Conversation

🙃 ɐʇǝɯ-Lulie 💜
@metaLulie
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?
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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
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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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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.”
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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.”
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
If I have strong urges to Twitter in the morning, it’s often b/c I don’t believe I can do whatever I’m trying to do, work-wise. Maybe I have a meeting scheduled, so not enough time to go deep. Or I don’t believe in my own approach. Helpful to notice this and fix those problems.
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coscorrodrift
@Coscorrodrift
do you recall any recent instances of you fixing these problems? trying to solve the "i don't believe in my own approach" and "i don't believe i can do whatever I'm trying to do, work-wise" narratives are things that resonate but i'm not 100% sure that's what i struggle with rn
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
Replying to
@Coscorrodrift
and
@metaLulie
Sure. Experienced the latter last week, actually, doing some design work. Reminded myself that what I *can* do is to sketch possible approaches for an hour and then to reconsider my plans if that yields no threads to follow. Related:
mindingourway.com
Stop trying to try and try
Imagine a graduate student of mathematics as they interact with a professor, attempting to understand something in the professor's area of expertise. They're working hard to wrap their head around...
12:16 AM · Sep 8, 2021TweetDeck
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
Replying to
@andy_matuschak
@Coscorrodrift
and
@metaLulie
w.r.t. the former, I experienced that about six weeks ago, when I was trying to push forward several projects at once. All were making slow progress, had trouble picking up momentum—I felt aversion. Needed to focus on one thing. Asking Twitter was helpful.
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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Curious how others deal with this: if I focus on one vertical slice of a long project (e.g. some design problem), I become annoyed that everything else remains frozen for long periods; if I work on a horizontal slice (a few pieces at once), bulk progress is very slow. Any escape?
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