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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

What's next?

"How to Make Yourself Have Sex When You Just Don't Want To"

"How to Make Yourself Eat Krispy Kremes When You Just Don't Want To"

"How to Make Yourself Love You Children When You Just Don't Want To"

Here's a dirty little secret: You should have an emotional attachment to your work similar to the emotional attachment you have to having sex, eating Krispy Kremes, loving your children, or whatever else is your thing. Others should have to drag you kicking and screaming away from your work.

If you "just don't want to work" then the wrong question to ask is:

"How can I make myself work when I just don't want to?"

The right question is:

"What the hell am I doing working on something that I just don't want to work on it the first place and what should I really be working on?"

Find the answer to the second question and you will never encounter the first question again.

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Well this isn't that hard to answer for a lot of people:

"What the hell am I doing working on something that I just don't want to work on it the first place and what should I really be working on?"

Because what I don't want to work on pays, and what I do want to work on doesn't make money! If I were independently wealthy, I would have no trouble at all allocating my time to things I find productive and enjoyable to do, and give the results away for free. For example I have a backlog of several projects relating to improving OpenStreetMap data waiting for time to work on them, but I can't think of a way to get paid for doing them. I think the results would be valuable to many people, but it's hard for me personally to capture that value, since improving OSM data is kind of a public good that anyone can use freely (when your work enables a profit-making business based on OSM data, it's not like they pay royalties to all the people who enabled it).

Sometimes you get sick, and you just don't want to eat (even Krispy Kremes), but you know that you have to eat to get better, so you force yourself to eat. This applies analogously with work: sometimes you are burnt out, sometimes you are bone tired, sometimes you fucked something up earlier and now have to do a messy triage, sometimes the most essential thing you could be doing with your expertise is boring scut work that no one else in your company can do... nevertheless, unless you are in a situation where you can just say "Fuck it, I'm going on holiday! See you losers when all of this is sorted out!", you may have to force yourself to work, both to get through the doldrums and also to keep being able to afford to eat.

The problem with your line of thought is no matter how much you love something there are going to be parts you hate. There is a reason it is called work. I love creating software, but I certainly did not love it when I spent a day debugging a tx deadlock in our test harness last week. Did I want to fix it instead of working on something else? Not really, but I did it anyway because it is my job.

Yeah, if work were all strawberries and kisses, sure. But sometimes its doing the paperwork, and it has to be done, and you have to do it.

That's the reason I've started 10 projects and finished 0 in the last year. I did awesome for the first few weeks starting a project, but then I don't "feel like" finishing.

Since I'm releasing nothing... I decided to take on smaller and smaller projects. Instead of making a mobile app, I'm now making a small plugin to release on CodeCanyon.net. I put all the CSS for the demo and the actual plugin in the same file to begin with, and now I don't "feel like" separating the demo's CSS in a separate file because it's frustrating and boring. I'd rather code new things than mess with this stupid CSS on a project that probably won't sell, that took way longer than it should have.

But this time I said I'm not doing any other project until I've finished this one. And now I've done absolutely nothing for 2 weeks(except my part-time job), and procrastinated by watching TV shows and studying Japanese.

As someone who always changes their opinion on "what should I really be working on" - I think I need something more than "asking the right questions." I'm still not sure what that is, but I'm hoping that one day I will find it.

That last part sounds like nonsense... in any given job or career or life there are both good and bad parts. You can't avoid the bad and still do the good.

As one example; I don't like dealing with the marketing / networking aspect of m,y business; but if I didn't do that I'd go out of business.

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