I really enjoy eating, but if I'm caught up in something I don't always remember to do it. Sometimes I'll go hours past my regularly scheduled meal times. Then I'm sitting at my desk wondering (only for a short time) why my stomach hurts. Oh ya, food.
While this is a extreme example, the logic still applies to coding/writing or anything else. Sometimes the tasks you should do are side tracked by other tasks. And if you're deep in thought, you might not have the internal alarm to switch to something more of a priority. Hence external alarms.
In the process of eating you have access to many choices. You have good food, you have junk food, and you have bad food.
Some people lack self control and discipline so they end up eating more junk food and bad food than good.
Same goes for the process of productivity. You have work, distractions, and hinderances.
If this is what you need to build up a habit of self control, then good for you. If not whatever.
But it also somewhat true. If I love music I would be playing my guitar every single day. Being a rockstar is sometimes both incidental and consequential.
My example doesn't mention making a choice of what to eat, only becoming "aware" that one is hungry (needs to eat). The joy of eating (independent of choice) has little to do with recognizing that it's time to eat. Likewise, the joy or writing/programming has little to do with identifying and prioritizing those tasks efficiently.
I could have said it simpler by stating that one would be foolish to rely on emotions to schedule his/her day.
It's interesting you bring up food. Everything goes much more smoothly when I'm fasting: I'm way more focused, and the problems that do crop up, I feel I'm able to negotiate more effectively. I tend to look at it as a kind of perverse karmic trade-off, but that's just me...
Let me just counter that with my experience. I can focus better and I get things done much better when eat regulary and when I eat well (no fast food, not too much fat etc). If I eat to late or if I only eat a sandwich for breakfast the whole day can become ruined and if I completely skip a meal I'll be worse off for a day or two.
I experience this too. The period when I arrive at work before I've eaten anything is usually my most focused. I feel calm and I would describe my mind as "quiet". Once I eat, it's like everything gets noisy and I have a really difficult time concentrating for longer than about a minute on anything.
Coding or writing are not uniform tasks. There are ups and downs, parts that are tedious, parts that go smoothly, parts that will not budge one inch despite lots of time put in (bug hunting!). It's not all the same.
Building up on that, you can't control if the next task you have is going to be a tedious or smooth one. If you have a bug, or have to parse a CSV file in your assembly language program, then you just gotta do it. Sometimes there may be a way around it, but most often there isn't. Otherwise, you'd be able to circumvent the whole task in the first place.
You might think you like all ice cream, until someone hands you some anchovies ice cream or something.
No matter how fulfilling or worthwhile something is, there will always be tedious parts. Always.
It's a refusal to accept this that prevents people from completing tasks -- they hit the inevitable wave of tedium, and they can't grind through it, because they assume anything that's truly edifying will be tedium-free. That's a really dangerous belief.
Now if something is all tedium, then I agree, find something else to do. But there is no project on Earth that won't have frustrating patches where your mind will try to wander.
I don't think it's about liking or not liking writing or coding. It's easy to start the day with checking email, reading HN or other less productive tasks. It's just something to help you start your day Hemingway style -- writing (or coding) every morning without distractions.
I'm a software dev but my favorite thing to do in the world is fish. Last month I took a vacation to the Caribbeans, which has some amazing surf fishing. My goal was to get up and fish every sunrise. I did this for 4 or 5 days but ended up sleeping in a few days because, after all, sleeping is fun and fishing can wait.
I do really like fishing and had a goal to do it each day but failed. I'm guessing you think I don't really like fishing after all?
I agree with you. I've been listening to Merlin Mann's podcast Back To Work and he talks a lot about things like this and things like "distraction-free writing environments". His philosophy (that I tend to agree with) is that if these tools work for you - great. But you might be solving the wrong problem. Procrastination might be your brain telling you something about the task you're putting off doing.
I expected something interesting or insightful from your link, but it just completely seems to sidestep the idea that procrastination exists.
The Wikipedia definition is "act of replacing high-priority actions with tasks of lower priority, or doing something from which one derives enjoyment, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time".
This clearly exists, and completely disavowing it with some (semi)feel good idea about how you aren't caring enough, implicitly linking it to low willpower is way too simplistic - and totally not insightful.
My own experience has been that even when I know that the task needs to get done, even when it is enjoyable, it can be hard to get started.
Once started, everything flows as you might expect, as the author says "How many things do I need to shed ... with extreme prejudice in order to singlemindedly focus on this one thing that I love?"
The post also neatly sidesteps the idea that even if you do not care, you may need to get things done.
The attitude probably appeals to some libertarian philosophy/Protestant work ethic, but even those people will freely admit that doing beats wanting to do something -- it's the doing that counts.
If people cannot get themselves to do something, even if they want and care to do it, telling people to care more isn't very helpful, especially when pooh-poohing the very things that work for some people to do what they want to do!
"If that sounds fancy and oversimplified, then you "care" about too many things. Period."
What if you really do not "care" about the things that you are doing while procrastinating? What if you are simply avoiding the anxiety of starting to do what you care about?
There are serious psychological questions here, and this blog post just ignores them all.
Part of it might be a confusion of terms. I would argue that if you really wanted to do something you'd be doing it or it would already be done (by definition of the word "want"). Same with "care". The very first episode of the podcast I listened to was Merlin and his co-host discussing the word "priority". He was giving a talk at a company and someone in the crowd claimed to have "27 high-priority items" which Merlin thought was completely insane. He says you can tell something is a priority in one of two ways: you're doing it or it's done. Calling something a priority when it's not obscures the real problem. I think it's the same here. Calling something a thing you care about but never do doesn't solve anything.
I wrote down Merlin's definition of procrastination: procrastination is what happens when you temporarily forget who you are, what you should pay attention to, and what your options are for doing something about it.
Do you need an alarm to remind yourself to play video games? Do you need a "distraction-free gaming environment"?
>Do you need an alarm to remind yourself to play video games? Do you need a "distraction-free gaming environment"?
I rarely play video games, so that isn't the greatest example for me.
I'll present an analogy, though.
One of the long standing examples given of whether knowledge actually applies to actions is smoking. I think we all know that smoking can cause cancer, reduces lifespan, and causes various diseases.
Except that you can invariably see doctors smoking outside of hospitals, even oncologists!
Just saying that outcomes are the only thing that matters to make an evaluation of whether you care about something, or consider something a priority doesn't explain why we can have cognitive dissonance about them.
Your (and the author's) assertions are almost laughably behaviorist, completely neglecting any idea that people have minds and you are effectively arguing that people are reducible solely to action-machines.
We know better than that, unless you really think that the mind has no meaning, or that we are somehow rational machines - in which case, why the obsession with "caring" (which is clearly more emotional than rational)?
Basically, if the only way we can judge that we "care" about something is exhibiting behaviors that show we care, using these tools will exhibit that same behavior -- in which case, what does caring have to do with it?
Really, there is even more wrong with this post than I thought at first blush, and further analysis seems to reveal even more flaws with the thinking.
Or just use Plex - a bit smarter than AIR Video - it includes placeholders so you can stop watching in the living room (via computer) and start from the same spot in bed (via iPad/iPhone).
I recommend StreamToMe. It's the best $3 I've spent. Transcodes on the fly, works great. We watched cartoons in the car. (iPad tethered to my 3g android phone).
