Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?

I can relate a lot. I'm still burning through self-motivation hacks at 35, some of which are helping while most don't.

Eventually, the hack with by far the largest impact (which brought me to currently being cofounder and CTO of one of the more successful German startups) was realizing that while I simply suck at self-motivating, I never had a problem getting stuff done when working for others. I effortlessly produced two albums for other artists, while I still haven't finished my own single release after 20 years. I tried to build my own company three times and failed miserably.

Eventually, I "just" found the right teams and eventually cofounders with a great vision and lots of focus who constantly pull and motivate me to do the stuff I'm really good at (which is building teams, sharing knowledge and architecturing systems).

So I've just made my peace with the fact that I need someone else to get me started every day and just stopped fussing around it. My talents are somewhere else and I've got lots of creativity and intelligence to make up for my lack of structure.

Stop focusing on your weaknesses. KNOW your weaknesses, but don't beat yourself up for it. Also know your strengths (which is often times the other side of ADHD). Practice self-love every day. Don't be afraid to ask for help.

Let me end with a quote of probably one of the greatest procrastinators out there:

> "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." — Douglas Adams

You're not alone. And it's gonna be fine.

I'm familiar with this. There's no magic solution, sadly, but I'll share one thing that has helped me and may apply at least to some of your situations.

I realised a while ago that my main issue was with nebulous tasks -- that is, the more concrete, defined, and _meetable_ a task was, the less trouble I had with it. So I started to break down large tasks, which never got started much less finished, into smaller ones, in the same way you might break a scrum-poker 20-pointer into a bunch of 3s.

You want to go from this:

- I should really write [some great app idea]

To this:

- I'll make a list of technologies that I want to use

- I'll read the docs, like a book, for the ones that are new

- I'll write a single api endpoint

- I'll flesh out the api for the rest of a feature

- I'll MVP a UI for that one feature, without any concern for design

- etc.

In my case, a combination of the size of and amount of ambiguity in a task is inversely proportional to the ability I have to both get it underway and get it finished.

Get hired in some software corporation. You'll be amazed how easy the work is and how well it pays. The only motivation you'll need is to get up in the morning and haul you ass to the office.

After few months of what will feel like vacation to you, in the company of fresh smart people, you'll start to get bored, even despite doing more hobby programming in your free time then you done in a long time. But at this point your freelancing clients will direly need you. So you'll take some jobs for weekends and evenings, at way higher hourly rate then you used to have.

After a while of that let one of your freelancing clients hire you but not as freelancer but a full time remote employee paid not for hours of coding but rather for 8 hours each day, same way you were paid at corporation.

After working for two or 3 years like that your problems with motivating yourself will come back but till then hopefully you'll get enough money to take a long break and then get hired somewhere else or do something else entirely.

As a side note don't ever play MOBA games. You'll get hooked so bad you'll have very little time to do any personal development and will have trouble enjoying any other games you enjoyed previously.

I have felt the same way. Some things that helped me:

1. Do the “Productivity” sessions in the Headspace app. I was really skeptical about guided meditation, but have found them very useful in maintaining focus. It teaches you to be aware when your mind wanders and helps you bring focus back to the task at hand. https://www.headspace.com/

2. Force yourself to break big tasks down into tiny chunks. When things seem overwhelming, it's easy to put them off.

3. Consider using an app that divides your working day into chunks that you can work on in 30-minute intervals. I use http://focuslist.co/ to set my agenda for the day early on, then work through the list.

4. Read “Deep Work” and “So Good They Can't Ignore You” by Cal Newport.

5. Reduce social media. I dropped Facebook and removed all twitter apps from my phone. This is a good guide: http://humanetech.com/take-control/

6. Exercise for 20 minutes every morning. I bought a speed rope from http://rpmtraining.com/ and now skip every morning while listening to podcasts / audiobooks.

7. Consider getting a full-time job, or a contract with one company for 20-30 hours a week. Having co-workers to compare yourself with and managers to be answerable to is a natural motivator.

I don't know exactly what your "success" or "failure" looks like to you, but I will say that working in an unstructured environment (which is what you normally do when freelancing) is super hard. I'm willing to bet that if you were to get a 9-5 job you'd discover that you're actually outperforming most other people -- because the 8 years of experience you have pushing yourself.

Being "self-driven" is both a talent and a skill. Some people are naturally good at it, but everybody can get better with practice. It sounds like you have been working hard at it! I spent 5 years teaching ESL at a high school and in that time read many, many papers on motivation. One of the things I discovered is that it's still really an open question how it works. I can tell you from my own experience, though, that circumstances can change your motivations completely. That probably sounds obvious, but it works in subtle ways. Working in an office, not working in an office, having a partner (both social and work versions), etc, etc, can change things dramatically. It's not just about finding a technique to concentrate.

What I will say is that freelancing is playing on hard mode, so it doesn't surprise me that you find it hard. That may or may not have any relevance to your ultimate questions, unfortunately. If I were to bet, making your job easier will make you more successful at this point in time (though you may want to dial it up again at a later point).

I'm in my mid 30s and I think I'm in the middle of the pack as far as productivity/focus/procrastination go. From that perspective and from your own description of yourself, I would put you below average, and much more importantly - your performance is making you unhappy.

I think this calls for a self-diagnostic. I would definitely see a therapist and maybe a doctor to make sure there aren't any subtle undiagnosed issues holding you back. This could be mild depression, ADHD, or heck sleep apnea. Or maybe you're completely in the wrong field for yourself and a counselor could help to quickly suss that out. Or maybe you're a wild perfectionist and don't even know it. There's a million possible explanations that could be completely invisible to you but accessible to a trained 3rd party.

If you were in your early 20s I'd say... muddle through, no one starts off awesome. But by your 30s I think it's reasonable to expect more and appropriate to get proactive about getting to the bottom of this.

You mention playing video games as a rewards and I immediately wonder: how much of your problem is the fact that video games made you get used to fast and easy rewards? How much did you desensitize your innate reward system by video games? I'm probably going to get down voted for this remark but I encourage every gamer feeling the urge to down vote to take a critical look at themselves before doing so, be honest, my interest in this is also honest. In the digital world nowadays many things are optimized for fast rewards, real life is not.

Gamers often tell me "it's just for relaxation" but often I feel that the time invested by them in games makes it more like a lifestyle.

That said, a tip would be: What do you like about work? What are the things that do motivate you? Try to make a list and try the make the items on said list as big a part of your day and tasks as possible.

Things to try:

- get more sleep

- time off to recharge / re-motivate

- meditation / yoga / exercise

- try to stop using stimulants (includes caffeine/nicotine/sugar) or try using different stimulants (eg. arecoline)

- absolutely do not smoke marijuana, it is known to make many people lazy and demotivated

- control your environment (quiet, no phone, phone off, offline)

- clean your environment (zero clutter)

- change your environment (fresh space)

- remove all distractions (visual, audio, etc.)

- try different times of day (eg. sleep early, wake then work early AM before sunrise)

I think this can be a result of spreading yourself too thin. I was in a similar situation myself when I was trying to do too much by myself and had insane ambitions for myself.

The question to ask yourself is Are you trying to accomplish the task of 5 people by yourself?

Because if you are then any amount of work you do, you will never feel satisfied (because let's face it nobody can do the work of 5 people and ace it all.. you are bound to dislike some aspect of it, procrastinate and then blame yourself for not doing enough). So I advise you to first create a list of the expectations you have for yourself and then imagine assigning it to a friend. What would be your take on it.. Do you think he should be able to handle it easily or do you think you're asking too much from him?

Lastly, you really need to get rid of this thinking "If I don't work for X hours, I'm a complete failure". This is classic "Labeling" or "All or nothing thinking" (things you can learn in CBT) and if you keep thinking like this it can cause depression (which also makes a person unmotivated).

You are normal. Over the years I have learned that the internet makes us all distracted and that it's a problem many of my peers are wrestling with today. I was in a meeting just this week where our new product line manager started joking about how easy it was in a moment of distraction to open a news site with the intention of just spending a minute there and end up losing half an hour of productivity. I told him I had to watch myself or a moment of distraction to check twitter while an app compiled would lose me half an hour in the endless scroll. Everyone else in the meeting was nodding their heads, and we all had a good laugh about it.

The important thing is that you are aware of it and you are fighting it. The best thing you can do is simply keep fighting it. I had seen many people on HN recommend the Pomodoro Technique, where you work in 20 minute sprints with five minute breaks. I got an app to keep a timer on my phone and it makes focusing much easier, especially when I know I only need to focus for 20 minutes. At the end of the day I can see how many sprints I accomplished and feel better about myself.

Other things I find help me is to have points in the day where I unplug completely. When I get home from work, I leave my cellphone on a stand by the door and only check it once or twice for support calls so I can focus on my kids. Complimenting this is mindfulness meditation, where I practice thinking about nothing while I jog in the morning. Having dedicated time where I just focus on focusing without all the other noise really helps me focus in the busier points of my day.

Like I said, the most important thing is that you are aware of it and fighting it. There are slow weeks at work where I lapse back into the endless scroll, but I see it happening and can make a conscious effort to course-correct. Remember that you are normal, keep trying things to find what works, and share what you find with all the other distracted people who also don't know how normal they are.

I fought this draining battle for about 15 years of a relatively typical IT career, from desktop support, to junior dev, too dev and all-hats, to application support, to QA (less stressful), to finally getting out of the game for the most part. Rarely did work not stress me out, aside from when I was starting out in desktop support roles, and maybe when I was trying out QA.

I knew people that seemed to be made for it. They may not have liked it, but they managed to power through day after day of drudgery like it was nothing. They were productive, accomplished their workload, and did it consistently over and over. Sometimes I envied them and wished I could be like them. But in the end, I just am not.

One of the biggest problems for me was that I rarely felt like I was working on anything worthwhile. It was either advertising to sell stuff, or tools to help people sell and ship stuff more efficiently, or number-crunching to track money, or various forms of CRUD to keep track of the cogs, and so on.

And even when the work was interesting, it was still largely driven by deadlines and plans and getting X done in Y time units. Put these here frameworks together, work out most of the kinks, and ship, ship, ship! This was also kind of soul-crushing for me, because I like to get things "right", even if it means prototype after prototype that's discarded after a month or two of learning.

In the end, I opted to minimalize my life and switch largely to supporting myself through barter and scavenging. Now much more of my time is under my control to do with as I please, and I try to make the most of it. For me, that means much more yoga and movement, and coding irregularly—when I am struck. I also feel much healthier, because I can sleep as much as I want and on whatever schedule I want.

I can relate to this and AFAIK there's no magic/quick solution.

Even if you find some job/project that motivates you a lot, that motivation won't last forever and eventually the lack of focus/procrastination will come back.

I work a full time as a remote software developer, and what helped me in recent years was to focus on developing self-discipline, which is what pushes you forward in the long term. And yes, self-discipline can be seen as a trainable skill.

I started by forcing myself to wake early and take a cold bath every week day. I've found that this habit helps me develop a work routine in the first morning hours. Even without having great productivity, I've found this greatly reduces the bad feeling you get from procrastination.

Almost a year ago, I started forcing myself to do something I used hate (but healthy, especially for someone that sits for most of the day): going to the gym and lifting weights 3 times a week. As the time passed, this became an habit which has an amazing impact on my work productivity. This may be because I'm following a program where I constantly try to increase the weights, giving a feeling of progress I don't usually get from daily work (Currently lifting about 4x weight more than when I started). It might not work for you, but this is what I'm doing, in case you are interested: https://stronglifts.com/

It's normal to struggle this way with work you don't love sufficiently, which (unless you're lucky) tends to include the work you do for money. Companies have techniques to motivate employees. E.g. your boss or peers will be upset if you don't do something, and happy with you if you do. As a freelancer you don't have that, so the struggle is more visible to you.

Some people can sometimes find types of work that they love so much that this doesn't happen. I have often managed to.

I've always suffered from ADD at school, my grades were really bad. I understood everything the teacher was saying but when it came to exams it was a different story. I couldn't study, and I failed them miserably. The worst part was that 20 years ago I didn't know about ADD nor did my parents, so the problem went unnoticed and there was no one but myself to blame. I never managed to finish reading a story for example.

I was never hyper and could always focus on coding and was always self motivated.

Even though I could focus on programming tasks, I realized at some point that I never finished a side project and always jumped from one side project to another.

At 30 (I am 34 now), ADD hit me hard and I lost my ability to focus when coding.

I decided to visit the dr about this issue and was prescribed adderral at first but I didn't like it as it made me feel euphoric for couple hours and ended up on vyvanse (30 mg) few months later.

Vyvanse changed my life. And that might me an understatement. The amount of knowledge I was able to attain after getting on vyvanse is probably more than everything I've learnt. I am now able to complete my projects, read plenty of research papers and absorb what's being said and code for 8 hours straight without an issue. I am considered one of the top engineers at my job (and previous ones) and I attribute a significant part of my knowledge to vyvanse.

My working memory improved significantly and I can focus and finish the most mundane tasks.

I've read that many people that has ADD or signs of it get hit hard by 30 or so.

I highly recommend visiting the dr and see which adhd med works best for you.

A few years ago, I could have wrote what you wrote, but at age 31, I feel almost as productive as I’ll ever want to be.

So what changed? I simply don’t think about it anymore. Coming up with rewards schemas is thinking about it — it’s your mind taking something simple and making it more complex. It’s also an implicit acceptance that you’ll postpone enjoyment of work and use your reward to compensate for that postponement.

Any schema is thinking about it. Any hack is thinking about it. Any todo list is thinking about it. Strategic plans…thinking about it. Any time you think of the outcome of your work before actually doing it. Todo lists will naturally write themselves when they’re needed. Strategic reflection will happen when curiosity or aimlessness arise. That’s there natural habitat. The mind weaponizes them for procrastination far beyond their intended purpose.

