Conversation

Sep 7, 2021

freelancers and solopreneurs: 1. how do you organise your time so you actually do work instead of sit around reading Twitter all day? 2. especially if comfy/got savings/won’t starve, what’s the motivation to do work at all? 3. how do you stay in the habit after a holiday?

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Sep 7, 2021

Not a solopreneur but similar situation. Trying to work non-coercively, I’ve found it useful to understand my monkey-brain proclivities. Monkey has inertia, finds it hard to get started, easy to continue. Monkey wants easy gratification in the moment, meaningfulness in hindsight.

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Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Sep 7, 2021

Very concretely: I find routine incredibly helpful. I’m not rigid about it—I’m happy to change it upon reflection—but everything is easier with well-considered defaults. It’s simply *true* that if I start my morning on Twitter, I will p>0.7 get no deep work done that morning.

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I’ll regret it: in hindsight, Twitter was fun for the first 10m, then I got unwittingly sucked in, and it wasn’t really that fun. So I start my day with the internet off. Sounds like coercion, but doesn’t feel that way in the moment. It feels like “oh, right… thanks, past me.”

6:32 PM · Sep 7, 2021Twitter Web App

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Dewey: “It may be a loss… to escape from [control]… only to find one’s conduct dictated by immediate whim and caprice… A person whose conduct is controlled in this way has at most only the illusion of freedom. Actually he is directed by forces over which he has no command.”

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Sep 7, 2021

Scheduling “endorsed Twitter time” can relieve the pressure. I know I can’t think/focus well at midday, so happy to do “unfocused” activities then. I can get a bit of optimizer’s pleasure from delaying: I’m being responsive to my body/mind by matching activities to its capacity!

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Right! Doesn’t sound like coercion to me—sounds like freedom from being taken over by autopilot.

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Maybe TMI - but i find it really hard to go offline in the morning especially on the toilet seat. How do you fill the void there? Or do you practice being bored there?

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Sep 20, 2021

I often find myself mindlessly doing the same thing when in 5m pomo breaks. A few strategies have helped: 1. Leaving the phone on its charger until I'm actually leaving the house. 2. Using the Forest app. 3. Setting an explicit intention to think about X during my break.