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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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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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?

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/