I'll post the rest in a comment, but your post inspired me to write this post:

https://medium.com/@cureau/is-it-normal-to-struggle-with-wor...

What can help:

- visualize yourself as a homeless in your late 40s, abandoned by your wife and kids, no longer recognized/avoided by your friends, destitute, in bad health. It's a likely outcome if you don't learn how to finish things, work on your own projects and make it. Think about it as your default future state you want to avoid

- remove distractions while you are working on something. If distractions are your inner ones, contemplate on them for a few minutes and then decide to stick with a task for 2 continuous hours.

- put away those sugary foods that wreak havoc on your focus; look up how cancer in obese people looks like and replace their exterior with you; contemplate about how to avoid such a fate

- when you are stuck for multiple days, don't keep sitting on the chair; take a walk to a forest, talk to completely different people to allow your brain stop overloading the same "circuitry"

- force yourself to have 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep every single day; experiment by going to sleep before 10pm and waking up around 6am

- build resilience by doing something you hate for an hour a day. It could be sports, it could be talking to/helping some annoying person, taking a 5 minute cold shower, take a morning run for 30 minutes or doing any useful things you hate to do; simply define the lowest point of the day - "it can't be worse than that" and move off to better things

- ignore your past failures, only learn from them. Don't occupy yourself with the past whether it was glorious or awful; you only own the present and shape the future

I'd suggest taking a look around you and maybe ask that question to people you know in person. I know this feeling myself, especially when starting out with work after college. Always beating myself up over how I don't have any side-projects, if I'm going to cut it at work and basically why I'm not on the same level as Linus Torvalds, or some other genius programmer already.

I think the truth is that I was heavily influenced by e.g. sites like HN, where it's always touted as the ultimate virtues to have these side-gigs and basically be working all the time. When I looked around though I realized that this is just not the reality for the overwhelming majority of people. Most people are happy just working their 8 hours and then _do something else_

So, my advice would be to 'stop trying so hard'

"Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls" (http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivit...) were useful to me and techniques related to "no zero days" and just getting started (with a single sentence, slide, line of code) are virtually the only things that consistently work for me. These techniques are nicely summarized in "Micro-Progress and the Magic of Just Getting Started" https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/22/smarter-living/micro-p....

Anything causing guilt turned out to be counterproductive, vide my answer to "How to stop feeling guilty about unfinished work?": https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17988/how-to-st....

I used to be lazy. For me there was no tactic that solved the problem, but instead a realization that hit me one day. Why was I not more successful? Nobody's going to hand me success on a silver platter. Nobody's going to make me rich. Nobody's going to do a damn thing for me. If I want those things, I realized I just had to work hard and do it myself.

It sounds like a trivial realization, but when it hits you juuust right it's life-changing. I think rather than tactics and strategies you need to spend some time in self-reflection and think about those things. Ever since then I've been able to self-motivate and work hard, even when I don't want to. (I guess you shouldn't call it motivation but rather discipline.)

FWIW I do think it's a "regular case" of procrastination. Even a regular case of procrastination can have devastating effects on your ambition, and procrastination is not easy to fight.

Depending on your personality type, you also may do well to make more commitments, not less. If you know you have to work on another project this weekend then you'll have to get the first project out of the way this week.

I'm going through this exact thing currently, too. I sometimes struggle to follow even the most basic of instructions, I have to really, really focus very hard to follow someone explaining something to me because my mind starts to wander half way through the explanation. I have to have things explained to me two or three times, and I can feel very dumb at times because of it.

I find struggle to have productive meetings, because I'm bored to the point of physical discomfort at times. I went to the doctors about it and they referred me for relaxation therapy (?!). So I'm struggling to know what to do about it currently. I was tested for ADHD as a child, but they concluded that I was just poorly behaved.

It seems to be a pretty common issue with engineers, I've came across loads who have similar issues.

I actually posted something similar to your post in the funfunfunction forum recently: https://www.funfunforum.com/t/attention-and-focus-issues/389...

I guess it completely comes down to the individual. For me personally, having deadlines with someone depending on what I'm delivering does help to get myself rolling with work I find boring. Of course, I've also noticed that I can do that for only a short time and if I don't get some interesting work to regain my motivation, I'll end up getting depressed.

Right now, I've structured my client work in a way that allows me to switch between things every week. That way I can do a boring thing for a week, then do something interesting, and then back to the boring. If there's no interesting paid projects, I just work on things I can find enjoyment in - learning new things, working on things I enjoy and dropping them as soon as the "fun" goes away.

For personal projects I avoid breaking them down into smaller steps. With smaller steps I can see the mountain of work ahead of me (most of which isn't that fun) and the motivation to work on it goes away, even if there's still plenty of enjoyment to be derived for said project. That's also one of the reasons why I rarely release anything personal I work on - the fact that once its out there and I would need to maintain it, kills the fun.

I also try to limit my working hours to a certain range; the only reason why to work outside of those hours is if I've been slacking off previously and need to catch up to hit a deadline or if the project is so much fun it's already as relaxing as anything else I could be doing to wind down after work.

Getting 8 hours of sleep is also very important for me. Any less for an extended period and I'm beginning to inch towards a depressed state of mind. Any more than 8 hours and my procrastination goes up.

But yeah, finding out what works for you is always difficult, and I think it also changes with time.

Firstly if you think you may have ADHD go and see a doctor for a diagnosis. It's a very common condition and there are a set of well understood and effective treatments.

Second, if you struggle to motivate yourself, maybe reassess what you are working towards. Perhaps the problem is not with you, but rather with what you're trying to make yourself do. There is an almost infinite range of activites available to you, try some new stuff, and then keep trying new stuff until something sticks.

When you really find your passion you won't need to play tricks on yourself to get stuff done, you'll just do it because it's fun and rewarding.

In my late 20s I saw a dramatic improvement in my ability to ship products I wanted to build, through aggressive simplification and feature stripping. It made all the difference.

There were other smaller ingredients, such as just getting better over time thanks to experience. Mostly though, radical simplification was the biggest improvement. I found that I would begin a new personal project, feature bloat would start right from the initial design documents, then I'd drown in the effort necessary to build it all. As I burned time, working away at attempting to finish the bloated monster, I'd gradually lose the motivation necessary to get to the finish line of a launch. So I ended up building an immense amount of stuff that I never shipped. Half or more of my personal projects would end up that way.

I believe the approach of radical simplification has the added benefit of producing superior products for the end user, as well. These days I practically enjoy it when I find feature bloat that I can throw out the window. It becomes: how much bullshit can I do away with, which accelerates my core goal to get to launch; I can get closer to the finish line, while doing less work, and that simply feels great on most any serious project.

You have to be ruthless about removing unnecessary complexity (most complexity will prove to be unnecessary, and worse, harmful). So many things in life are going to be commonly working against you in trying to build something, there's a very high value in not adding to that.

You have ADHD. Make an appointment with a qualified psychiatrist to see if you meet the requirements for diagnosis and medical treatment.

You are not alone. Your struggle is the result of a medical condition, and not your fault. ADHD can destroy lives. Don't let it ruin yours.

Source: I'm 35 and struggled with very similar things my entire life. It nearly destroyed my marriage and my career. I received a diagnosis 6 months ago and have been taking prescribed stimulants (Vyvanse) ever since. It was a life-changing experience. My only regret is that I did not seek help earlier, having for so long blamed myself rather than my neurochemistry, which only made me stressed and depressed without providing a solution.

I'd recommend talking to your doctor about Adderall.

I have the exact same kind of issues focusing and basically have all my life. Sometime in college I talked to my doctor about it and it's single-handedly one of the best decisions I've made. With it, I can multi-task and stay focused on even tedious tasks. I'd say I'm easily 4x as productive, which has helped my career tremendously.

Seriously--I don't want to come across as a shill, but it's like a night and day difference in ability to stay focused. Insurance covers it, and diagnosis consists of your doctor asking you a few questions about exactly the kind of thing you're describing here.

What long-term goals do you have for yourself, really? Do you have any? And if you say you do, do they actually motivate you?

Building an app or starting your own business sound like typical HN crowd goals, but do they actually apply to you?

It seems to me that you right now struggle with seeing the effects of your work, and how they relate to whatever long-term goal you may have. Because there seems to be a disconnect there, you do not feel motivated. But this will not change until you: (a) have a clear long-term goal that you actually care about, and (b) figure out how to work on tasks that help achieve the goal.

Why are you doing whatever it is you are doing?

It's normal unless you are not able to consistently overcome it to achieve your goals. Basically, like any disorder, its not technically a disorder until it prevents you from living your life.

I was diagnosed with ADHD at about 12years old. I refused treatment all through high school until I was 30 when I realized I had gotten nowhere in life. I had substance abuse problems and a criminal record.

I'm back in college now. I have hobbies, goals, and no desire to turn back. My anxiety is gone as well as the impulse to self medicate. I've gone through several state mandated drug/alcohol/anger management classes over the years, so the cognitive behavior mechanisms were there, but when I finally told a doctor my story, and how I felt, I got treatment and it changed my life.

You can't diagnose yourself and trying to is unhealthy. It manifests doubt and can make things worse by compounding negative emotion.

If you're just being lazy, grow up. But if you are unable to will yourself to do/focus on the things you want/need to do, if you feel you are "suffering," even a little bit, ask for help.

You are important. Don't waste time guessing.

I've often felt the same way. So much so that I even did some testing a few years back to see if I might have undiagnosed attention deficit issues (turns out I don't).

The worst byproduct of this is that it brings some shame with it. I've never had jobs that demanded all that much of me - I worked some intense hours when freelancing, but for the most part I've had very flexible jobs with good work environments. My wife works insane hours as a tax accountant, and although it makes her miserable a lot of the time, she always seems to be able to power through her 10-14 hour days during busy season. I feel myself mentally checking out after just 4-6 hours some days. It's embarrassing that I don't seem to have the same work ethic as her (and many others).

I've tried productivity tools (pomodoro-ish stuff mainly), but they never seem to quite fit in with the kind of work I'm doing or with the work environment at my job. I'm looking forward to reading through this thread to see if there are any recommendations I can take from here.

I always thought I was ADHD, then I started a business, turns out I just like to do things my way and lead not follow. I've struggled to "focus" my whole life I'm a jack of all trades and master of none.

When you find the right thing you'll know. I would do what I do now for free or if I was worth 100 Million because I love the game.

I cannot speak for anyone else, but what you described is very similar to what I went through for most of my life.

It felt like there would be periods where I would be so adverse to any kind of work, and look for any possible reason to push it off or do nothing, and spend the rest of the day on Reddit or HN.

Eventually I started seeing a psychiatrist, and he diagnosed me as manic depressive, with possibly a case of ADD.

He prescribed me a combination of Lamictal and Wellbutrin (the latter of which is also prescribed occasionally for ADD), and I can honestly say that it has changed my life.

I used to think that I was just lazy, and maybe I was, but I am certainly not anymore. My job has been a lot easier to do, I don't look for excuses to spend all day on Reddit, and my life has simply been better.

I suffer the same as you, but at a younger age.

I have also been wondering if I suffer from ADHD too. Even at university I really struggled to sit there and do one thing for an extended period. I stopped going to lectures because I couldn't handle sitting in the lecture theater for an hour, I could never do homework either.

The only work that I've ever really managed to focus on and stick at for hours is physical work, like construction work or hospitality.

Like others have suggested, exercise does seem to mitigate my problem somewhat. I've found that going to the gym at lunch really helps. Don't just go solo to the gym though, or you'll just procrastinate at the gym, you need to join a group class.

> Am I suffering from some form of undiagnosed ADHD?

It's worth looking into this. I know people who found a diagnosis extremely helpful - even those who chose not to avail themselves of the medications available. There's several online questionnaires that would give you an idea of the kind of questions you'd be asked if you went for a consultation. Some of the traits are quiet distinct and you'll have an immediate sense of familiarity. If you find yourself saying "Gosh, I thought that was just me" then it's probably a sign. :).

Feel free to msg me and I can pass on a bit more info.

Last year, I moved from a large faceless corporation to a startup. For the twist in this story, at the startup I got exactly the way you feel. I had no motivation. Everything was easy, everyone was amazing, the benefits were great, but I was just so bored.

After 7 months, I went back to the large corp. I really enjoy what I do here and I'm now in a new role that I enjoy even more.

I guess my point is: you're bored. You don't care about your work because you don't care about it. Go find work you care about, something that excites you.

I just read a book about ADHD, and what you describe is exactly what the book says work can feel like for someone on the ADHD spectra. (the book is a Swedish one, called "Fördel ADHD" by Hansen)

Read up on ADHD, and learn good "tactics" to cope with work, such as regular workouts (increases dopamine and makes you able to focus for longer periods), short term goals (just 2 hours into the future perhaps), varying your tasks and work setting often, etc. Something I have found very helpful is the Pomodoro technique.

Pathological distractivity (like ADHD) is not the same as long-term erosion of motivation and sense of purpose by not being a good fit for either your workplace, or type of job. You would probably benefit from a professional psychotherapist to determine which specifically is plaguing you.

Remote freelancer here. I've had this problem for forever as well - many days I will stare at whatever project I'm working on all day without getting anything done, and maybe the next day the same will happen, and by the third day I will start avoiding communication with the team. Sometimes a week will go by where I've sat down to try to work as if it was full time but only clock a quarter of that. After a few months of that kind of torture, I'm dying for the customer to dismiss me and try again from scratch...only it's the same thing over again. It's no wonder I haven't built a solid network of clients, and I'm genuinelly surprised when I get anyone to call me again. I know I would probably perform better in a regular job environment - I know I've done in the past. But at the same time, I have both a very hard time accepting the idea of spending 40-50 hours in an office, and huge difficulty convincing those jobs of taking me. Development for me was supposed to be a way to get home the bread and support my artistic career, but it's working out to be very poor at bread winning for me, and I find it just as hard to work on my art this way. I'm considering quitting it completely and do menial jobs that don't fry my brain so I can really push my real passions.

