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2019-11-14
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futuro00:11:23

I’m a little late to the procrastination party, but one of the things I’ve found to have the longest lasting effect is to set my intention when I get up, and to avoid doing non-intentional things. F.e. I have a habit of reading web comics in the morning, but doing habitual things leaves me with less resolve later on when I have to do less-fun things.

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jaide04:11:25

That's good advice, usually, I do that through bullet journaling but sometimes that just isn't enough. I think there's a bit of impulsiveness to my personality that's like, "Ok you meticulously wrote down how much you have to finish the booking page of the frontend redesign... sooo want to write a CLI for our ticketing system in Clojure instead?"

futuro15:11:18

I know exactly what you mean. The thing I planned to do isn’t nearly as interesting as <insert non-critical project here>, and then I get to struggle with that.

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myguidingstar01:11:55

Getting started is hard enough, so setting goals in the morning may be too late for procrastinators. Doing it the night before can be a huge change.

myguidingstar01:11:42

Someone even comes up with a well designed routine for that https://dariusforoux.com/evening-ritual/

jaide05:11:58

That's a great idea!

jaide05:11:43

Heh, I haven't had much luck with this kind of approach personally. Often I end up doing neither the task I need or want to do in those circumstances 😛

seancorfield06:11:49

Yeah, the few things I think I should be doing to better my life would be very hard to link to the "temptations" that I actually have/want to do! 🙂

sogaiu01:11:29

it's nice to have a variety of techniques to try -- i don't know that there's one thing that's going to work for everyone.

jayesh-bhoot04:11:02

A long essay incoming haha. Tagging only the OP @jayzawrotny From my observation, or in my case, the crux is that I procrastinate on a task when I feel unpleasant emotions over the task. The distraction part - where we do something else instead of what we should - comes after these feelings. These feelings usually come up when * I have to start a task and I have no clear starting point * When the task reaches a difficult phase * Deciding what to start with These feelings could be or stem from: * lacking confidence on the ability to finish; * resistance against having to brainstorm (yes I have this a lot despite the fact I enjoy the brainstorming very much. Starting it is the problem); * anxiety over having to consulting a colleague (He is busy, will do it later. Now I have to wait for him, so lets do something unproductive); * guilt over not having started earlier and then feeling more anxious over the guilt (see the vicious cycle here?); * and anything mundane that could be categorised as an 'unpleasant emotion' (welp! Half the day is already gone so there is no point in starting today). One special mention is the feeling to start and end with perfectly. It is one of the most debilitating feelings. A perfect start is a non-start. The transition, from feeling these emotions to getting distracted towards something else, is almost instantaneous. For me, working on being aware of these emotions and embracing them have worked much much more than trying to reduce distractions. The latter works for sure, but you will always find something to distract yourself with from what you should be doing. Some points that have helped me: * Sticking to only one goal at a time helps. So now when you catch yourself with unpleasant emotions, you know where you have to steer towards. * Be accepting of the fact that a perfect start of finish does not exist. If you have no idea then start anywhere in the project. Starting alone will get rid of a lot of procrastination. Pen and paper are a boon here (be it programming or doing your taxes) as you can just start scribbling and chart a rough course. By then you are typically engrossed enough to not require external momentum. * Thinking on paper helps a lot with all the above points. I have a catch-all notebook (4th one atm) for everything personal and work (why not separate? Even looking for the right notebook has proven to be a point of procrastination for me. So I went with the simplest route). I have embraced this to the point that I figure out the html and css structure from wireframes on paper first haha. Emmet helps there. Then I type it in (thanks to pycharm autocomplete), and then tweak it as needed. Working on developing one habit at a time has taken me places. Currently I am only working towards being aware of these emotions and embracing them, while sticking to the task. Nothing else matters as this is the crux of procrastination for me. As long as this systemic issue is not taken care of, no techniques will work for me. I can always build up on this later. Oh and I agree that 8 hours a normal day of just working is unrealistic. When I worked in an office, I was not working almost half my 8 hours. So a target of 5 hours of focused work a day has worked wonders for me. The exhilaration of having successfully avoided procrastination will stick with you. Even these many hours will keep your spirits high through the day. None of this means I can eliminate procrastination entirely. I am still avoiding working towards a major goal of my life. But is my situation better? Yes, a huge difference. Rome wasn't built in a day. So it can't be torn down in a day as well.

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jaide04:11:07

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Since the discussion earlier today I checked out an ebook I've been sharing a few thoughts from. It's Procrastination from Jane B. Burka. In so far it seems to coincide with your anecdote and my experiences very closely.

jayesh-bhoot05:11:52

Nice! I will check it out in case my current strategy doesnt work. Other recommendations: Procrastination puzzle by Timothy Pychyl which has helped me steer towards discovering this core issue. The Now Habit by Neil Fiore helped me single out the perfection-ish tendency as an excuse for procrastination. However the solutions they offer haven't much worked for me (especially the implementation intention by Pychyl). But even being aware of the root cause has helped me a lot. These books are instrumental. There is another book by The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel. I found that it tries to reduce what is essentially a human, emotional problem to a lifeless equation. But may work for you.

jaide05:11:29

That book seems to emphasize that it's an internal, psychological condition and not at all a matter of intelligence, success, or circumstance (distractions).

jayesh-bhoot05:11:40

Which one are you talking about wrt psychological condition?

jaide05:11:10

The one I've been reading.

jayesh-bhoot05:11:07

Oh and as an aside, thank you for indirectly propelling me towards clojure ecosystem. Yours was one of the first blogs I caught on clojure. I think I noticed it from perun.

