Ask HN: How to induce productive mania? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to induce productive mania?

When I first started programming, I fell in love. Over a period of roughly 3 months, I maintained what can only be described as a productive mania. I had a very positive mood, elevated energy levels, intrinsic motivation, and an overwhelming, driving, sense of happiness.

I would spend hours, and hours, pouring over documentation, absorbing everything I could. I applied what I learned in projects that were relevant to me. Every day I was EXCITED to wake up, and learn more.

That was 5 years ago, and I still look back on that time and wonder HOW? HOW did my own body, naturally, without drugs, go into a state of HYPER productivity and HYPER positive mood? Is it not possible to induce that state again somehow? If I was capable of it once, why can't I control it?

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When I get like this I can write code and design systems as easily as breathing, but only for short stints, and once I go to bed and get a full nights sleep I'm done for a couple days.

It's like hyper vigilance but all I see is the computer, it's awesome (probably unhealthy), but I can't turn it on and off. There are triggers that usually work though.

If I stay up playing past 10pm it almost always turns on, and all of a sudden it's 4am and I've got standup in a couple hours, but I got a shit load completed.

I used to be able to take a lot of uppers, like smoking and drinking too much coffee/red bull, and that would stretch it out, but I can't do that anymore because I want to live past 40.

So now I get the effects over shorter periods of time, and really only when I stay up late.

I also find that when I'm really exhausted from lack of sleep, it actually kicks in faster, but when I do that, I just end up sleeping all weekend because I invariably end up working on something until 4am every day.

I'm still trying to figure out how to attain that extreme level of focus at will but it feels like it would require me to stop focusing on computers/electronics to try to figure it out, and that simply won't do.

You mention something interesting:

"... and really only when I stay up late"

My "productive mania" that I mention in this thread, was predominantly late at night. I've always been something of a night owl, and at the time in my life where I began programming, I was able to stay up very late, and sleep in late.

Sometimes I wonder if productive mania is attainable only when you're functioning day-to-day, in your 'ideal' sleep cycle.

Why I can not control what you mean:

1. Not much free time to code besides job, family and life.

2. Not possible while coding at work. That stuff is just too random and boring to be exciting.

So I suppose to induce "productive mania" you could:

1. Get big chunks of free time.

2. Do stuff you are excited about. Do them because You want to and not because of some other goal (like getting money, attention, rewards etc.).

I manage to get that for very small scripts that I program in order to get some small things done for me personally. Those things (I hesitate to call them tasks or projects) are always done quick, work like a charm and do exactly what I need. It gives me a good feeling.

You touch on something important.

"Do them because you want to, and not because of some other goal like money attention, rewards, etc."

This is an important preliminary step, toward productive mania, I believe. It's not clear though how to induce this. Are we really in control of what we find intrinsically motivating?

Let's say I have a programming project I'm working on. I'm excited about it, but only moderately so. I have a goal of turning it into a business, and making a moderate passive income from it. How can I turn this decent energy and motivation, into something explosive?

It would seem that I need to muster some intrinsic motivation, some desire to work on the project just for the sake of working on it, not for completing it, or making a business from it. I'm not sure how to accomplish that, or if it's even really possible when you're doing something that isn't entirely novel and new.

It's easy when something is new - You're intrinsically motivated to pursue it because it's, novel and exciting. But when you've done something before, it's less simple to find that intrinsic motivation.

My conclusion about motiviaton in general, after investigating this matter for a couple of years (not scientifically but nonetheless):

Intrinsic Motivation can not be created artifically.

Its funny, because I just recently found a little "trick" that somehow motivates me a little. I found this after I made a lot of lists of things, that I really like to do and during the course of it I realized that all of these things are really just fun and could never be turned into a job or towards creating a side-business (like watching movies, listening to music, hiking etc.). So most of the software projects, no matter how fun they are at first, include some unexciting parts and turn into work. The trick: I say to myself, when I have done boring task X, I will be allowed to do real fun stuff Y. I then try to imagine myself doing fun stuff Y and pretty fast I get into a good productive mood. (Sorry for the long introduction)

Try building something instead of learning something.

Also while programming I find I can stay productive if I always leave my project workspace where there's a bug or half-implemented feature I can start the next day.

This is good advice.

Anecdotal advice: in my first year of university we were taught how to write programs in Java. During the summer after, I spent my free time trying to use what I learned to make little games. For each feature I implemented, I got experience with things like API documentation, file I/O, OO programming, etc. I learned a lot of new things, and was motivated to learn because it gave me something I wanted.

To expand on your first statement, it's helpful to have a project you are interested in using once its operational. Learning something for its own sake isn't very motivating. But if learning the skill allows me to do something I am truly interested in, then the learning is just one of the steps in the process, and you have a much more directed approach.

It's the difference between "figure out how to use websockets" vs "build a temperature controller for a smoker that is accessible from a webpage, using websockets".

I think this is good advice, and you're hitting on one aspect of my aforementioned 'productive mania'. When I started programming, I almost immediately went into building projects I was interested in, would use personally, and friends would use. That probably hard a big impact on why I was SO driven, SO productive, and SO energetic.

I try and work on projects like that nowadays, but I can't hit that extreme level of productivity and excitement. It seems that another aspect of that mind state, was that the 'newness' of programming coupled with the success I was having at it BUILDING something, brought heightened mental activity.

I just wish I could tap into that nowadays. Unfortunately, it seems like the brain comes alive most, in a novel environment.

If you're working on something hard, and you're working on something you care about, and you're pushing the limits of what you're capable of (but stopping short of being overwhelmed completely), you can do this.

But most of the time, several of those factors aren't ones you can control. The reality is that we have to work on mundane shit that we don't care about pretty frequently. Learning how to do that is much harder than learning how to be maniacally into something insanely cool.

There was a book written to answer this exact question by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It's titled "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience"

Excellent, just bought it on my kindle. Thanks for the reference.

You're hyper-productive when you feel you're working towards the goal of making your future better

I think that's a pre-requisite yes, but there's more to it for sure. I have a project I'm working on right now, and I get decent motivation and energy since it's a goal of mine, and it will make my future better... But I still struggle some days to even get started. And I have nowhere near the energy, creativity, and endurance, that I had when I started programming.

It would seem then that the "manic" and "hyper" part of the productivity, may be contingent on the novelty of the pursuit, as well as a handful of other factors?

Coffee, Energy Drinks

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