Do your goals actually make sense to you? Why have you set these goals? I'd start asking these fundamental questions, because it may be that you simply aren't engaged in your career path. Do you actually enjoy your work? Do you think you'd enjoy starting a business? Or are you just trying to get paid?

If you don't have the passion for the actual work, and you don't care that much about the money, then you'll never feel that motivation you talk about. And that's OK! You can force yourself to get there by playing games and tricking yourself, but is that worth it? Maybe working a solid 20-30 hours as a freelancer who makes enough to get by while pursuing other interests isn't so bad. If so, embrace it! Don't beat yourself up over failing to meet some arbitrary goals.

Maybe there's something entirely different you'd rather be doing. You're young enough that you can still find your passion if it lies elsewhere. Have you ever been driven to complete anything? Is there anything you just can't get enough of doing? Think about it. Maybe it pays less, but maybe that doesn't matter, because if you enjoy it, if it gives you a sense of accomplishment, maybe that's worth more than making extra money.

I used to struggle a lot when it came to getting things done that I actually wanted to do wrt personal projects, and sometimes work projects. I had a big issue tackling projects I wanted to finish because I would get discouraged or distracted by something and then lose focus. Usually I would bounce from project to project whenever I ran into a hangup and then by the time I came back to it I had forgotten what I had done and what I wanted to do, so I was usually surrounded by rotting projects if there was no screaming deadline pushing me to deliver.

It's probably really obvious to other people but the main change I made in the last year and a half has been consistently writing my ideas down as 'tasks' in a project management software, divided into projects. Now everything is in one place, out of my head, and I can see for each project what I have actually done, what I have not, and categorise things. Having concrete tasks that I can check off as I do them or amend as I rethink my ideas increases the satisfaction and focus I have while working on a project because I can see what I have been planning and how far I've come instead of getting bummed out by a weird edge case or slightly wrong initial architecture.

Have you considered trying therapy? Working with a professional who understands how psychology works can be incredibly helpful problems like this. They can help you build personalised strategies that take into account how you think, rather than generic suggestions.

Especially your mentions of punishing yourself and tracking “fail” days sound very unhealthy to me (not a professional), and perhaps working on what’s causing you to think in those terms could be beneficial.

I have always had the exact same problem, sort of dealt with it by doing crazy sprints of work, but recently had a revelation. And I'm in my late 30s.

Try the free course "Learning How To Learn" by Barbara Oakley on Coursera.

It teaches you how to deal with this in the procrastination section. Roughly speaking, it teaches you how to recognize and effectively counter bad habit as well as change your mind set to focus on the process, not the product. For me the process/product bit was the big revelation.

Also, it sort of teaches you that your zombie mode can be used for good, I realized that by trying to have an incredibly flexible life and not have a set routine, I was actually working against one of my best "allies", habits for simple stuff are good, the mind likes routines as it can switch off. Use it to your advantage.

It's not a magic bullet, some days still go wrong, yesterday for example I played a game all day. But the odd thing is, techniques like the podomoro technique have now started working for me with this change in mindset.

I would go through the whole course start to end, it's short and really good. I've picked up several other new ideas and habits from it that are really working for me.

EDIT: Also, I second the therapy too, that's also helped.

Many, many good responses here. And I muchly second meditation and exercise. I also needed to get out the house every day when I worked from home (the gym was good, but you don't talk to enough people). WeWork has been excellent because it gives me a place to be every day, and people to talk to.

As for distractions like video games, try making them irritating enough that it's more effort to do it than keep focused on your task. Unplug the console, put it in the box and put it at the top of the cupboard. Unplug all the cables from your TV. Let yourself play console, but go through the effort of setting it up and packing it away each time. Before long you'll only play it when you really want to - those ten minute "one game" sessions that become 2 hours don't happen anymore.

Last year I moved into a new place and my housemate and I didn't bother getting a TV. I missed TV for about 2 weeks. Been over a year now and not having something to just 'sit' in front of has been a game changer for _doing_ other things. Same deal. I cut out all the casual watching.

All of us struggle - particularly when working for yourself. Don't beat yourself up, it really doesn't help.

It could be ADHD, but believe it or not I'd explore whether it's an addiction issue. I think there should be more discussion and analysis of the relationship between addiction and chronic procrastination.

What else are you doing with your time? You made a couple of references to video games as a reward system... do you spend a lot of time playing games instead of working? Are there related addictive-ish behaviors like watching porn or engaging on Internet forums for hours a day?

Addiction isn't just about substance abuse. It’s about certain brain systems creating instant gratification feedback loops. Chronic procrastinators who don't abuse substances might be missing out on a whole body of literature and research about how this aspect of our brain works.

Another thing to consider is whether freelancing, your only career, is something you’ve chosen to enable yourself to pursue addictive behaviors.

I’ve just read a book on this called The Biology of Desire, the thesis of which is addiction is not a “disease”. More of a dysfunctional inter operation of brain systems in response to anxiety and trauma. It has several stories of how people recovered and reconfigured their minds.

I can relate. I've probably tried the vast majority of the motivation 'hacks' recommended by the other posters in this thread with varying amounts of success and failure.

The #1 thing I think that anyone in this situation, or any self-improvement challenging situation, should do is to understand themselves fully - what makes you tick, what do you like, dislike, etc.? Beware: this is not a 5-minute task; we could be talking years here. Once you feel like you have a handle on it, or along the way, try out different approaches. (As much as I love the word 'hack', I really shouldn't call them that because you could very well be using it indefinitely.)

--- For me personally, one thing that I've never truly tried is a commitment contract. I've long known about services like Beeminder and StickK, but I never actually fully tried one (where you commit with real money). That changed recently when I discovered a framework for classifying people called The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin.

Folks like us mostly fall into the category of "Obligers", people who meet outer expectations, but struggle to meet expectations they impose on themselves. And one way to beat that is to create parameters (like a commitment contract) that force you into action.

I recently (~6 weeks ago) created a goal on Beeminder and after falling off the wagon tout-de-suite and having to pay up ($5 initially), I haven't derailed since (my current penalty is $10). I know, not an earth-shattering amount of money, for some reason it's keeping me honest.

It's probably too early to tell if this is going to work long-term, but even this feels longer than I've stuck with other methods. I encourage you to check out Rubin's blog posts, interviews [1, 2] and/or podcasts. There's even a book and a quiz, but I learned enough from a single interview to get started.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/gretchen-rubin-the-four-tende... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2017/09/12/gretchen...

I discovered that I'm only really useful before about 1pm, so I get up early and take advantage of that time as much as possible. After that, I handle emails, scheduling meetings, the stuff that doesn't require thinking too much.

Sometimes I get a second wind and want to do intense thinking later in the evening, but usually I ignore it to avoid burnout.

I fought it for a long time, but it's just how I'm wired.

I think very few in the Western culture will encourage that, but if it's your nature, don't fight it too much, you don't have to be the hero that ships app number 1000000021 in the app store. Get or keep a comfy '9 to 5' corporate job, get a gym membership and enjoy life the way you enjoy it and not the way is trendy in 2018. Humans are not built to be systematic.

What helped me here are two things:

1. The book getting things done by david allen. He just very explains to you how organizing works or how it often fails and what to do about it. Basically a smart person guide to keeping organized

2. Realizing that it wasn't motivation i was lacking cause that is fleeting and temporary but discipline. Not motivated? Fuck it, do it anyway. Motivated? Good, keep doing it.

A thing to keep in mind is that work (at least as it is commonly practised) is not "normal". It's a thing we have accepted as normal, and if you want to be successful (by the common definitions) then, sure, you need to find some strategies achieve some focus and the ability to bring things to completion. There are plenty of good strategies throughout this thread; exercise and meditation are probably the most important.

But you shouldn't feel like a failure or consider yourself aberrant in some way. You're not built for the way we live now. If you're concerned about ADHD, find a doctor. I know plenty of people who have become much more satisfied with their existence after working through that, figuring out ways to adjust their behaviours.

In the end, you need to balance the utility of coping with the expectations of the modern world (and your own requirements for a comfortable life) against an understanding that the way we live now is messed up.

For me personally there is a huge gap in "working for others" and "working for myself", with freelance work falling in the latter category. I do well in an office environment where I have influence in setting my own tasks, but having others rely on me finishing my things and meeting deadlines. Of course it helps that I find my work interesting.

When working on my own projects in my free time, motivation comes in bursts - I can have two evenings where I can hardly keep myself from working, and entire weeks where I cannot seem to get started or do anything constructive - my mind wanders off and I start procrastinating instead. I am fortunate enough that it does not matter financially to me what I complete in my spare time, but it is clear that waiting for motivation to hit me is not a viable strategy (for anyone).

First off, I find that starting is the hardest part. Once I sit in front of the code, opened and have written the first words, I can keep going for at least a couple of hours. So make sure you always start a task, even if it means dragging yourself in front of the computer.

Second, find a way to motivate yourself. For me, it is communicating clearly what my deadlines are to the people depending on it - this means I commit myself to finishing it publicly. At the same time, make sure you do not say "This project will finish in 3 weeks", but break it into chunks - "In two days, I'll have a prototype of the admin module, where you can test. Friday I expect to have all the functionality working, implementing your feedback along the way. Wednesday next week we'll have a meeting to discuss changes to module Y", etc.

There's no silver bullet, and I certainly do not envy this part of being a freelance developer, but it is possible. And remember, everyone struggles with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk

First up, I'm not qualified to solve your problem, but if you think you have ADHD, get it checked by a professional. I managed to convince myself that I had diabetes.... I apparently do not.

But honestly, maybe you just need to do something different. Find a small shop that needs a developer, pick something that your grossly overqualified for.

Yes, mid 30s, I struggle as well. I'm much better at small discrete tasks than I am at larger projects, where I often work for a few minutes, then back up and think about the scope of the whole project, get discouraged, get distracted, etc. I've been very successful in life but the past 6 months I've been working hard to tweak a lot of the things I don't like about myself.

Currently seeing a CBT specialist which is helping. What I like about CBT is that it gives you discrete tools to address issues rather than spending 6 months trying to get into your entire childhood and background and stuff.

Lots of great suggestions here.. unfortunately the answer is you just have to fix it yourself. But you can fix it with help; it takes the desire to do something about it, and some experimentation, and it sounds like you're ready. Best of luck.

I'd recommend reading The Procrastination Equation. It sets out a simple model of how your brain makes these choices, and makes it clear what all the levers are to help you "game" your brain. It explains why shorter productivity cycles are so powerful, for example. It also sets out that there's a lot of variability in how sensitive individuals are to changes in the parameters - this is just a fact of life: you - and I! - may be more predisposed to it than most other people, so we have to work harder to battle it.

One very interesting parameter is how valuable - to your mind - the outputs of your labour are to you. It's of course not an easy parameter to change, but it's good thinking about it. Is your procrastination telling you something about your work?

At the end of your shower, switch the water to cold. Listen to your thoughts as you prepare to move the water to cold. Your brain is probably slinging lies about "you'll die", "this will suck", "it won't be worth it", etc. Pay attention to these lies, because it's the same stuff you think when you're working.

Eventually your thoughts will lessen, "this again", "we've already gotten good at this, you can stop now", etc. It's a great microcosm of learning opportunities.

It's also great for health.

"No discipline feels pleasant at the time, but it yields a harvest of righteousness" -- I have to say this pretty much every day to move myself in the positive direction.

I've got ADD and as a software engineer, yes I struggle with this everyday when I am not medicated. And unfortunately I self medicate with various drugs like research chemicals, prescription medications, and even methamphetamine. I would NOT recommend any of those - being a speed addict has been a personal hell for me over the last few years but it's been extremely effective with keeping me on task and engaged at the expense of my health (high blood pressure, insomnia, stimulant psychosis, etc.)

I would look into maybe finding something that is more stimulating as a career. I think this is what I'll end up doing; I really can't be a tweaker for the rest of my life.

Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has a lot of interesting things to say about this:

Why it's so Hard to Sit Down and Study/Work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFmQ5waavJY

How to Always Achieve Your Goals - No Matter What

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvc9zguunhc

Sort Yourself Out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0Qm8I2cCAE

Clean Your Room

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gcMm_aL3Cc

Find a therapist. Maybe talk to your GP or primary care doc. In technical terms, take a look at your requirements. Are they obtuse? well defined? Is the customer asking too much and you know that but didn't tell them? These long term tasks (building an app etc).. those require insight. You might self-sabatoge because you know the insight is not there. But the one way out of that is to do this: your code/app/software may not be a global solution and make you rich but a stepping stone along the way to making it so. That's it. Simple. Do the work, practice. For those interviewing.. Do you the algorithms, leet code. Just do it.

Are you one of the "theorist" NT personality types? It's very common for such intuitive thinkers to get into these kind of traps. Day-to-day task management and productivity (especially detail work) become significant stressors. The best answer I've found is rebalancing in favor of thinking-as-job and doing more consulting, planning, teaching, and less making or doing. Then the making or doing can develop on its own in e.g. hobby time.

It's just another mental model or lens through which to view the human system, but I find it useful. Last I checked the majority of HN were intuitive theory-types. Good luck.

I suspect the issue isn't that rare, but clinical explanations are worth considering. Look at a wider range of that menu too. What used to be known as Asperger's syndrome (now "high-functioning autism spectrum disorder" or something like that) can have these sorts of issues as a facet, and is also of particular interest to our demographic.