jayesh-bhoot05:11:54

Still very much learning the ropes of the trade, but am convinced that this is my go-to language when I have a choice.

jaide05:11:58

Hey that's great! Welcome to the party parrot

Timofei Chernousov06:11:55

Hey, I am wondering if Clojure or FP in general changes people minds so they do not use slack threads? 😄 Reading through #clojure or #clojurescript is like looking into spaghetti of discussions, sometimes forked into thread but anyway continues in main channel, like a oldfashioned chat. It is not typical for well-populated and mature slack groups, hence the question 🙂

seancorfield06:11:31

@runiner We try, from time to time, to encourage focused discussion in threads but a lot of people just don't find Slack's thread UI/UX to be very satisfying -- and there's also the argument that threads are hard to discover if you're browsing channels so it's easy to miss some very interesting discussions that went to threads before you could tell how they were going to go...

seancorfield06:11:26

...I don't know what the answer is there. Some people like threads, some don't. Some people try hard to draw conversations into threads, some don't. And we're 17,000 people so... ¯\(ツ)

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Ahmed Hassan06:11:34

Reddit, ClojureVerse and Stack Overflow encourage more focused discussions than Slack channels.

seancorfield06:11:25

And they are much more permanent than Slack's free (limited) plan.

Ahmed Hassan06:11:47

Yeah, and they are very easy to search and discover.

jayesh-bhoot07:11:30

Compared to these alternatives, slack's advantage is probably being instantaneous. It provides a quick way to start - whether it be asking a question or responding to something. I find a good parallel in Evernote. It sucks (ironically) as an editor, but it sure is unparalleled at quick capture.

henrik07:11:09

Also, many people probably already have Slack installed and open. It’s easy to reach for.

seancorfield07:11:29

Slack is great for a quick back-and-forth to figure out a bug or answer a question about how to use a library or some such -- so much better than some of the weird, random, lack-of-detail StackOverflow questions that have been posted recently (or issues on GitHub too!). But for real, deep discussions, yeah, ClojureVerse is my go-to.

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henrik07:11:11

Out of all the channels to discuss Clojure and related things, I probably dislike SO the most. I can’t quite articulate why. It’s probably at least partly due to that it feels like using a filing system more than it does having a conversation with someone.

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seancorfield07:11:47

It's fine if folks have a nice, self-contained question, about a specific problem... but a lot of the questions are so poorly written and require so much clarification and additional information from the OP that they're just not worth answering 😞

seancorfield07:11:14

(there's a "new user" on S.O. posting Clojure questions that would be so much more easily answered if they'd just jump on Slack and chat with us)

etiago08:11:49

Maybe you could nudge them our way in a comment 🙂 not sure whether that's frowned upon on SO though)

aisamu13:11:49

"We" already do that! From the answer to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58854665/clojure-how-to-disable-logging-temporarily: > Asked on Slack and got almost immediate answer from the creator of tools.logging.

seancorfield07:11:24

(re: searchability -- most of the Slack channels here are mirrored to Zulip, which has a free, searchable index of everything back to about the start of the year... ClojureVerse has a log of many channels going further back but the UI/search app is not yet stable/up-to-date)

Mno13:11:16

Maybe we could make a slack integration that let's us post a slack thread into stack overflow

Mno13:11:20

Though I cant figure out a nice way to map it into question, answers and comments

Mno13:11:05

Or even better post the thread to ask.clojure

Alex Miller (Clojure team)13:11:41

Since no one has yet mentioned it, please use https://ask.clojure.org as the official, public, searchable q&a site for Clojure!

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henrik14:11:45

Speaking of which, I never got any clarity as to this question: https://ask.clojure.org/index.php/8329/caret-character-differences-with-re-seq-in-cljs-vs-clj (`re-seq` behaves differently in CLJS vs. CLJ) It’s not listed as an officially recognized difference here: https://www.clojurescript.org/about/differences

dominicm14:11:27

I'm convinced that is a clojurescript bug

henrik14:11:01

Fair enough, but nothing seems to be logged about it in Jira, which I perceived to be a consequence of finding a bug and filing an entry about it on http://ask.clojure.org 😉

enforser14:11:54

maybe not the best place to ask, but I’m learning Ruby on Rails for a new project and looking for a good resource to start learning with. I ask here because my favourite resource I’ve ever used is Clojure for the Brave and True, so hoping there is something similar

Alex Young17:11:35

https://www.railstutorial.org/book/ might be worth a look. It used to be both excellent and free, now the second half is behind a paywall (but you might find it worth paying for).

enforser18:11:41

that’s great, thanks!

danielstockton14:11:03

https://poignant.guide/ strikes a similar tone perhaps, but probably outdated (and ruby, not rails). It's been a decade since I dabbled.

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Mno15:11:40

Oh man why's guide brings back so many memories

Mno15:11:18

I think pragmatic programmer had a course on it which was one of the preferred ones of my time

Mno15:11:45

But im not certain of any up to date ones

Mno15:11:18

Luckily everything in rails is extremely googleable, since everyone encounters the same issues.

enforser15:11:57

awesome, I’ll take a look at Why’s guide but maybe read up to date documentation for topics it covers! The intro was great

lilactown17:11:08

there was an alternative to github that popped up maybe 6+ months ago. it had a pretty short name, was on hacker news, seemed very dev friendly… anyone remember this too?

lilactown17:11:16

yes, that was it. thanks!