Psychology

DO NOT INVENT TASKS TO KEEP YOURSELF BUSY AND NOT DOING WHAT IS UNPLEASANT BUT IMPORTANT

We are trying to repeat a pleasant and emotionally charged, quickly rewarding experience and to avoid unpleasant, stressful and seemingly without a progress ones. So we tend to do some repetitive unnecessary superficial small-tasks which we’re already good at, to get some unwarranted feelings of “competence” and exercising our abilities. As you may gave noticed, this is conceptually similar to masturbation.

Just like polishing your configs, and tweaking the classic editors. I usually update my Gentoo or Neovim and Emacs packages. It makes one feel good but creates a false sense of being in control, illusion of competence, while actually wastes away the precious time and plants seeds of sorrow, suffering and disillusion.

But we have to do unpleasant, slow, unrewarding hard work instead.

Those who do become Johns Carmaks and Mikes Tysons.

There is another universal principle, most prominent in sports, that once we become comfortable with some activity we stop improving and just waste our time.

The same principle applies for learning – once we stop trying what we cannot (yet) do we stop improving.

This is why there is no easy and painless way to mastery of programming. We have to try what we cannot do yet, and to experience the “pain” of multiple failures.

Quick recovery, without any emotional turmoils and mental dramas, and systematic restarts is the only strategy that works (just as in sports).

When silly people talk about doing less for more, they actually mean to stop doing unnecessary busywork and do only important and challenging tasks.

Half-finished

This, perhaps, is the most underrated concept which explains our failures.

Not finished “task” is a failure. With simple activities, like preparing a meal, we go from start to finish.

It would be “crazy” if we just stop half-way while preparing a meal - the food, the time and the effort will be vasted and the problem of being hungry will remain.

With a complex, long tasks we do reprated “iterations” or “sprints” (good terminilogy from the Scrum).

The insight is that these iterations or sprints has to be completed.

Each one has to be planned from start to finish and left in a consistent, well-defined finished state.

So one cannot just stop in the middle when one feels like. The task (iteration) has to be completed.

Not finished (completed) “iteration” is a failure, plain and simple. Like turing back halfway while going to a grossery shop.

With our “mental work” we do it all the time, and then restart later only to struggle to regain the proper mental state, which will not come again!

So, there is an additional burden to select (prioritize) and plan (define the goal of the “sprint”). “Improvising” does not work.

Waste

Multitasking

The most toxic bullshit ever shilled.

Being overwhelmed

This is very real demoralization, very unpleasant and burning out for literally nothing factor, and it comes from way too much of the lowest quality and low-effort, redundant information, including irrelevant technical details.

To focus, at a higher level, is to select what is important, most relevant and matters a lot (the right principles, adequate concepts, proper abstractions).

Doing less unnecessary busywork and unimportant routine chords is how to be more productive, by focusing only on important thing for smaller but regular periods of time. This is exactly like physical exercise optimizations, and it works the same way.

Identifying and establishing the right priorities and getting rid of unnecessary routine actions, allows one to free lots of time, which can then be used for personal well-being, which, through a feedback loop, will improve your concentration, focus, and mental productivity.

So, when one feels overwhelmed, anxious and exhausted, it means one is just doing wrong things, being literally busy with nothing or with bullshit. This is very common pattern for those who did not understand their calling or their craft.

Notes

The fundamental question addressed by any intelligent agent is how NOT to get stuck in some corner, hitting the wall in a loop.

Nature evolved emotions for that, including what we call the feeling of “boredom”.

On a more subtle level, we are quickly losing motivation when activity is not hormonally (dopamine) and emotionally rewarding, which is right and efficient.

Another heuristic is if what we are doing does not work, especially when we are trying again and again. It is a hint that we are not qualified for the task.

Now consider some opensource projects. Have you ever trying to build a working Haskell stack (ghc, cabal-install, stack, and the fucking abomination called haskell-language-server) from the sources? You have no idea how fucking frustrating this is. You are stumbling at each and every step, and the result is still just a fucking crap.

The principial fuckup is that they are trying to verison everything based on content hashes instead of just having stable interfaces and increment a fucking number on evety interface change, like our forefathers did.

Trying to set up scala3 and metals is little better, but you still have 3 different versions of the scala compiler and a few GB of fucking jars.

Please try to understand. Your brain signals you (correctly) that you are doing something that you should not really do. Yeah, just use fucking binaries, ghcup and what not. It signals you that it seems to it that you are ruining yourself.

This is not a coincidence that they came up with that crappy idea of versioning everything, and having 3Gb of libraries for a working haskell-language-server build, which anyway will NOT work with a different version of ghc.

These things not just kill motivation, they are really burn you down. They give you an actual psychological pain.

So, it seems that modern CS requires some Rocky Balboa kind of character and self-determination, which is not supposed to be this way.

Habitual introspection and breathing techniques for relaxation is of some help, but it is still just fucking frustrating to actually experience the fact that the whole field is now dominated by literal idiots and low effort bloatware crap.