1. Set your standards (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUck-umj2WI, yes it is him, but it is good.)

2. If plausible, release something shit / half done. You will feel embarrassed and want to fix it up.

3. Just get started. Do a minute. Soon you will be in work mode, and forcing yourself to no to do it, so you can sleep at an appropriate time!

4. Try to do fun stuff if possible. Going to the gym is not fun, but it feels good after. But if you have a side project, make it a fun one, something you really are in to.

5. Habits are very powerful. Your brush your teeth, right?

Since Channing mentions interstitial journaling, I want to share my interstitial journaling app called Interstitch at https://Interstitch.app

I shared it here on HN and PH and got 2 upvotes and zero people checking it out. But I realized half the problem is most people don’t know what interstitial journaling is. Many people understandly confuse it for a journaling app. But it’s closer to a time tracking app but more for individual performance than invoicing. But I assumed I was the only person who finds this useful, which was ok since I’ve been using it to set “deep work” daily goals and summarize how I spent my week so at least I use it.

Then the CEO of Medium somehow sees the HN post and emails me that he coined the term, but I probably heard it from Ness Labs founder that Channing links to. So then I email her and she adds me to her newsletter which has like 100k subscribers and about 100 people are now using it which is cool. Good lesson in reaching the right audience.

Out of curiosity, do you think this is self-treatment for attention deficiencies, or just an effective set of strategies? In other words, is this a life strategy or a work strategy?

"As a rule with few exceptions, you want to move forward through iteration loops, not backward. (Too often, moving backward is a sign of problems with doing, not problems with planning.)"

What does that mean? a short example here would help. How do I know if reprioritizing is going backwards or a problem of doing vs. what was advised up above?

Some cool points made in this article thanks for sharing. It’s a bit broad and formulaic to be directly actionable in my opinion but that can be seen as good/bad depending on the reader

Logically, we want a Plan to move towards our Goal. As Engineers we often suffer from Analysis Paralysis: lots of paths to the goal with no clear winner. We also slow down from Impostor Syndrome: surely a smarter/more talented person knows the one true Plan forward to the goal.

> I make a plan, then do the plan, then learn from my efforts by reviewing my progress. I do this every day of the year, going on half a decade now. [At many time scales: three hour cycles going up to three-month cycles.]

I believe OP would agree that the Plan should be low quality, at least at the beginning. This encourages forward movement, and learning, vs just planning in circles and without using real-world data.

Source: writing a book on Feedback Loops

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." —Bruce Lee

If you put down hours in a mindful way towards your objective, you will progress, regardless if you want to learn to play piano, discover a revolutionary drug or get rich.