But I think you would also do well to consider what you do have easy access to motivation for and if there is a mismatch between your work and your values about how you want to live.

Hope you'll find satisfying answers.

I know how you feel. Some times I can be doing good, and be getting shit done. Then bam from right field something distracts me and wow where did those 2 hours go. Recently I been taking a more Buddhist style to the problem. Removing the unwanted distractions like uninstalling video games, staying away from youtube, and limiting my time on other unproductive distractions. Rewards and negative feedback only works if someone else is handing out the reward or punishment. That is why working for others causes people to work. If you want motivation you have to either find something other then money to push you, or every time you start to procrastinate you have to fight. Every morning I wake up look in the mirror and scream "FUCK IT" to remind myself life is short, time goes by fast, and I need to get shit done. Add positive habits in your life and you be surprise how much it helps. The other thing I say every day to myself is ESSR "Eat Shit Sleep Repeat" reminder I don't want to be one of those people that goes through life just surviving. Their is no simple way to gain motivation it is either something that comes naturally like people that love to workout vs people that have to drag themselves to the gym. Or you have to fight for it every day you have to go without reward, without joy, without pleasure, and get whatever you have to done. Best of luck.

> I've used everything from rewards ("If I work for X hours, I'll play a video game") and punishment ("If I don't work for X hours, I'm a complete failure") to get myself to work.

Programming is a creative pursuit. It's not something you can do on autopilot. [1] You have to think and solve problems and honestly and typically for those who love it's very rewarding. If it's not rewarding enough for you then perhaps it's not the career for you. [2] Full time at least.

[1] For example you might hate and have no interest in being a store clerk or a toll taker or cut lawns but those are by and large 'autopilot' jobs that is you can do them with nominal pain and just get by. They don't require creative energy. Things that require creative energy are difficult to do long term full time unless you love to do them.

[2] The other aspect of this to consider is how much time you spend doing programming. Perhaps it's rewarding but not as a full time job. I enjoy doing programming but then again I don't do it full time. I don't know if I would be able to do it full time in fact I think I wouldn't. Ditto for commenting on HN. I can do it here and there but I would be frozen and it would be distasteful if I had to do it 40 hours a week or even 20 hours a week. Or if I was forced to do so instead of being (as I suspect all of us are) self motivated. Note how many people don't leave comments because either they can't (are to busy) or it's not rewarding to them.

Rands is one of my favorite writers on development.

http://randsinrepose.com/archives/a-hard-thing-is-done-by-fi... this article is pretty good when it comes to forgiving yourself for procrastination in terms of starting something.

In terms of finishing, for me that is a question of self-image. I am someone who completes things. I build my reputation on delivering things on time and with attention to detail throughout the project. Others know they can rely on me to do that, so they will not try to micromanage me or look over my shoulder, because they can rely on me delivering the way I always do. That image is important to me, so I will go to great lengths to keep it.

People think I am good at attention to detail (even though I have no natural propensity for it at all, outside an obsessive need to understand how things work) and they rely on me to be that person in the business environment, so I have an unwritten social contract to fulfill, and keeping that is important to me, even if the actual task I need to do to keep it is not very engaging.

That's all there's to it. Start, and finish what you started. I don't tie any kind of rewards or punishment to the process. I'll procrastinate a bit before I start, but that is part of figuring out what the thing you're starting is, and I will finish (on or before time) because others are relying on me to finish.

Are you a procrastinator, unable to start anything which is more than a tiny bit of work ?

These two posts made a lot of sense for me:

https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti...

https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/how-to-beat-procrastination.h...

It could certainly be ADHD-PI/ADD, as it is very underdiagnosed, especially amongs people with (otherwise) above average cognitive abilities, more so if they are men. It can be very debilitating.

There is a sort of very non-scientific test you can use to gauge the probability of ADD/ADHD, in my experience, quite reliably.

— Would you agree that being really bored is better described as somehow painful, in an almost physical sense, than anything else you can come up with to describe it?

If yes, it's my experience, and that of a few others as me with ADD/ADHD that the only other people that tend to consider it at least -possible- that one can actually experience something closely related to pain when bored, is those that either are already diagnosed, or will be in a few years. Haven't been wrong once, yet.

Apparently it's so hard to understand for most people, that it's very common that even doctors and nurses working with ADD/ADHD have a hard time to undertake the concept, many appear tp outright reject it. As if anything but pain could stop you from applying yourself, even to the things you love, or loved yesterday.

I can elaborate a lot more, leave a comment if you're interested, and I'll TRY to get back to you tomorrow. But as you are probably aware, there is a significant risk I've forgotten all about it tomorrow.

Best of luck!

My only real motivation is coffee. It makes me just the right amount of autistic to pay close attention to tedious details and actually care about getting it right and finishing the task. Without coffee I could care less and wouldn't e able to hold down a tech job, I'm sure. I wish it were not so, it has many negative side effects for me: anxiety, grumpiness, difficulty sleeping well. If you find a good motivator that isn't a drug, you will be way ahead.

In my case, it helps to stick to habits. Habits that are device, cloths and location specific.

The biggest one is probably my computer at home. It only exists for gaming. When I'm inside my gaming room to enjoy a gaming session, nothing else gets close to me and I forget about everything as soon I step into this room.

Another thing is, that I have cloths to relax, to go out and to go to work. As soon I change into my plain white shirt with collar, my brain probably switches to work mode.

The third is similar to the first habit. Going to work and being there is also a 'swtich' and I can concentrate.

I was a freelancer too and I had a hard time to work at home. My computer was always just a room away and just going in there for a 'short' gaming session was too easy.

So basically this is my advice: Go and buy a different computer than the one for gaming, shower in the morning and change into your business attire. Leave the house and go somewhere boring and quiet. The last part is the hardest since everything gets interesting depending on how much you have to overcome your habit. Your brain tries to fill your enjoyable habits with new enjoyable habits, instead of the 'boring' work. This is probably why so many smoke - it creates a enjoyable habit of doing 'nothing', which is better than working.

I hope this helps a bit. :-)

Test your self for vitamin D and B12 deficiency. Also try avoiding gluten and dairy products. I support and agree with most other comments here as well, but fix the diet first!

It feels like you’re haven’t discovered something that you would wholeheartedly embrace as a “success“, that you would experience as a genuine pleasure. What is the ultimate game you want to play? Do you like animals? Cuddling a pet gives you a warm fuzzy feeling? That might be the feeling that you should look for when defining that „success“ in work. And once you know what it is motivation will come to you as a lucky dog or a cat asking to be petted.

Yes, I do feel this way. So much so in fact that I could convince myself that I sleep-typed this, except for the fact that I'm in my mid-thirties. All the way down to gamifying my productivity, racking up points and "indulgences" which I use on junk food, video games, etc. I wish I had an answer, and am keeping an eye out on these replies as well.

That said, all external indicators seem fine. Whenever I bring the issue up to colleagues, superiors, or significant other, they assure me that I work plenty hard. I'm doing "okay" in my line of work, on track for a passable career in research. But I am all too aware of how much time I waste and how much better I could be doing. This troubles me because I know my work makes a difference in the grand scheme of things.

It's possible that we only have so many creative/intense work hours in the day and it's a lot fewer than we realize. In my case, I probably average around 3 hours of solid work per day, highly irregular (most days probably 1-2 with some hard spikes).

Shortly before finishing grad school, I did go see a therapist. He said something like "You might have a mild case of ADD, but you seem to be making it work so far (was finishing up a PhD). I could prescribe you medication, but I wouldn't want to mess with what seems to be working for you." To start with, he recommended the book "The Mindfulness Prescription for ADHD" and the Mindspace app. These were nice, but in my mind they are just thrown into the bin of "things that worked for a little while". Now that I live elsewhere, I've been considering seeing someone again.

I'm starting to just chalk this up to the human condition. Maybe I'm wrong about intelligence and my more successful peers (whom I've seen as equals in innate ability) might actually be brighter, not just more disciplined workers.

I'm looking for "the" magic answer, not because it would be easy, but because I don't want to sink more effort into just another method that may or may not work in the end. In a way, I'm getting demoralized on the subject of self-improvement.

For what it's worth, several years ago during an "enhanced" experience, I had the following realization, which might have some truth to it. Paying so much attention to self-improvement, month after month, year after year, trains your brain to think you're a loser. The constant thoughts of "I'm too lazy, how do I get better" eventually get internalized. This is probably unhealthy and might even be counter-productive.

Best wishes, fellow traveller.

Hi,

I want you to tell you a litte story about my self and my struggles. We should be about the same age. A year ago, I was going strong, working my job, having side projects and getting things done. I was doing a lot of sports and was on the level of a marathon runner. Then I had an injury. Due to the lack of sport, I fell into depression. I was unable to concentrate on a single thing for even five minutes and had no motivation whatsoever. I have had then set goals for myself and after I failed to accomplish them, I beat myself up. Rinse and repeat. Now, about 9 Months later, I am still in the recovering process. Like you I tried pretty much every productivity hack out there. From pomodoro to bullet journaling, habit forming and so on. What I want to say: There is no quick fix. It takes time.

So I regularly try to niche down on the cause. Is it a motivation, concentration or multitasking problem? Then I try to fix the cause with experimenting with different tools and strategies. At different stages in your journey, you will have different bottlenecks, asking for different strategies.

At the beginning the things that worked for me, were building up from my principles and core beliefs (Minimalism, Freedom, Simplicity). Then I started dreamlining with a monthly timeframe. But it is important, that the goals are measurable and attainable. Then I broke them down, to weekly and daily tasks. I also have daily todo lists, which I still fail way too often. Currently the biggest benefit brings singletasking and mindfulness. I noticed, that I am not really aware of my body, thoughts and surroundings. So currently I am borrowing a lot fom Zen Buddhism. According to the saying: "When you walk, just walk. When you sleep, just sleep." I really try to be present. This helps me to focus and concentrate on a single task at hand. But it takes training. This won't happen over night. This sounds like a straight path. It wasn't! I experimented and failed a lot. I threw away what didn't work, and used what worked for me.

Links that helped a lot: https://alexvermeer.com/8760hours/ https://zenhabits.net/ https://tim.blog/lifestyle-costing/

Yes, it is very normal in an unstructured life, many very smart graduate students at the top universities struggle with it. It is the curse of freedom. People don't realize a regular 9-5 job gives them routine, social commitments and a visible positive feedback on a good job done in a timely manner, and a negative feedback otherwise (both positive and negative social feedback are stronger than self-awarded rewards and punishments).

I always felt this way about schoolwork, and never about professional work. You mention that you're a freelancer - do you have a home office? I found that the context switch of physically being in the building and at my desk made work the most natural and effortless thing in the world, while I struggle with "work from home" days. Is there a way you can create this kind of "work mode" context switch for yourself?

I used to do alot of self-motivation hacks, but ultimately threw everything out the door because they were unsustainable and tiring. I eventually noticed that if I was helping people, I didn't need any kind of motivation. I do things because I care. Perhaps you could try the same approach?

In the first summer that I couldn't get a coding internship (in college), I taught my friend who didn't have a coding background how to code. I taught my girlfriend at the time how to code. I started a meetup group and taught everyone I could. As they got better, I started to learn new things to teach. When I took on contract projects, I talked it over with my trusted friends and we solve the projects together. They were getting better through the projects I take up and my projects became a little more fun to work on.

Now, fast forward a few years, many of the people I taught are now senior software engineers. I still meet up with them a few times a week to talk about new coding patterns, discuss work projects, and help each other get better.

For me, the mindset shift I needed to do was to start thinking about how I can help others around me and make sure I'm helping them effectively.

I feel very similar. It has actually always been like that for me. I hardly ever did (=finished) any homework in school and university, but I was spending most of my free time sitting at my desk b/c I had to do homework.

Now I'm perfectly aware I'm procrastinating while I'm doing so, but I just feel like I must [find out xy / read the current news about xy / read that interesting article I saw / review and close the hundreds of open browser tabs / have some social interaction w/ someone / finish unrelated task xy (e. g. housework) / eat sth / watch porn] at that very moment and couldn't even properly concentrate otherwise.

As many others pointed out being overwhelmed by either huge or lots of tasks causes this quite often and splitting up tasks and prioritizing can help in those situations. Nevertheless this pattern sometimes even makes me procrastinate 2 minute tasks for days w/o doing anything useful during that time even if that one task (and/or others dependent on it) is/are the only one(s) I have to do (so to tackle it there neither is anything to split up nor to prioritize.

Short answer: yes, it is normal

Long answer: I have seen both sides, for most part of my school life I was an incredible procrastinator. It's incredible when I imagine that I passed school. ;) (In fact a friend of me was amazed by that.) And yes, with studies I struggled like you. Of course it wasn't possible anymore to do a minimal program. I don't really know how I survived studies but I obviously did. (Oh god, remembering the mornings where it took me 3-4 hours to get up, hitting snooze a bizillion times...)

At some point thought things changed. I was working a student job where I was programming and I was incredibly motivated, getting money for something fun. Actually it stopped being fun after some months but I was still much over average motivated for 1-2 years.

When finishing studies I started builing a startup with friends and I worked the first time a day super long, went to bed at 11 am in the morning when we shipped our web app the first time. The startup wasn't particularly successful so after half a year of quite some work we "ghosted" it.

But then I realized something really weird for the first time: it's possible to put in a tremendious amount of work into something and it might still not pay off. Worst off all, even my final study grade suffered slightly from this because my co-founders put a lot of pressure on me.

So afterwards I realized: never ever again am I working (insane) overhours for a prolonged time.

