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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3687 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 16, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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I got a great new software development job that's easier and much higher-paying than my old one, but the first few weeks have been really rough. I work from home and find myself just playing endless videogames rather than working, then staying up really late and still mostly playing videogames just to get an hour or two of work done. Don't know what's going wrong really--I think I might be stressed or burnt out, but I need to get some work done to give my new employers a good first impression.

Crazy thing is, it's a great job, I'm really good at it, and I only have to do 1-2 hours of focused work a day to excel. But even that seems to be beyond me currently. Anyone else been in a similar situation and have good tips for how to concentrate?

Are you both gaming and working in the same machine/room/environment? Because I would strongly suggest never doing that.

IMO you need a work space completely distinct from your recreational space. I work from home and have a separate work set up in a different part of the house. Yes this means I have to double up on chairs, desks, monitors, etc. Else the alternative is working in a cafe, like other commenters suggested.

If you roll out of bed and sit down in the same place you previously racked up 5000 hours in Dota, then you will be overwhelming your brain with "it's time to relax" triggers that you have conditioned yourself with over time. You need to create an environment you associate with focus and work (and only work). You can also add other work triggers, like getting dressed as if you were going to the office. Basically, you must embrace the good screen/bad screen meme - they cannot be the same screen.

Something else can help is time blocking (e.g. the pomodoro technique). Ideally you'll work in a state of flow where you don't feel the passing of time, but failing that, working in 25 min chunks feels easier and less intimating than a long unstructured day.

Maybe decide on no videogames for a week, and as much videogames as you want after that. You can survive one week, right? Then just take the time where you would have been playing videogames to sit in a chair and be bored. You can survive being bored as well. (Hopefully this will make you so bored that work feels like fun. It works for me.)

This is highly speculative, but what if you tried temporarily downgrading your internet to the cheapest tier and/or swapped out your home router for a beat-up prior-gen model? The idea is to have just barely enough bandwidth to load Stack Overflow, but with a speed and latency too bad to game.

Once your first impression is made, return to old ways. Unless you want to keep it up.

This sounds ridiculous, but I know a couple who did this accidentally by moving to a place with only cell internet available, and it actually worked for them.

(Is it whiningcoil who's in a similar situation with non-starlink satnet here?)

Other replies are better starting points, but failing that try to read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It's more about creative work specifically than work generally, but it's short and I found it to be pretty helpful myself in understanding attitudes you might hold towards self-motivated work.

I've been there, it's frustrating. I didn't figure out any "one weird trick" personally, I just gradually got better at forcing myself to buckle down. I still procrastinate a lot but I do also get done what I need to get done. Shorter-term deadlines where I'm accountable to a colleague are helpful. If someone is relying on me to do X at N time, I'm much more motivated than if it's a "finish this eventually" situation.

This service is often recommended, probably worth a try: https://www.focusmate.com/

You have a few options, you could make a habit of going to your local library or cool coffee shop and work from there for the 2 hours you need in the morning, then get back home. Generally if you go in a space that you haven't trained yourself to associate with gaming, you won't game. You could also install something like the paid version of ColdTurkey to prevent you from gaming. Going on the pharmaceutical end, you could get hold of some modafinil and use that to focus, it's much milder than amphetamines and easier to get (I use indiamart and have some indian dude ship it to me).

I actually did buy ColdTurkey but it was too easy to uninstall it, lol. I thought modafinil was generally for wakefulness?

modafinil was generally for wakefulness?

Just like caffeine both keeps you awake and focuses/motivates you, modafinil also has quite significant effects on focus and motivation, it's sort of the intermediate step between caffeine and amphetamines. I wouldn't necessarily use it everyday, otherwise you get used to it, but it could really give you 2 days per week of great motivation.

Have you tried changing your physical location? I realize a coffee shop isn't going to be optimal from a monitors perspective, but it might be worth a shot for some of your work if that's at all feasible.

I've been working from a library quiet room for a couple hours a day. You really do have to isolate yourself from distractions to WFH successfully.

I'll try that, thanks.

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