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CronoDAS comments on Life hack request: I want to want to work. - Less Wrong
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Ah. We have a motivation!
Do you expect that completing this project will get you money to donate immediately? Or is it one step in a long process that will someday result in doing paid work for money, so you can someday donate money and save lives? If it's the latter, it's easy for me to understand why you're frustrated. You're (faced with the prospect of) putting all this effort into something and getting (what feels like) absolutely nothing for it. Of course you're having trouble wanting to do it!
Sounds like you're taking on a difficult project, then, or at least one that's difficult for you. Doing an activity that requires creativity, such as writing or programming, tends to be much harder than doing something you can reduce to a series of habits. Solving a cubic equation symbolically is easy if you can look up the cubic formula, but deriving the formula on your own is nearly impossible. When I've had writer's block, standard advice such as "write an outline" is useless, because if I could have written an outline, I wouldn't have been stuck in the first place. The hard part of writing isn't what happens when a writer is typing, it's what happens while a writer is staring at a blank screen "doing nothing".
Anyway, the best productivity/motivation hack I can offer is this:
Don't work alone.
Get yourself a partner and work together with that person. If you get stuck, maybe your partner won't be, and you'll probably get much less frustrated with the work itself. You'll also keep each other on track, too. This can backfire if you start fighting with your partner, but overall I find myself becoming much more capable of doing things when I'm doing them with someone else.
I suspect working with someone only works when the someone you work with is goal driven by a goal that matters at least a little bit to you. I have no one who shares my goals enough to both 1) want to work alongside me 2) be among those whom I'd have working alongside, if given a chance.
BTW my goals can 90% be achieved alone in the sense of without a partner, but not in the sense of without a motivational human driving force.