I strongly believe that there is something in us that protects us, less magical than it sounds, evolution. When we work too much we burned out.

In the years after I eventually co-founded another company and was really close to totally burning out. (Although I limited my overhours, the work-life balance was terrible and when I worked it was ~90-95% "efficency" - my whole private life was built around this startup.) I think this 2nd hard lesson totally showed me that it isn't worth it.

Nowadays I do my best to find a good balance in work. Of course it's a personal life choice. The more effort/work you put in, the higher the probability you gain but also the higher the probability that something bad happens.

So yes, obviously there are life hacks etc, go for them if you want to "solve your problem". Or maybe think for yourself and imagine what's best for you.

I've done some thinking on this over the years. I'm not convinced it is "ADHD" per se, based on reading the symptom list and observing family members who do clearly have the symptoms. Of course it is always tricky to self-diagnose.

For me it is more akin to an addiction mechanism : consider someone who is overweight because they eat too much and exercise too little. This situation is crystal clear to everyone, including the person themselves. Yet, almost nobody improves their weight situation just because they "realize" that they should be eating less and exercising more (two things that from a practical perspective are pretty easy to do). We don't say that they lack focus to stop eating -- we think of their behavior more in terms of an addiction.

So what's going on? Obviously it's complicated but on some level the person's brain has decided that eating is actually what it would prefer to do vs not eating, even though it "knows" this isn't going to achieve the desired outcome.

Similarly with "getting st done" I suspect. Although your brain knows that it should be cutting code or writing blog articles, it actually prefers to read HN and research the security measures used in triggering mechanisms for the primary stages in thermonuclear weapons.

That being the case it sounds like you are already taking all the typical countermeasures : don't have food in the fridge; count food points; try to keep the long term goal in mind..

One other thing I'd say in the context of freelancing and remote work is that you may be unfairly judging yourself, or rather comparing yourself to a mythical perfect version of yourself, due to the lack of available other people with which to compare your achievements.

I think motivation is one of the most fundamental parts of human existence. I think it should be studied so much more.

Often we talk about it at such a high level. But in the end everything boils down to the second-by-second internal monologue, and all the context and life experience surrounding this monologue.

Beneath this is the raw emotions that we feel and cannot explain. Its like when you're looking at a stack trace and it stops at an internal call into a private api.

I'd love to know more about the inner workings of people's internal monologues. Are there consistent patterns of thoughts that can lead people into the state of flow? How does the mind wandering into a day dream contribute to our motivation? Perhaps ignorance is bliss, and seeing behind the curtain spoils the show. Are we driven by our delusions of grandeur?

Can we trick ourselves into exaggerating the importance of what we are working on regardless of how we may feel about it after its finished?

Does contemplating your own motivation (regularly asking yourself why you are doing something) disrupt your actual motivation (uncertainty principle).

Yes, but mostly for different reasons (see below). I think the web has shortened people's attention spans, and there's the now constant distraction of social media. The other problem is that much work nowadays isn't really necessary, and many people doing it realize this, though maybe not consciously. It's very difficult to keep motivated if you don't see the point of what you're doing.

As for myself, I'm still developing my programming language (http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html), but as recent work has involved a major refactoring of the type system, with some bug fixes along the way, there's been very little visible progress (hence, no updates to the tutorials section of my web site) and a few things that worked before are still broken. Lack of visible progress can be somewhat demotivating.

Working continuously for several years on the same project doesn't help either. Sometimes you need a change.

My work/research is completely unpaid, so there's no financial incentive to continue. If I were to stop working on it completely, hardly anyone would even notice, and I wouldn't be any worse off financially.

As I'm working alone on this, and no one's done anything remotely similar, there's nowhere to go to for help when I'm stuck.

Online comments on it have been mostly negative.

What keeps me going is that there isn't anything important about the language that I would want to change. The language feels like "the right thing", however hard it might be to explain that to aficionados of imperative textual languages. If nobody else wanted it, I would still use it myself.

Not everyone is suited to the freelance requirements for self-management. Consider being part of a team or recruiting a business partner.

Finding meaning in freelance work is a tough proposition. Perhaps it feels like a struggle because you're actively looking for struggle. It's easy to tell ourselves positive results can only come from struggle—that's far from true.

It sounds like you're good at what you do. Double your prices each project. Cut the number of projects you do 75%. Over-deliver. Hustle by improving your operation/system, not chasing a single variable (work input).

This work system will allow you to spend less time laboring and more time working on yourself:

1. Sleep, diet, exercise, reflect.

Here's a comment I recently wrote about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16150664

2. Visit a good doctor and get blood tests.

A few years ago I started having trouble focusing for more than 2-3 hours at a time. It turned out I have an under-active thyroid (Hashimoto's Thyroiditis) which causes my memory to become foggy, focus limited, and tempter short when my adrenal glands are under stress. This is fixed with some blood tests and the right medication. I would have never discovered this without finding a good quality doctor. I paid out of pocket to have access for a 45 minute session—worth every penny. Now I only have occasional flareups.

------

You're not broken—you're human. There are simple fixes for almost everything you describe that feels difficult. Take a step back (maybe literally, via vacation or a week off) and analyze how you can simplify your life and disconnect from this struggle = reward mindset.

Something to ponder: money, love, or fame as the end goal are dangerous, but as a byproduct of earnest effort and a life well lived can be uplifting.

I was there too. Oh my gosh, how hard it was for me to push myself to do any work on time.

For me, the solution was to change job. I didn't want to work on a thing that I haven't believe in. It was just uninteresting. Now I can say I work in awesome place, on wonderful project where I learn interesting new stuff every day and feel that I become a better dev every day.

>Am I suffering from some form of undiagnosed ADHD?

You can very easily resolve this question by talking to a doctor, or two. If you are curious, don’t just sit and wait and keep “wasting your life away” in the indecision of whether or not to get checked. The lack of decisiveness to even get check may itself be a symptom of ADHD.

One obviously cannot understate the value and importance of having a healthy life, regular sleep, good exercise, good diet and hygiene and all the like, but for some people it’s a little harder to get things in order than just that. Also you don’t need to consider getting medical help as a terminal situation; perhaps you may just use meds long enough to retain your brain with what it means to be productive and do meaningful work.

No solution is one size fits all, and you need to find what works best for you, but if you have questions or doubts about whether or not you may have an attention disorder, the best way to discern with any real certainty is to ask a professional.

I find the following helps:

- Changing my routine seems to kick off my ability to focus

- I have a sit-stand desk. Using it standing seems to help my focus, but changing between sitting and standing can bump my motivation.

- For clients starting and stopping a timer helps me focus.

- For clients and my own projects I use Pivotal Tracker to order tasks. It helps me break stuff down into smaller parts and to keep track of what I'm doing and helps me to avoid wondering what to do. I use it even though clients have their own project management solutions, I only use it for what I'm doing.

- I've never found rewards/punishments to be particularly effective.

- Unfortunately (because I'm from the North of England) I find that the better the weather the more motivation I have for just about everything.

edit I forgot to mention, fasting helps me focus too, even for long periods. Could just be the change of routine.

What I will say is that I've not cured what sounds very much like what you suffer from, just generated ways of dealing with it, more or less.

>This question might come across as dumb, especially for a 30 year old, but I come from a culture where this aspect of work was never emphasized and at this point, I don't know who to ask.

Off topic, Could anyone point to a place where you could ask for advice of life? It seems once we are in the 30s, there are more questions then answers then when i was in 20s.

I used to feel that way, but I finally came to terms with the fact that my work-life was a mess, and I was basically lying to myself.

I was working (and struggling, hard, in the way you describe) on a project I was telling myself would become a startup, and even though I felt I was being realistic about the limitations, in retrospect even that was insanely optimistic. I was burning myself out.

Once I had this epiphany - triggered by going to Startup Weekend and having a ton of fun (and no motivational problems!) working on a project, I pulled the plug and eventually got a fairly regular job in a fairly normal company (in an excellent team, though).

The epiphany and pulling the plug had a huge effect. It didn't fix everything overnight, but I did get into a habit of introspection, especially when I'm facing tasks that I struggle to get motivated for. They're still hard, but I am generally able to organise things around them in such a way that they don't get me down.

You're not suffering from ADHD. You're using a motivational skill! It's a very valuable skill to have! Boring work can be made interesting, life changing even. This requires vigilance, as you've noticed. Motivation is ongoing, requiring you to revisit the feelings and rationale that gave you that productive burst.

There are probably no simple solutions. But just in case, you havent already done this, just use a simple time logging tool and work in discrete sessions(20-40 minutes). (Eternity time logger is one good app, there are others). Dont worry about being precise (in terms of minutes high or low, or exact kind of task, over analysis isnt good). Instead aim for consistent use.

This allows you to work a certain number of rounds a day(instead of nebulous amount of productive time) and clarifies what is exactly happening instead on relying on internal psychological indicators of having done something or not.

Also, specifically for the ADHD part, the problem with wavering attention is that when one comes back, 'loading' the context again takes a lot of work. So write a note at the end of each session on what's done or maintain a simple task text file(again, it is easy to over organize here, so keep things as simple as possible).

> Essentially, I come up with a new tactic to motivate myself every couple of months. If I don't do so, I find myself struggling to meet my goals and distracted.

How often do you think about your goals? How important are they to you?

I was in your shoes for a long time, and the way I got past it was to think consciously about the end-result on a regular basis.

Do you want to skate by on your niche skills and watch as other harder workers get the bigger/better contracts from your contacts in the future?

Do you want to passively step through the motions of life and regret not trying to start that business when you're 60?

Do you want to look back and wish you had learned & built more instead of drinking beer and playing COD?

At the end of the day, you are 100% responsible for your own decisions and path in life. You aren't going to be able to artificially motivate yourself forever (as you are discovering). You have to find something that truly motivates you.

If you’re still here looking at replies feel free to contact me. And or watch/listen to this video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YSfCdBBqNXY

Wish you'd left some way to contact you.

Now that I'm at a computer I can say more but you're certainly not uncommon and there is lots of help that you can have. Cognitive behavior therapy shows great results in adult adhd/add patients. The video I linked talks about children but you'll likely feel yourself nodding along thinking of you.

Money quote for me was something like the ADHD child has zero self motivation. All motivation comes from the outside world. Which is why kids can play video games for hours because there is instant feedback. But when you finish a problem on your homework nothing happens.

And that there is a extremely poor short short term memory problem.

Tons of stuff.

You might be interested in this feature about adults with ADHD: https://www.buzzfeed.com/kellyoakes/these-adults-have-adhd-b...

You should like typical ADHD to me. I had the same issues and now am doing great with major changes to my lifestyle!

Maybe you should be doing something else with your life? Maybe you were supposed to be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a builder? I mean, life is so short, why punish yourself? I hate this culture of 'hacks' and all this rubbish to force yourself into doing things maybe you shouldn't be doing.

It is normal. Make sure you have all of these. Autonomy, Purpose and Mastery.

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594484805/braipick-...

The only advice I can give (I'm 29) is that my work life gets easier AND more productive when I think about it in terms of my path to the top of the mountain. So, pick a spot that you feel represents a point of accomplishment that you'd be happy to die having done (big goal, tombstone style stuff). Then as you approach your work, ask yourself "is this a stepping stone on my way to the mountain?" If it is, you'll find some reward in doing the work, as you feel like you have invested in yourself and your long term goals. If it is not, then you can measure that sense of frustration and now understand why you feel frustrated. And if you feel that frustration on a daily basis, it's probably time to get a new job.

I have felt this way for my whole life since my very childhood (when working meant doing homework). In my case this is ADHD. Ask your doctor about this. As for me (disclaimer: don't try this without consulting to a doctor, also note neither piracetam nor sunifiram are FDA-approved, anyway sunifiram should never be taken in doses higher than I do - it would do much bad and no good) I have found out empirically (I have tried many different things, adderall helped too but far not this great) that a combination of ¼ of a xanax pill once a day + a combination of 1200mg of piracetam, 4mg of sunifiram, 500mg of l-tyrosine and a strong multivitamin complex pill 2-3 times a day solves the problem by making me happy, concentrated and productive.

In my experience, this might be:

1. normal, up to a point. A lot of work is mostly not enjoyable, that's just a fact. 2. depression or ADHD or something related. If you suspect that, pay a visit to a psychiatrist or a general physician. 3. you don't want to do YOUR kind of work anymore. Maybe you should experiment a little with something different? I switched recently - I was extremelly bored at web programming and switched to Android programming some years ago. Now I have a lot of more fun. 4. your nature (meaning something innate and mostly unfixable (or not?))

Personally, I usually operate in cycles: bouts of excitement and motivation where I'm very productive, then I get tired and start to struggle and half-ass some things.

Start to exercise! Literally, destroy yourself physically, it could help. ;-) I think you can't fix your mental problem only with mental toolkit. It's important to keep your balance of mind and also body. I'm not an expert, but it works for me.

I reached that point when I was about 30. Every day, I had to talk myself into getting out of the car and walking in the door. It turns out the problem was that I didn't like my job. I changed careers and I haven't had motivation problems since.

I have had the exact same thing for years. Turns out I've been depressed since youth and never knew any better.

Make of it what you will, if you suspect you have something undiagnosed you might as well make a doctors appointment. Things can fly under the radar like that.

I think I struggle with similar things. It's hard, sometimes, when you have a day off to continue to want to push yourself to study up on the latest technologies or create side projects you can stick with. I do think it's important to _make_your_own_deadlines_ ...because then, nobody else will ever be setting them for you. I wonder if we all have a period in life where we sit and think "well what the hell am I doing with my life"...usually those moments come, make me reflective, and I have to then start to re-situate things... that's a motivator too. I don't know, but keep at it, grit is important, you got this. And you're definitely not alone.

