Ask HN: How to maintain interest in things for longer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to maintain interest in things for longer?

10 pointsthrowaway_wwEG6 comments

Hello everyone.

For most of my life, my interests have shifted relatively quickly: I spent a month or two learning thing #1 before then discovering thing #2, putting the first on hold and so on until maybe I discovered some interesting insight that got me back into #1. Learning anything else other than the current interest is a slog, but so far that worked in my favor as being a jack of all trades, master of none was beneficial as an undergraduate.

Working on my final project is making me realize the shortcomings of such approach: I keep procrastinating and sometimes missing deadlines because I get interested in orthogonal topics; I need depth of knowledge rather than breadth; learning as an end in itself makes me uninterested in practical applicability. Despite that, I don't see myself as dysfunctional, but rather just far less productive than I know can be.

I am interested into pursing an academia path, but I can't see myself as I am going through a master's, let alone a PhD. The outlook of going to the industry doesn't seem much better either.

So, cutting the chase short: how can I work on improving this situation? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I think switching interests come from not seeing what else you can gain from current interest. When it comes to losing interest in completing a project, it probably comes from your brain thinking it's a dead end with no end anywhere in sight.

To maintain interest in something your brain needs to you see improving in it / getting better at it over time.

Also you have to convince yourself that there's a worthwhile future at the end of the tunnel, and that it's not a waste of time.

If you're talking about depth over breadth in some particular technology, that's not too hard: regardless of what project you're working on, you can shove the new technology into it. I'm learning some LISPs, and I'm going to incorporate some Racket into my current academic project. I'm learning Rust, and using that everywhere too. With regards to specific technologies, everything's pretty versatile these days, so if you make a concentrated effort to use them wherever you're already focusing, you'll be good.

Now, if you're talking about depth over breadth in terms of projects, and you just can't maintain focus on one, I am in the exact same boat.

A masters degree isn't much harder than a bachelor's. If you want to be an academic, I would think these orthogonal explorations would be a good thing because you need to know how all the parts fit together and how they fit into the world.

The only issue I see here is the missing deadlines part. I think you just have to be more disciplined and make your grades a priority.

I have room to improve on this too but I have two pieces of advice.

1) Don't do things by yourself. You're more likely to switch tasks because doing so won't leave anyone else in a lurch. Incorporate others to play parts in whatever you're doing so it's a team effort.

2) Announce your projects and a deadline for them in public, either on a blog or twitter. You wouldn't want to appear as someone who jumps from task to task if people are aware of a previously-announced project and deadline.

Just turn up every day and do a little bit of work on one topic.

good job

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