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Comment by dorkwood | Hacker News Reader

My experience has been that an inability to focus on a task is usually more to do with my fears surrounding that task than my level of discipline.

If I can stop for a second and understand why I'm scared of the task (am I worried the best I can do won't be good enough?) I can employ strategies to work around that fear. One that's worked especially well for me is approaching a task as if I'm a complete novice. If I can pretend for a moment that I don't have years of experience, and start again from the very beginning, I give myself permission to make mistakes and "play" within the space. Approaching learning like a beginner, and letting go of any pretense around results or performance, seems to be the key to engaging in deep work for me.

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I certainly think that's a major part of it. I think another important part is just not knowing what needs to be done immediately. The days where I have the discipline to compile a detailed list of things I need to do, I get a lot done. Days where I procrastinate heavily are typically days when I don't really know how to get started on a task or don't know what I don't know.

Extremely relatable. I call it "paralysis by fear". Minimizing FUD (fears, uncertainty, doubts) is certainly a good way to get productive.

Still learning how to do that effectively, though. In work context, talking to people and bringing every one on same page seems to help. Approaching the task a complete novice is an interesting way to look at it.

Agreed. Fear and other bad feelings (like guilt) also fuel my procrastination so that I don’t even get started on the most important tasks. But the bad feelings lurk under the surface and I don’t even realize I’m procrastinating – I just think I’m “too busy.” Only when I sit down to do the task do I realize “Oh yeah, this is hard. There’s a reason it’s taken me so long to get around to this. This feels really bad right now.” But once I identify the feelings, like you said it becomes a lot easier to deal with them productively.

Meister Eckhart: ”Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.”

I also have found the 'play for a bit' thing very useful. When I was younger and had a lot less experience, it felt much easier to write code, despite the fact I was quite green.

Now I find it much harder to get going because it's so easy to fall down the 'what if' and 'what else' and 'is this going to be good enough?'.

If I start 'playing' it typically works out... typically!

Also, break it down into subtasks, and only do the first one.

There can be a lot more involved than I (consciously) noticed.

There can be a lot less... just the scary chance of it being much worse.

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