I totally understand. When I was a freelancer, I found that working on project work forty or more legit billing hours a week is a lot harder than advertised.

When I'd been full-time or working for a consulting house, a lot of my forty plus hours was actually spent listening to meetings and performing non-productive activities. Moving to freelancing, I felt like I hit a wall at thirty-five actively-logged hours on tools like Toggl and needed to take breaks. No one was holding me accountable for my time except myself.

From experience, I feel like most professional consulting organizations pad hours, but I'd prefer to show more for my time since my personal brand is critical to my success.

Hi!

You may just score low on the contientiousness scale of the big five, do this test and see!

https://www.understandmyself.com/

If you score low on that dimension of personality, routine does not come easily to you by nature of your personality. It's not bad per-se but it means it will be harder for you to make and keep a schedule (which apparently is the advice for people low in that dimension).

I score low, and as a result I always have to keep on top of myself. I thought it was bad and carried a lot of guilt about it because I thought it should 'be easy'.

Send me an email if you want to discuss privately (ryan at 137 dot ms).

Personally I found out that my motivation was directly related to being well managed / being poorly managed by others where being well managed is normally something like: "find me the best possible solution for x, taking into account that we have y and z constrains", and doing things I believe in. There's a world of difference in motivation if you believe in the project goals or if you're in it just for the money. Finding technical challenges is also relevant sometimes, but not that much for me personally. whell maybe what I call workflow optimizations is the lie I tell myself for creating technical challendges.

I had the same problem you do. I used somewhat of an out of the box solution, which is to listen to subliminal audio. I do this while working, so it costs me no time at all. You can find some free ones on youtube.

It changed me from someone who would want to mess around all day, to someone who actually enjoyed working.

People underestimate the affect of what they listen to and see on a subconscious level and how it affects us. There is a reason that advertising is such a huge business.

If you are listening to melancholy, nihilistic music, especially, change your habits. Constant exposure to people complaining about how bad their life is, in verse, is really not good for your motivation.

My problem is worse: I can't motivate myself to play videogames anymore. "Oh no, more time spent with a computing device!".

I procrastinate a lot but I notice taking a break will give fresh insights. I make my breaks useful, like getting groceries or running. The worst thing you can do is procrastinate behind your computer.

For me going freelance was the motivator to become better. More pay, more influence on the product. I can take unpaid leave 1.5 - 2 months every winter and my customers are fine with it. Can't believe people put up with the miserable amount of holidays a lot of American countries give you if you have a day job.

It's normal for a Human with a brain having two distinct, functional hemispheres.

When you're in school or 'working for the man', their clock is your clock. As a fellow independent freelancer, the challenge I have found is maintaining compatibility with those clocks. In some cases, I'm doing what it takes to synthesize one of my own, according to the rhythms and cycles of the dominant "super-clock". They don't ask it of me, it's just that without enforcement of interplay, I lose all momentum.

Without a support crew, an Astronaut on an EVA can only accomplish so much.

No clock, no appointments. No appointments, no money.

I've had similar problems. After trying to overcome the problem myself for much too long, embarrassed to even reveal it to others, I found a great therapist and they helped immensely.

Probably the most important thing I learned is that there are healthy, very human needs behind bad behaviors. Stop fighting yourself and doing tricks and workarounds (hacks, etc.), and start caring about and helping yourself. When you can't focus on work, what do you really need, on an emotional level? What does the video game provide? What are you avoiding?

If you don't understand your subconscious drives and emotions, you will be a slave to them.

Without blowing this out of proportion, I think this can also be a slight case of depression. At least, lack of motivation (perhaps from some sort of "non-joy" in your work-environment and tasks) and "there's just no point in doing it" along with your negative self-thoughts, are all part of depression as an illness.

The "I'm a complete failure"-part resonates with me, and perhaps, it could be something as simple as being so afraid of failing, that you never even try.

I don't know if this is helpful advice at all, but it might give you an idea of what you can do to help yourself (CBT for instance).

Last week I heard an interesting interview [1] of Antony Sammeroff, author of a free e-book titled Procrastination Annihilation. [2]

I hesitate to recommend to you yet another anti-procrastination technique. Most of them are probably gimmicks that wear off quickly, as you have testified. But this book sounds like good stuff to me. I know this guy a little, and I think he's really smart.

[1] https://tomwoods.com/1090

[2] https://beyourselfandloveit.com/en/doit

No. Get help for ADHD. I spent 13 years professionally with untreated adult ADHD. All this sounds very familiar.

Informative: https://vimeo.com/109309151

This sounds a lot like the reason is lack of purpose, being passionate about what you do.

When you're freelancing, most projects don't mean anything to you other than cash, so it's understandable that you don't find much motivation for them.

Have you thought about what you're really passionate about and find a company that you find really awesome and work for them? Maybe tesla, spacex, watsi, or a new small hot social media app are all very exciting.

Or if you always had that one problem and it really bugged you that there didn't exist a solution for it, ever thought of making a product out of it?

First of all, if you work alone at home as I do, it is freakishly hard to do something that you're not madly in love with. And most jobs involve at least some portion of that, so I try not to be too hard on myself. We are fighting a world of distractions and no visible restrictions. It's amazing to accomplish something at all.

Second, finding the right music helps me a lot. I also play a few instruments which are right next to me and I often pick them up for a minute or two and play along. I can't imagine not being able to resort to music while working on boring stuff.

I have had similar challenges when working on side projects or boring tasks at the day job. It is tough to say if it is just procrastination or something else.

I think if you have a very creative mind, you may just enjoy the design part of the process instead of the actual work.

I have tried many different methods, the one I am trying now is using an app to implement the GTD method. So far it is working well.

Previously I have tried to plan things out the night before and be able to just hit the ground running. It works well, but having more of a running list of next actions with GTD seems to be a better fit.

Here's something to try: 20m chunks and breaks. And patience. Sometimes it takes a few empty cycles of 20m before breakthroughs begin. Once begun, they self-motivate.

You don't have to crank through until something starts. And it might even be okay to let your mind wander during the 20 minutes.

Then break. Take a few minutes, step away, go outside, pace around, glance at HN, anything.

Back to the 20m.

It's similar to a warmup at the gym when you're starting to do heavy sets. Here you're priming your mind.

My philosophy is, the second you have to fight yourself / your mind (motivation), you've already lost.

As somebody who has suffered basically the exact same thing, one book that has immensely helped is: https://www.amazon.com/Self-Directed-Behavior-Self-Modificat...

Essentially I found that I could tackle any task, but on the first flash of some other more exciting idea, feeling or sensation, I would drift off.

The book boils doing to finding your own Antecedents that Lead to Particular Behaviors that you want to change.

For me, the main thing that works is having a boss, someone that watches over my shoulder so to speak. I probably couldn't go self-employed / freelancer, I'd end up in your situation.

Try meditation. It is proven to increase productivity. I'm not talking about finding spiritual balance and all that hocus-pocus, I'm talking about actively destroying the thought threads that pop up in your head for 5 minutes at the beginning of the day. This will help shape your mind to prevent distractions throughout the day. Some other things that help are planning your next day in the evening, exercise, a good sleep, a good diet, showering, but meditation is the single biggest improvement that you can make.

I identify with you 100%. This post could've been written by me.

The only difference is I'm not a freelancer, and I've never been one. I've worked at small and large companies, and I've always struggled with this so everyone suggesting you just join a company is probably a bit naive.

I've ALSO wondered if I have an undiagnosed case of ADHD, and honestly when I look at the lists of symptoms online, I match more than half of them. I've wondered if I should talk to a doctor, but always avoided it. Maybe both of us should.

> Part of the reason for this is perhaps the nature of my work. I'm a freelancer and have been one since I graduated from college.

I think it's more than just part. It sounds that it could be the biggest problem. Have you tried working for a regular company? That way you wouldn't have to set project deadlines on ypur own and there would be a bigger driver/motivation/goals than what you have to build on your own. Also, there will be other people working towards that with you.

In my view, you are very lucky you can ask this question. It means you don't have external stimulation big enough to not have time to think about these matters. I don't want to be silly, but if you'd be hungry, jobless or having a lot of stake at risk, your brain would imidiately switch to "get shit done". So much for external motivation. Internal motivation, thats another story, which everyone need to figure out themselves. Still struggling myself.

You sound a lot like me. I have had tons of trouble making myself work, even on my passion projects that I have invested significant amounts of my own money in. I would recommend that you read Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield. He was a chronic procrastinator who turned things around. I would combine this with renting a desk at a coworking space and keeping regular work hours, though they might only be four or six hours per day (8 is too much if you are actually working).

I picked up bullet journalling last year and it has dramatically improved my procrastination and disorganization which has had the biggest impact on my motivation.

Setting aside each night to review the day and plan the next really helps. I love checking shit off. Just make sure your list is achievable and the tasks are small enough. Large tasks that take multiple days can be overwhelming and lose meaning.

It also helps that my bujo is a physical book. That tactile experience makes a big difference.

Ivan Pavlov, famous for his dog experiments, wrote about something he called "target reflex" (approximate translation, I could not find his 1916 book by that name in English). That's the desire to capture the flag, reach another level, or set a new record that's keeping you glued to the screen when you're playing a videogame. Learn to ride this reflex.

lugg gives a good trick: do one thing. Nobody has time for 100 pushups, but surely you can do one, right?

Clean your room!

https://youtu.be/OoA4017M7WU

(Then rescue your father from the belly of the whale, roughly speaking)

I would advise you start talking with a therapist who specializes in mindfulness training. Meditition and mindfulness can help you learn how to focus, while at the same time being less judgemental of yourself. I recently did about 6 months of online chat therapy for my anxiety (which was hindering my work productivity), and applying the mindfulness techniques that I learned has been really good for my well being and productivity.

My theorie is that while we as humanity accepted the differences in human pretty far so far we still expect a pretty standardised human in terms of work environments.

However I think the trick is essentially to give up trying to act normal and finding your own way. Something that fits your style of life.

Edit:// I am certain any doctor would agree its ADHD. However you'd still have to question if amphetamines really present a final answer then.

I did struggle at work and since being laid off (after 33 years) I struggle as a middle-aged guy at college too.

ADHD may be part of it for me but when I organize my tasks and hunker down I do better. But I do see people who are amazing who seem to pick up new tasks and complete them effortlessly.

As someone once said every piano player isn't a Mozart there are shades between. Whatever the task some of us are terrible, some OK, and others are great.

I typically find that getting started is most of the battle. Pick one task and just start it, then you'll be in the flow. Avoid the temptation to check email/etc, and disable notifications/etc as these will break your flow.

Furthermore, give a helping hand to future-you. I actually find that it's better to not-quite finish one task before you leave for the day, so that you have an easy onramp to start tomorrow.

Do you work at home alone? Maybe try a co-working space or similar to be near other like minded people. There may also be something where you would feel more fulfilled being part of a team, not just a cog off to the side. The are positives and negatives but I work best this way as well. Think of it a little like going to the gym, you tend to be more successful as a pair or group of friends.

Imo, most people just want to improve things in life but don't always concentrate to form an action plan.

My guess is you don't spend any time focusing on how your work improves your life. Makes you money but if money is just a pool you keep around in case you want to go swimming you'll find it's just a job to pass the time and you really just forgot how to be bored.

Do you sleep enough? How was your stress level about non-work issues? Do you take vacations enough? What is your office environment like? What is your diet like? What is your spiritual life like? Do you exercise? Have you considered mindfulness practice or meditation?

All of these things are relevant and can have a significant impact on your mental health and ability to focus.

I do well with a version of the Rule of 3.

I set 3 larger goals for a day, and I tend to break each up into 3 smaller goals that help me get to each. This can scale up to goals that are larger or take longer.

My main point is to use milestones. I set a schedule with milestones that should help me reach goals on time. The sooner I feel behind, the sooner I push through my procrastination.

Just gonna throw my two pence into this...

I've always found that if I couldn't motivate myself to do something then I probably do not want to do it on some level and should be doing something else.

If that could be you then one solution is to take a break from work and try figure out what you'd rather be doing. You'll know because you'll feel drawn to it.

You aren't alone. I'm far better at helping others than myself. Freelancing I find tricky. I've had good management in the past alongside a team that knows how to play to my strengths and keep down my weaknesses. So don't discount working in a unit. Stroking my own ego, and trying to reward myself is useless for me.

I think you've not yet found what you love. Try new things and wait until you think about these naturally in the shower. You should force yourself to assume you dont know who you are. It could be surprising. Maybe you should be, say, a hair stylist. Maybe you would dramatically love that. Finding what I love to do worked for me.

The War of Art [1] has some good advice on overcoming "resistance", the force that stops people from doing what they need to do.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp...

Read “The Now Habit.” It will probably change your life. It will handhold you from where you are back to good productivity.

I am struggling with same problems for 10 years, I am diagnosed with ADHD and taking medication for long time... But ... even I am diagnosed i dont think i have got ADHD - maybe i can call it depression. In fact its caused by not enough fulfilling relationships. Its fixable in one day... sounds easy but its so hard..

It is normal in the sense that it isn't unnatural. It is normal in the sense that this is something many people experience, maybe in software in particular. It isn't normal in the sense that it is something that you should expect. If you continue to struggle with work you will be unhappy and many people are.

I know this sounds like a cop-out answer, but you need to see one or more professionals instead of asking here. I had the same kind of problems (all my life, really) and it turned out to be ADHD, which I didn't even know anything about until my son was diagnosed and his psychiatrist told us it's hereditary.

I can recommend the book '365 days of self discipline'

https://www.amazon.com/365-Days-Self-Discipline-Life-Alterin...

Self discipline is something you need to work on every day.

