Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

You're quite right. It's amazing what one can accomplish if one lets oneself be satisfied what incremental progress, no matter how small.

For example, I dislike doing pullups. Many times over the decades, I embarked on a program of daily doing as many pullups as I could. I failed because it just took too much willpower.

I finally hit on a solution. I started with doing 3 pullups a day. 3 pullups are easy. It didn't take much willpower at all. After a few months, I "graduated" to 4, which then was just as easy. After several years, I am now up to 10, which is easy, and something I had kept failing at before.

You might think "why wait several years", but my goal with this is long term, so that doesn't bother me.

View on HN

This is good advice. However, I've seen this advice before and the example is usually something where it's easy to imagine what an incremental step is. The advice is when you want to do n just do < n. This is great for some things but I find it doesn't work for everything. So I'd like to just expand on this for tasks where doing < n doesn't really make sense.

For example, if you're trying to solve a difficult bug it can be overwhelming and you feel like you're not making progress and you procrastinate because you don't have the time to dive in for five hours and you feel like spending thirty minutes isn't enough to accomplish anything.

My advice, if you're struggling with tasks like these is to make excessive notes. Save the link to the Stack Overflow question you looked at. Write down file names and line numbers with your thoughts. Copy bits of relevant documentation right into your notes. The basic idea is that if you can ramp up from your notes in less time than it took you to make them then you have made progress.

What I've found can be useful in these cases is to define success as a small amount of time spent working on the problem. For example, I have a daily goal of spending 5 minutes a day on language learning. Some days I really only have energy for the 5 minutes, but as time has gone on, more and more days end up with time spend far in excess of 5.

+1 to notes and documentation.

30 minutes won't be enough to solve many nasty bugs, but it can be enough time to rule out a possible cause, or rule out a possible technique as not being helpful for tracking the bug down.

One of my nastier crashes took two weeks to root cause - I eventually ruled out every smart technique I could think of, and resorted to dumb ones. 15 or so build + test cycles later (taking maybe 10 minutes of work each and another 2 hours of waiting for builds to complete) I'd bisected VCS history and found the cause. Turned out to be a change to use some third party code that looked completely unrelated. So unrelated that I spent another 10 minutes creating a completely isolated standalone repro case to verify I'd actually found the culprit (I had) instead of something that would hide the symptoms.

For a lot of these things, I've found that thirty minutes of looking at the problem from various angles is enough to get your subconscious mind engaged. After working on the problem for a bit, the solution just comes to you when you're in the shower or on a bike ride.

If you can’t do the thing, you usually can break it up into smaller constituent things. Keeping with the pull-ups. My wife can’t even do 1 pull-up, but she’s broken it down into a couple of foundational movements and she’s doing them, and getting stronger every day. Doing reverse pull ups, and miniature flexes at the base of the pull up motion, and a couple of others.

She’s probably got another 4-6 months until she can do the full pull up, but it’s coming.

So many projects are stillborn because of the paralysis caused by assuming things are done through heroic feats rather than mundane tasks such as setting up a bank account. Concentration on the effort, consistently, and holding oneself accountable to consistent standards over time compounds.

It's the willpower to be self-accountable which forms good habits.

People often ask me how to deal with periods where one's motivation to work on a project vanishes (it happens to everyone now and then). What works for me is to say to myself "I'm just going to work one minute on it today." It's amazing how that works.

1. The project stays fresh in your mind, rather than winding up in the "garage" of your thoughts.

2. It's surprising how much you can get done one minute at a time.

3. Sometimes you discover that one minute had turned into a couple hours without thinking about it.

4. My motivation returns a lot quicker than if I just set things aside.

Out of curiosity, what do you do your pullups on? I don't have space for something on the floor, and I'm pretty skittish about damaging doorways (having previously, you know, damaged doorways). Do the ones that brace on either side of the doorway work well?

Normally I'd recommend a gym (I also don't have space in my apartment) but that's not realistic right now. I've found in the past that the doorway bars that hook around the structure work pretty well, and some cardboard will prevent scuffs.

I have a phobia of the pullup bar coming lose and me falling on my back. I attached it to the joists in the ceiling with lag screws. You could support a piano with it :-)

Hah maybe I am scared of the wrong thing then.

Unfortunately I'm too short and my ceilings are too tall for a joist mounted deal. (However that does mean I can do more pullups I guess)

I use this - https://www.target.com/p/pure-fitness-multi-purpose-doorway-.... I've had that bar for a while but just decided to do 1 pull-up a couple of weeks back. Graduated to 2 last week.

I'm not affiliated with target or the bar manufacturer.

This is an amazing coincidence! I bought the same one and I literally just finished setting it up.

If you don't mind the question, how thick is your door frame? I feel like the bar tends to slide down / put pressure downwards on the wooden frame and I'm reluctant to hang on it for fear of breaking it, not sure if it's how it's supposed to work.

> It's amazing what one can accomplish if one lets oneself be satisfied what incremental progress, no matter how small.

I find it improves my satisfaction to log my progress and put it on a graph. This lets me see how my small steps have paid off over time and is a lot more rewarding.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com