just like in devops when people try to scale something before you have the users... which doesn't even make sense. And I'm guilty of that as well.

</comment><comment><USER43> There's actually some science behind procrastination and the steps you can do to beat it: [http://nickswan.net/procrastination/](http://nickswan.net/procrastination/) These are my notes from Tim Pychyl's lecture that was posted on here a few months ago. Link to the YouTube video included in my blog posts. It's a really good watch.

<comment><USER44> > Ask myself : What negative emotions do I have associated with project or > task x,y,z?

That's a valuable tip. Drilling down to what stresses you out and finding a way to integrate that into self is central to overcoming procrastination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Disable internet. It takes 2 clicks. You can always get it back, it doesn't go anywhere. Do this for your workstation.

Use a laptop to browse stackexchange. Set email to sync every hour, unless your job is to answer emails as they come. Checking once an hour is enough.

</comment><comment><USER46> I have found that having a decent computer really helps my productivity. As a grad student, an adjunct, and now a full time faculty member, I have consistently had shitty slow computers in my office on campus. I have found that because it is so slow that when I grade a paper online, i hit submit and the browser takes so long to load the next paper that I get distracted by checking email or twitter or facebook. Now that I'm stuck at home, I have noticed that my personal computer is so much faster that the next paper loads almost instantly and I get less distracted even though i have tons of more things here that could distract me than in the office.

</comment><comment><USER47> I often put my phone on DND and only allow calls , that really helps. From morning 9 to 6 and everytime I am on my bed. Removing social media apps also helps. I wont say its 100% effective but I see drastic reduction in my screen time.

</comment><comment><USER48> To me there are two keys:

1) Keep the phone far out of reach

2) Every time I get overwhelmed, try to stop thinking about the big picture and think "What's the smallest piece I can do right now?" Starting my IDE, starting the software, fixing some obvious typo. Whatever.

3) Yes, block distracting apps, but _not permanently._ If I do that, I relapse and feel guilty. Instead, I use a Chrome app called Focus (there's a million of them out there) to block distractions for 30 minutes at a time. Enough for me to do work, but not enough where I want to give up.

</comment><comment><USER49> I fundamentally disagree with all the tips in the article. Mostly because I've tried them and tips like this in the past. They work but only for brief periods. They all require force. Forcing behavior on yourself. The mind becomes a critical parent to the mind. I realize this is a negative comment. "What works then?" you might ask. That's something I'm still figuring out. However a negative result is useful because it saves you from wasting time on dead ends.

</comment><comment><USER50> What has somewhat worked for me is Focusmate. You make a video call to a stranger, and you both commit to 50 minutes of work. I guess you could do that with a workmate or a friend, if you dare be honest in needing that kind of basic childlish psychological support. Actually, I have almost picked a habit of doing the same commitment alone, which is nice. :-)

Even that does not work, if you are tired, exhausted, depressed, sad, angry, desperate and lost. Fix that first.

</comment><comment><USER51> I've long had the habit of putting stuff that I know I can waste a lot of time on into my /etc/hosts to point to the void (news sites, forums).

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm sure it's been said many times before, but there's a special irony to reading an essay about procrastination in order to avoid doing work.

</comment><comment><USER53> I think the main problem with advice on 'how to beat procrastination' is the assumption that everyone is the same. Which is not the case, of course, because people have different sleep patterns, different habits, and different reasons to procrastinate.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and one trick or tool that works for me wouldn't necessarily work for you. And it can be really hard to find something that works.

</comment><comment><USER54> If you don't want to modify your /etc/hosts file manually you can always use [https://selfcontrolapp.com/](https://selfcontrolapp.com/) which will do it for you.

Pomodoro technique has really helped me as well. I feel it forces me to just start right away and get into the flow. The only thing you have to build the habit of is actually starting the timer.

</comment><comment><USER55> I too believed that my procrastination problem was ADHD. Almost everything I read about ADHD symptoms agreed on to my behaviour. This went on for like 8 years and one day I decided to visit a Psychiatrist.

He said it could be general anxiety and prescribed me medicines. I came back home and googled the medicine to find out that it is an anti-depressant, SSRI if you want to know.

Then I said to myself, "crap ADHD is due to the lack of Dopamine and not Serotonin, this is not going to workout". But I chose to take it according to the prescription, hoping that after the tablets are over I can go back to the second session and get my psychiatrist prescribe me ADHD medications.

After two weeks, I could feel the change. Suddenly there was motivation to work, my mind was not constantly fantasizing about the "perfect" work that will interest me. I could see interesting tasks to do in my current job (I am a web developer). I could sense business needs rather than writing the perfect code. I was productive. Challenges did not scare me. I could understand things in meetings without confusion, or obsessing over details. I stopped using pomodoro.

My obsession to constantly check Reddit, HN, Twitter, Youtube was rapidly dying out. Going to sleep did finally feel like going to rest, rather than one more "task" to struggle.

Most surprisingly, I did not give up on physical tasks. Usually I would give up the last rep when I am lifting, but under the medication I did reps to failure and that was the first time I did not give up something which is difficult.

I was still checking Reddit, HN out of habit, but I could stop when I want to. Even my relationship with my wife improved. This was indeed magical. Things I struggled to do or couldn't do became easier and I could do it naturally.