Do you like your job and way which you do it? Could you continue doing this for 20+ years more not getting mental?

If there is at least 1 "no" answer, you should think about changing the way you earn, at least. Life is not about the money, it's about excitement and passion, about things you really want to do.

Spend more time away from the computer and work related! Increase your rates, so that we you do work you earn more. Through empiric studies on myself, from working 10-15 hours/day 7 times a week I found out that I actually get more done if I just work 8 hours per day and take the weekends off.

> Am I suffer big from some form of undiagnosed ADHD.

Possibly but I would take that question to a medical professional.

I have this problem when my tasks lack a clear answers to "why are we doing this?" and "what are we trying to achieve e?".

Without clear answers to those questions it's hard for me to motivate myself on work.

There's another HN article trending right now that holds your answer.. https://capitalandgrowth.org/articles/859/book-summary-the-p...

You might enjoy reading Yihui Xie (bookdown, Knitr)'s very honest blog post on his problems that sound similar to yours:

https://yihui.name/en/2018/02/career-crisis/

Hard work is not a virtue and only a necessary evil. I think the human has never been evolved to work as we do today. We experience stress very often at work, but stress mechanism has been evolved to literally save your life when you need to fight or flight. Your mind naturally holds you back.

I often try to remind myself that it is better to start somewhere, than nowhere. Just getting started is often halfway done. Even though it might turn out that you could have started somewhere else which in hindsight would have been a better approach, it is still better than nothing.

I can hardly wait to get to the office most Mondays. Today is a holiday, I’m scheming a way to sneak into the office avoiding the security system.

What you have is certainly not normal. Even if it were prevalent you shouldn’t settle for it. There’s a lot of helpful advice in this thread.

Charge more and take more time off. Lately when I find myself struggling to work I just don’t. The amount of progress I make in my sprints is often enough to keep the rest of the team busy for weeks. Just embrace that you might be a sprinter and that that’s ok.

so, uh, I have similar issues, and you know what works for me?

Going into a physical office with a professional middle manager.

I mean, assuming I find a place where I'm a good fit (meaning, my technical abilities make it worth the time of the middle manager to manage me) it works really well, because the job of the middle manager is, essentially, to make people like me work; Because I honestly want to be useful, I think that often said middle managers feel good about the whole thing, too, because I really do get more done under their guidance. They feel useful, I feel useful, etc...

The other thing is that I go through periods of strong productivity and of very weak productivity. This is... acceptable in industry. Ok, so you have some unemployed time, but that's okay because when you are really productive, the remuneration is pretty great.

Also, on the ADHD side? for me? this is after getting the medication. It helps... a lot. but I still benefit more from having a middle manager than most people do, I think.

Append: more on medicalizing your shit:

We live in an age where we spend a huge amount of our GDP on medical care. We have amazing solutions for a lot of problems. Take advantage of this, because when medical science has a good solution, it's often super easy and effective.

Sleep apnea, for instance, is easy to test for and easy to treat, and if it goes untreated? Really fucks up your attention span (and your cardiovascular system) It's one of those things where modern medical science has a quick, cheap and easy mechanical fix.

There's a bunch of other crap like that, too. I personally would go for the sleep apnea test before I messed around too much with medications; not that medications are bad, but if you have it, treating sleep apnea is an unalloyed good, (well, getting mask fit setup is... difficult, but that's mostly a matter of buying the masks and trying them; a small matter of money on a software dev salary) while most medications have pluses and minuses that need to be carefully weighed, even once you've found the one that is best for you.

I'd consider whether you are relying on too many quick fix dopamine hits. Things like games, video, browsing the web, or whatever. These things can out-compete "work", since that usually takes more effort to get the same effect.

I dont think a point / rpg system ever works for a signle person because the value of the points is dynamic. Ive been using the GTD method for work in combination with pasting reminders everywhere and am very happy with how this works.

Yes. It's normal. It's why people have to pay you to work. Unless you are a slavish minded individual, why else would you be motivated to work? You are trading your valuable time for something you don't want to do for money.

If you're a freelancer, find a co-working space, as it really helps to have people around you. And I suggest you should read "Living Forward" by Michael Hyatt. It helps you to structure your life/mind. Have fun! :)

It was like this for me when I tried to do a PhD. Since I'm working in software development it's hard for me to stop working in the evening.

What applied to me might not apply to you.

But changing my occupation to something I really want did definitely help.

Are you sure you are doing the right job for you?

It's all very nice that it makes you a lot of money, but if you are spending a third of your life doing something that you constantly have to force yourself to do, perhaps a different career.

I run when I am not at my best mentally. I iterated that a while and ended up completing a marathon the second year of my startup. +1 to crossfit, meditation, yoga etc, especially in the morning if you want to be on A-game.

Just a guess, but do you find yourself wishing you could be gaming when you’re trying to work/focus? Sounds like you’re a avid gamer. If so. It might be time to give it up. Or reduce significantly.

I personally don't think it's something "wrong" with you, most probably there's something wrong with your process.

I have the same issues, and I think you speak out for lots of people, motivation is a very limited resource and when it's not used properly, you end up in this state.

What worked for me best is to tackle your tasks with the notion that you have limited resources in mind and that you're just human.

Some tips that you might find useful, that certainly work very well for me:

1- Declutter your workspace, clean your whole house, having small things here and there lying around affects my thought process.

2- Declutter your brain, Throw away ideas that might be nice, but are not possible to work on right now cause they'll take tons of time and money, write those ideas down somewhere for later use, if ever.

3- Declutter your life, make sure you don't have lingering problems that can be fixed now, your brain will fatigue out when you have a lot in your stack, fix that leaking toilet, talk to your spouse about the issue you've been always having with them, tell your friend you can't help them with that thing they needed, empty out as much as you can, and work on the low hanging fruits first.

4- When it comes to tasks, spend as much time as you can afford planning it ahead first, break things down into small actionable tasks that will take a few minutes or hours to resolve, avoid homogeneous tasks like "Implement backend", "Fix the known bugs", "Release next version", etc... instead, have very concrete minimal tasks like "Fix bug #21", "Create Users profile database schema", "Convert header image to SVG", etc...

5- Timebox things when planning, say you'll spend only 1 hour today working on this issue, if you can't, then take it again in the next planning and break it down further and give it an appropriate time slot

6- Getting great ideas while working is almost like thought cancer, don't start on them, write them down and continue to do what you are doing

7- Don't start new tasks before the assigned ones are actually done

8- Don't reward or punish yourself, rewards tend to make me very narrow minded, and punishment takes the fun out of things, ask yourself why you are doing what you're doing and why you have to do it, write that down and keep it as a reminder in your workspace.

9- Talk to others, let people know what you're doing, and when it's expected to be done, this keeps me at least from getting lazy as there's expectations form others to see what i've done

10- Listen to different music, I noticed that once I changed my playlist that was on repeat, I was a completely new person, play a podcast instead, or listen to radio or channels that you have no control over.

11- Kill the projects that are taking too long and deep inside you you know that you'll never manage to finish, find smaller ones that are realistic.

12- Always remember that nothing has to be perfect, it's better to have something out there, most of the time no one even notices what you think is a crisis.

13- Ask yourself everyday, is this what I want to be doing?, am I happy?, should I continue? if the answer is truly a big yes from your heart, then go on, if not, try to find other things that might be more fun for you.

Tis is what works for me, your results may vary, but what matters is that you have to be relatively happy doing what you do!, if you think you're suffering from ADHD, I would say it's best to visit a therapist, it'll clear out lots of things, don't feel bad spending money on yourself a bit, it's worth it. also if it's your kind of thing, find a mentor :) keep up the good work and never give up!

I am very lazy and can only motivate myself to work to avoid more work in the future. If you are smart about it (debatable if I am) you can get an awful lot done to avoid worse outcomes.

You are in the wrong profession. Find something you really love doing and a way to get paid for it and you won’t work a single day in your life after that. You just didn’t find it yet.

Try to work on projects that are more interesting for you. I almost always have better focus if I work on a job that includes at least one thing, which I am personally interested in.

OP please see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16181081

OP, are you doing something you love? Sounds like you and maybe others might be “doing a job” and not working on something you are interested in. Just a thought.

You have to force yourself to take the first step, getting started. Once you get the ball rolling you have inertia, it's not so hard to keep going.

Try a 9to5 job for a year. Its much easier to stay focused in a structured environment with collegues. At least that's my own experience.

I don't know how to contact you, can't see anything in your bio. My details are in mine, be great if you could email me.

I'll give an unpopular opinion here: Grow up. Get a job where you have a boss. Be responsible to someone besides yourself.

Are you bored? That's what it sounds like to me. Maybe you need to find work that is more interesting to you?

Adderall sure does help a ton. You might not have adhd, but instead add. I can empathize with you for sure.

Are you burned out? Perhaps a weeks vacation or even longer if you can afford it might be in order.

I now have the opposite issue! If I’m not working RIGHT NOW, I start to feel anxious, because I should be working. This even stems to when I go home after work, or on the weekends, and so I never really can relax my mind. It’s really unhealthy, and I think I’m going to have to see a professional to help me fix this.

I've often felt similar. As well as peoples other suggestions that are useful, I've found wearing glasses helps, I don't usually, but when I do concentration is definitely easier.

Only first had to wear them from a few years ago so the prescription isn't strong.

But yeah, do tend to flit between tasks a bit.

Yes, it does sound like ADD.

Judging by the up-votes this post got, I'd say it probably is normal.

Start meditating. Join a sangha. In SF I would love to join SFZC.

Nothing gets easier, you just have a chance to get better.

This may be a symptom that you don’t like the work.

take a break from your mobile device for 1 month + do 15min meditation. This should at least repair some of the focus issues.

Maybe, try adderall? You could just have ADHD.

Serious question - how often do you exercise?

I've been a bit disappointed in the responses to be honest. They're almost memes in and of themselves: therapy, drugs, tricks, maybe you're born with it (most aren't).

The good news is that you're normal. The bad news is that you're normal. And that really strikes at the heart of the situation. A fish is worst at explaining the concept "wet" because they're born and live in water. HN appears bad explaining lack of focus and self drive because most of us have been brought up in a culture that is almost specifically dominated with instilling such aspects in people. I don't know if it is by design, but it is incredibly effective as a social glue and at showing that culture.

Cultural reprogramming is, to put it mildly, difficult at best once you've spent 30 years in one, so I'm largely posting this on the chance that it introduces a new perspective and raises curiosity, not because I think you should necessarily do it, since most people are not interested in such extremes and quite rightly: try separating from your dominant and acculturated environment and you'll likely find a while host of other (arguably bigger) problems.

You've been born into and live in a culture that, almost from birth, teaches you to turn to quick wins, entertainment, external direction and external authority. You have now subsequently internalised that culture.

To start to fight it, you need to remove yourself from those cultural aspects that reinforce such, and put yourself in a culture/situation that reinforces the opposite.

About the clearest thing that reinforces the opposite is isolation and survival: learn to be comfortable in your own company, try spending some time away from others, learn about hiking and camping. If you can spend a few weeks almost without human contact and your cultures distractions, you're forced to start to find that locus of control within yourself and not others. Of course, the downside is that done poorly, this may also be a quick path to mental illness and isolation.

Also be aware that if it works, you'll no longer be a member of your current culture as well, this has downsides as well as upsides. But I can't pretend they're not there or downplay them. Talk to others who have experienced integration and then movement or rejection between cultures to understand these: you will no longer have a cultural home, and you cannot ever fully go back, even though part of you may always have a foot in both camps.

The other side of the coin, is recognizing and thinking those influences in your dominant culture that reinforce distraction, short term, and locus of control. Obviously, if you try the rather radical route of isolation/cultural reprogramming, these also can't be present or you'll just spend your entire time on them. So:

- no TV - no computer games - no news - no HN - no podcasts - no classes or programs where someone else ticks you off or tells you what to do: schools/university - no status

Many of your current techniques are bound to failure because you're essentially trying to use your cultures dominant phenomenon to overcome the very cultural phenomenon you're struggling with.

Lastly, only the most radical...borderline insane, would actually seriously try to do the whole thing. You can take positive little steps, by recognizing small steps at first. Aside from removing the negative, there are also positive things that or culture doesn't reinforce that you can introduce:

- sign up at a library and start reading long books

- take up meditation, walking, hiking, long distance and endurance sports

- listen to classical, not pop music. Attend some concerts :p

- try some status/authority busting exercises: sign up at a soup kitchen and learn that people you might otherwise have hidden from aren't bad: volunteer to help ex criminals. Expose yourself to different cultures and classes, travel. Find someone your culture and yourself hold in high regard and look to learn all the reasons that it's bullshit.

Hopefully I've given you some ideas and insight beings the normal HN feedback.

Have you written off ADHD?

Look into the science of motivation, it's very enlightening. Specifically, the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

In brief: intrinsic motivation is when you're motivated for no "reason". You're intrinsically motivated to play video games, for example. You don't have to reward or punish yourself to get yourself to play a video game, you do it because you want to.

Extrinsic motivations are things you need a reason to do. Money is an extrinsic motivation: people probably don't want to build the next ad delivery service posing as a communications platform, but they do it for the money.

In a world full of unicorns and rainbows, we would all do jobs that intrinsically motivate us, but in the real world, there's not much reason to pay people to do things they're intrinsically motivated to do, because they're going to do those things whether you pay them or not. So the reality is that most people have a hard time motivating themselves to do their jobs, because what makes a job pay at all is that it's not easy to find motivation for it.