All of this, though lasted only for a few months, as I discontinued the medication for various reasons: people close to me were questioning like, "for how long are you going to depend on it", slowly I developed some tolerance for it, and some minor reversible-side-effects. Now I regret not forming habits when I had the chance with the medication.

The point being, the symptoms of OCD, anxiety disorder, ADHD and ADD all overlap, and don't assume yourself anything. Talk to a psychiatrist, because they know better. Hope this information helps someone or at the least gives them hope.

<comment><USER56> I'm identifying myself a lot with your story. I think I might have ADHD and my psychiatrist is thinking of prescribing me SSRI. Do you end up taking ADHD medication or was the SSRI enough for you to fell the change?

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Here's what worked for me in lockdown (I had issues working at home) : aim to do minimum 6 pomodoros a day, where each pomodoro is 55 minutes long. When measuring time I try to focus on a single task that's not related to admin work (answering emails etc.) I figured that 6 hours of productive work is not far off from what most people probably get done in an office environment anyway.

<comment><USER58> How long of a break in between?

<comment><USER57> 5 minutes. Sometime if I get in the flow or I'm in a middle of the meeting I'll skip the break and restart the timer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> The DNS hack is a nice low fidelity way to avoid procrastination helpers. I have also used [https://www.rescuetime.com/](https://www.rescuetime.com/) which provides a bit more of a polished interface for accomplishing the same effect.

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm gonna read that one, later.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm glad that the article acknowledges procrastination as an emotional issue, not an organisational one. Reading Getting Things Done or using a new Todo list app does not do anything for procrastination. The slight bump is just down to novelty.

</comment><comment><USER62> Implement all these life hacks and you too can crank out 4% more JavaScript per day and don't even have to worry about politics, current affairs or what is going on in the country or the world.

It's not like being informed is an important part of being a citizen.

</comment><comment><USER63> I know plenty of people consider it some form of cheating, but medication can help. I've been regularly taking armodafinil for quite some time now and it helps immensely to start doing things, to get into concentrated work and to stay there.

</comment><comment><USER50> Another cruel tip is to put all your procrastination prone Web accounts behind complex login controls (passwords behind 2 factor authentication Lastpass with paranoid settings), and purge your cookies often.

<comment><USER64> In a similar vein: put your guilty pleasure accounts in a browser that you hate, log yourself out of there. Make fake accounts on your primary browser, so that whenever you have the urge to log in or are accidentally logged in, you find nothing there.

I do this for Facebook. I'm considering to do it for YouTube.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I've bookmarked this to go in the large folder of articles on beating procrastination that I've amassed.

I'll get around to reading them all sometime soon.

</comment><comment><USER66> Write your distractions down. Look at them at lunch / end of the day (and by then you'll find they don't seem so important).

</comment><comment><USER67> It's great to see this article at the top of Hacker News, my number one source of procrastination.

</comment><comment><USER68> The problem when the procrastination has nothing to do with the phone or applications, or fear, but instead with reading and writing a lot because you actually want to write at least one novel but that isn't going to make you money (most likely).

Oh, well, still a good article.

</comment><comment><USER69> Step one: Stay out of Hacker News comments section...

</comment><comment><USER70> "That mother-fucker!"

</comment><comment><USER71> Self-discipline is key. Either get better at it, or don't own a smartphone or a computer.

<comment><USER7> The brain is very good at self-sabotaging when it can't figure out what or how to deal with certain situations though. The best thing to do is figure out why you're procrastinating before trying to fix it.

<comment><USER72> Paradoxically, I think just acknowledging procrastination as _an_ example of a bad thing, but not _the most_ important one, might work well.

I say this because anxiety around needing to do something important is one possible cause of procrastination in the first place, and yet there is nothing more anxiety-inducing than telling yourself that by procrastinating, you're failing to do the most important things first. Whereas instead, if you only go so far as to make a mental note of it when you catch yourself procrastinating, you'll give yourself a moment to reflect without giving yourself anxiety that perpetuates further procrastination.

Also, you may have a subconscious reason for not doing something. Procrastinating could simply just be your brain's way of letting a better idea about how to do it percolate. That said, forming habits of doing certain unproductive things could be a pointless loss of productivity. Like if you have a habit of checking social media several times a day you might try blocking yourself from that and see how much productivity you've gained. And after all, there are better ways of procrastinating than by checking social media, like going for walks, trying new healthy recipes if you cook, or even cleaning (I actually don't know how many times I've thought of a good solution while cleaning), etc.

Once you've done that, you can think about it in terms of optimizing time spent working vs. time spent in leisure, and acknowledge that the "good" forms of procrastinating are an important form of leisure, which, if you've optimized the ratio well, boost your productivity by restoring mental energy and increasing creativity. Technically this includes sleep as well. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Bookmarked to read later.

</comment><comment><USER74> [deleted]

<comment><USER75> Maybe your posts would be more appreciated if you posted them with your personal account and didn't write totally write them like ads. Oh, and if they were more relevant to what's being posted. I don't procrastinate because of clickbait.

I'm afraid that you'll get this account restricted if you continue like this. You're also tarnishing your brand.

Edit: Another notorious project-poster is burtonator, which I also find mildly annoying, but whenever he posts about his project at least it's actually tangentially related to what is being discussed. He's a good bit less over the line than you are, in my opinion.</comment></comment>