The remainder of this post moves from established psychology into my personal opinion:

A lot of what I see is that money and greed can turn intrinsically motivated tasks into extrinsically motivated ones, turning something that was enjoyable into something that is miserable. If you had to play your favorite video game in a way specified by a boss for 40 hours a week, you would probably no longer be intrinsically motivated to play that video game. For a lot of us, programming was like that: we started off loving programming. Programs were like puzzles, and when you solved the puzzle the program would compile and do something. But the day to day problems of a programming career are mostly ones where you're solving some inane detail of a larger whole, and even if you are lucky enough to care about the big picture, you probably don't care about implementing yet another responsive XML cloud-based enterprise SEO keyword. If you are qualified for your job, you mostly have a pretty good idea of the solution to the puzzle, so it's not fun to solve. As Quincy Jones said, "If you go into the studio to make money, God leaves the room."

And a lot of us have a hard time adjusting to this once we turn programming from a hobby into a career (which is how most of us got here). We keep working, thinking we'll somehow recapture how it felt to program when we were tinkering with HyperCard on a 1980 Apple, but it never happens because the whole structure of what we're doing has changed.

There's nothing wrong with you. The problem isn't you, it's the structure that economic leaders to build an economy that forces people to work toward the economic leaders' goals rather than their own goals. To quote Joe The Barbarian, "It's not the picture that's upside down, it's the world."

I don't have a good solution to this problem. I love programming when I do it for myself, and I've spent countless hours writing compilers/interpreters without reaping a dime from it (okay, I guess I've gotten jobs due to people being impressed by my compilers/interpreters, but the economic payoff is negligible compared to the effort). The best I have come up with is to opt out of the economy as much as possible, and find ways to work fewer hours while making enough money to do what I want. The best I can do is minimize the time I'm wasting on extrinsically motivated tasks.

If I struggle with procrastination for shorter periods of time or for specific types of chores, I'll use productivity techniques like a pomodoro timer, rewards, etc. And like others have said, breaking down large nebulous tasks into smaller more well-defined ones and making a daily todo list at the beginning of each day is important (the latter is one of the only 'techniques' that I've found to be consistently useful for me over a long period of time)

But if you struggle with procrastination and demotivation for months on end, I think you need to think more about what motivates you to work in general, apart from needing to put bread on the table. Two key questions to ask is why you do what you do (the vision), and the circumstances under which you do it (your everyday work). Either of these can motivate you - ideally you'd be motivated by both (doing tasks you enjoy, which also meaningfully moves you toward fulfilling your vision) but you might also be ok with just one or the other (e.g. you might but up with slogging through chores for a while if it helps you achieve your bigger vision, or you might put up with a 'visionless' company for a while in order to play with some cool tech). But if you get neither, then there's a high chance your motivation will go over a cliff - it sounds to me like this might be the case for you.

Here are some things to consider in terms of how important they are to motivate you, at the vision level:

- How many people does the work impact?

- How important is it to them if it is done well?

- How 'altruistic' is the work? (do you feel like the world becomes a 'better place' from it?)

- How important is it for you if you own the company yourself or someone else does?

- How important is the 'prestige' of the job for you?

- What kinds of 'achievements' would you be motivated to pursue? (e.g. speaking at a conference, making a name for yourself in your field or similar)

And at a daily level:

- What kinds of tasks do you enjoy doing (e.g. for me as a programmer, user-facing features are much more fun than backend tasks)

- How much do you want to interact with end users/customers/clients?

- How much do you want to interact with colleagues? (everyone needs some amount of social interaction and it can get lonely as a freelancer)

- How much would you like to be doing tasks yourself, and to which extent would you be ok with/prefer to just oversee others doing the tasks (some people prefer being hands-on and focus on just a few tasks at a time while others prefer to be a manager for many people, so you don't go as deep yourself, but get to have a hand in everything)

- What other things can motivate you about your daily work or work environment? (e.g. a good cafeteria, short commute, flexible hours, etc.)

The balance of how important each of these aspects are vary from person to person, and for a person over time. For example I was working at a game engine company and while I loved the vision (that I could help thousands of creative people turn their ideas onto reality) and the colleagues (places with great visions tend to attract really cool people) and while it was initially a fun challenge to get the hang of C++, I eventually got tired of the cruft of a legacy codebase, and probably most importantly, I felt like I was wasting my most productive years realizing someone else's dream instead of building up a company of my own, like I'd been dreaming of. I was lucky enough to find a co-founder just at the right time, because I also know about myself that I tend to get demotivated if I'm not interacting with other people daily.

Anyways, the point is, 'fighting down' procrastination is a necessary skill sometimes, but sometimes you also just have to listen to what your subconscious is telling you about what motivates you and find something that does. It's important every once in a while to look at both if you're going somewhere you want to go, and if the path that you're taking there is one you care to walk on. There's no shame in realizing that something that used to motivate you doesn't anymore, or something else has become more important to you now. People grow, and boredom and dissatisfaction is part of what drives us to do so.

yes

Burnout drains your motivation, but unlike depression, it goes away when you go on vacation and lose the deadlines. Read up on it a bit, and if it sounds like what you're experiencing, do what Google tells you (take a break, focus on intrinsic motivation over extrinsic, align your motivation with your goals, take care of your body, etc.) and it will clear up. It may be that's not the problem, but I'll share some of the ways I overcame it in college because they apply to motivation in general.

1) I reengaged with a friend. I was so busy and stressed that I went months at a time without making social plans, and when a she wanted to get coffee, the first thing through my mind was how taking a few hours off from studying would make me that much more overwhelmed. She told me about burnout, and that's how I realized I was in a temporary state that I could get out of. Beyond that insight, just talking with a friend and breaking my isolation was the right thing to do for my social and mental well-being.

2) I switched from an accomplishment-oriented schedule (I'm done once I finish this task) to a time-based schedule (I have two weeks to do this assignment, and it will take me up to 20 hours, so I'll spend 2 hours on it per work day; that leaves six hours for these other projects, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours of free time.) I made a spreadsheet so I could see how much I was accomplishing and see that I'd have time to finish everything.

This made a big difference. There was always more work to do, always some long term project that wasn't finished yet that I felt like I had to work on, but scheduling time for it made it possible to take free time without worrying I was being lazy and I was never going to finish. It made my work, even huge projects, feel manageable.

3) I reevaluated my motivation. I was motivated by a sense of duty and obligation to work hard and make the most of my education, by grades, and by not wanting to fail. Hearing someone say, "Hard work pays off," was a great reminder to me that there were better reasons for what I was doing. Looking back, my hard work really did pay off. My education prepared me for my current job, which I love going to even on Mondays. It was very encouraging to look forward to the payoff and remind myself that my work was adding up to something.

4) I gave myself a break. I made it through the term by changing my time management and reevaluating my motivation, and the next term, I signed up for a lighter workload. I made it through college, and I've avoided going through burnout again by keeping an eye on my working hours and my motivation.

TL;DR: Take care of yourself, make some progress each day, don't forget your real motivations in the midst of your proxy motivators, take time off when you need it, and know that you're doing a good job and your work will pay off.

It's normal for some people.

I've tried everything. Two things finally helped me: understanding, and that one neat trick.

Understanding:

Understanding yourself is important later, but for now, it helps if you understand procrastination.

https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_mas...

That one neat trick?

Just do one. One push up, one minute of meditation, one minute of work.

Setting yourself up for failure will never work. Setting the bar really low is the only thing that let me achieve anything.

I can do one minute of work. It's easy. I very rarely stop after 60 seconds, but sometimes I really just ain't in the mood. Most of the time, I just keep going. If I lose focus, I say, ok one more minute then I can do something else.

Who has time for 100 pushups a day? Nobody. Who doesn't have time for 1 pushup? It's literally like 10 seconds of hard work unless you think about it for longer (why?)

The one neat trick is more about "just starting" than anything else.

Working is easy, starting is hard. The biggest issue with most motivation techniques is they assume you have already started.

What you need to do is reduce any and all friction from starting. If starting seems daunting or too hard, you're planning to do too much. Reduce the act of starting to it's simplest form if you have to. Ive had days where my task was to sit down at my desk. That's all I had to do before I could tell myself "job done." I wasn't going to get much done on that sort of day anyway but at least I didnt beat my self up about it.

That last point is where understanding yourself and acceptance really starts to play a role.

Are you working by yourself most of the time? I forget where I read it, but I think it was Joel Spolsky that said “Don’t be a guy in a room” because even if you can do whole projects by yourself, it gets boring and feels unfulfilling compared to working on a team.

You work alone right?

I am hyperproductive when I work in a team because I want to show people who stuff is done within deadline with minimum efforts.

But when I work alone, I lose all motivation. I achieve much less. Even after starting 5 companies.

I think the issue is with reward signals. Monotonic reward signals like the ones from normal employment are not anywhere like the ones we received as hunters and gatherers in the wild.

Starting your own business, like I have, is one way to get back to the possibility of variable reward signals. But it's terrifying and you basically can't have a family in the US because of healthcare. Then there's also the possibility of 0 reward signals with seemingly undecipherable error signals. It also isn't anywhere near the same distribution.

So your struggle is focus and not hard work as such?

I think we all have problems with that from time to time, I catch even the most high paid and productive members of our organization have their procrastination routine from time to time.

If you catch your self in a hard procrastination loop too often, it might be a good idea to try something. For me it really helped to completely stop drinking coffee at work, it seems like it made me less focused. I heard others say that standing up while working helps them focus.

Working alone is sort of like having ADHD. When I'm grinding on something, pomodoro is pretty useful. Really any kind of discipline works here.

It's not 10/10 though; for some kinds of tasks (math oriented ones) you need to get into the zone; combinations of oversleep and undersleep seem to help with this. Also blocking internets. I used to go to the Cal library (I don't have wifi access there) to concentrate.

Find another freelancer with the same problem and keep each other motivated/accountable. You don’t have to share work, just general information about your activity. You’re more likely to keep pace if you know someone will notice when you fall behind.

For OP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory

I hate making 150k/year working. I really do.

So I bought 2 apartment buildings ( 4 units each ) and now live for free and can quit freelancing anytime I want

You need Passion + Patience + Perfection

Sleep, Exercise, eat healthy.

I have a bit of similar problem. I have a bachelor's degree in CS, but I'm not passionate about programming. I mean, I like it, but in the way that people like strawberries. I enjoy it, but 3 courses a day is too much, or several days in a row with no breaks.

I used to loathe myself for not paying enough attention to math. I recently tried to apply for a "backend engineer - data scientist". I read about the "R" programming language they value. It's like math with a programming language strapped on, not a programming language optimized for math. Which reminded me why I never got very far with math, even though I once had a 2nd place in primary school contest and received a monetary reward. I don't usually enjoy math if it's without a clear purpose. Like, I need to understand more math to write some target prediction code in a game. Math for math's sake, like statistics, matrix operations, higher algebra - these things bore me. I can understand them if I stare at the math symbol soup long enough and keep taking it apart, but my mind drifts away and I struggle to focus. This is despite using various motivation tricks and even meditation.

But I need to come to grips with the fact I just don't enjoy math that much, despite the high hopes my math teacher had for me. She even got me tested for mensa (I'm way too low, IQ 120 and the threshold was 140 last time I checked).

I enjoy Python, I enjoy figuring out how to program something in Rust, I like writing documentation, reading articles, arguing with people, analyzing stuff (I've spent wayyy too much time analyzing patch changelogs for games I never played, or developing creative strategies for games). I like drawing a bit, music - a lot, I like animals, physical exercise, shooting bow, strategic board games with relatively low randomness. Many other things. It seems like my skill points are spread over many areas but I'm not great at either of those. I admire people of Renaissance like Leonardo da Vinci, but this doesn't translate into finding an appropriate job very easily. These days specialists are highly prized, and inter-disciplinary knowledge is harder to use unless you have a brilliant idea.

I started observing myself and my feelings closer, and I encourage you to do the same. Pay attention to what activities you enjoy, what you don't, and be honest with yourself. Even if you've already missed an opportunity, with good self-knowledge you can find another one. For example I'm a nerd, I have an affinity for technology, history, archeology, animals, knowledge in general. I read a lot. I like sharing knowledge with others. Maybe I could make a good teacher if I had better grades, or a scientist. But I get my fulfillment by... teaching people new board games, or teaching them how to work out without getting injuries.

I'm pragmatic. I think programming and IT is a good, interesting and well-paid job. But I don't breathe it. I work to live, not live to work. I try to explore different aspects of life and acquire new skills. People in the past used to get satisfaction from many different places. Many famous people were mathematicians, painters, journalists, travellers etc. all at the same time. They were losing money in some of these activities, but did it for enjoyment.

Observe your feelings. Think of the last time you enjoyed doing something. Take notes on what activities bore you and what give you a rush. If you identify several activities you enjoy, play connect-the-dots. Example:

I'm analytical, patient, have some affinity for art, I like animals. Origami is all those things.

Another example, how to reverse engineer your interests: I enjoy people that keep surprising me, movies that are not very straightforward, books by Philip K. Dick, fantasy, sci-fi, old maps (the weirder, the better), archeology, lost civilizations, the cartoon Moomintrolls. What do these things have in common ? Answer: MYSTERY.

Pay attention to what people are saying about you, especially your skills, interests and what you have an affinity for. People have observed that I happen to like badgers quite a lot. And other animals, that I should perhaps work in a ZOO. I've been also called a philosopher a couple of times, including in high school, and I managed to instantly spot some that weren't labeled as such. One person told me I have a scientist mentality. I'm also a bit of a contrarian (philosophers delighted in trolling!!!). See, I'm a lame version of Paul Graham.

Of course, finding an activity you enjoy and one that you can get reasonable money for is two different things. That's why "e-sports" (computer game tournaments) and game development are not well paid activities.

Try to think which aspects of being a freelancer you enjoy and which you loathe. When you're happiest, when most burnt out. Debug thyself.