I get the thrust of this; it's to help Virgos[0] stop procrastinating by over-preparing. But you do need some minimal level of preparation. So declaring that preparing to do a thing isn't doing the thing becomes almost a tautology, or a meaningless question of what the words mean in the dictionary.
Oh you are absolutely doing the thing in this situation, as in you're in the process of doing it, somewhere between 1% and 99% of the way there depending on the context. You haven't done the thing until you actually fully do the thing, it is true. But most of the work could be in this preparatory meta work, and of course it means nothing without the final all important step of doing the thing, but there you have it, doing the thing before having fully done the thing.
Redefining doing the thing into a complex process, where actually doing the thing is only one step of the process, and then other steps, is not doing the thing.
Au contraire! Almost all the time you spend doing the thing is actually doing the things required before the final completion of the thing. I've taken to calling this "the work before the work" and it's at least 90% of the work.
Example: I get asked at the start of a project to provide ModbusTCP comms mapping for a new control panel, so that the client can start integrating it into their SCADA system. It's just a spreadsheet, maybe 100 rows, how hard could it be? They need it right now, why am I telling them it'll take 6 months?
Typing the addresses and descriptions into the spreadsheet is 'the work', and it only takes an afternoon, but it can't start until we do the work before the work:
- To document the ModbusTCP mapping I need to the PLC program
- To finish the PLC program I need the electrical drawings
- To finish the electrical drawings, the electrical engineer needs the device list, datasheets for all the devices, and the functional spec
- To finish the device list and functional spec, we need to agree with the client exactly what we're building and what it's meant to do
None of these things are 'the work' but all of them are 'the work before the work' and usually nobody wants to do, to wait for, or pay for this work.
Well, to really know how things would pan out, you have to indeed do the thing.
And it happens that people will procrastinate with preparation. But as someone who does not and is fast at doing things I can tell you that if I want something done really fast preparation will be a good chunk of a projects time. If I want to toy around and the project doesn't matter that much, just doing the thing may do the trick.
Now the advice on that site aims to get people started with the actual work part and tries to do so by telling you preparation doesn't matter. That is not true. But it is true that people prepare forever because they are afraid to cross the threshold where they start translating grand ideas into concrete, protentially flawed reality. That means actually good advice would deal with the question where this fear comes from, how to address it and how to notice you have been preparing too long.
If you want to build a house, drawing the plans and finding the right location where to put said house is part of building a house. Or you could just mash bricks on top of each other in your backyard and then realize you forgot the foundation.
In his case, his domain shows up on HN periodically. Like simonw or tptacek, interacting with the audience is doing the thing in his case. Haha. But probably not for the audience!
Wow this article is an amazing rorschach test!
Each defensive comment here is a person defending what he thinks this article is personally attacking him on!
It's also unclear to me if people are intentionally ignoring the fact that it's about procrastination, or actually don't realize that in the rush to argue about what constitutes productive work.
> Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
For some types of work, the work we call prep work is 90% of the work and most of what determines how well the finished product turns out.
Painting is a good example. You can grab a bucket of paint and paint brush and start “doing the thing” by slapping paint on the surface. Your paint job is going to be very poor and fail early relative to a professional who properly sands, cleans the surface, preps the work area, and does it right. You might save some time now by skipping straight to doing the thing, but you might also lose more time later when you have to repeat the job because the paint is peeling or you’re cleaning up a paint mess that spilled on to another surface because you didn’t prepare.
I think in this example those prep work items _are_ doing the thing.
But then telling people about a new product could also be doing the thing.
There’s definitely something to be said for defining what the thing really is being an important part of doing it, but that can also spiral out of control into not doing the thing.
I think thingness is more of a variable property of the current thing you are doing. Than a binary is or isn’t the thing.
All we can really do is regularly check how much the thingness of the current thing is aligned with the main thing’s thingness.
I'd say for the purposes of this article anything that is required in order to have done the thing is "doing the thing".
If you need to read something to get the thing done you are doing the thing. If you already know everything to get started but still read another article you are procrastinating. If you need to sand this part to do a good job painting it, then you are doing the thing. If you just continue sanding with no benefit you are no longer doing the thing, you are now just delaying the next step
Additionally, a lot of people will describe doing completely unrelated things as "(mentally) preparing to do the thing."
I catch myself doing this. I will put off writing a job requisition by spending time on code. I will tell myself, "ugh, I'm just not in the right mental state to write a job req right now. Let me focus on some code until I'm ready." Which never works. I end up getting into a code flow state and that's all I work on for the rest of the day, or until I get interrupted by a meeting.
And then I get back from the meeting and say, "I got interrupted, I should just finish what I started and then I'll write the job reqs." And that never happens. I always pick up yet another coding task instead.
The only way I am ever able to get through admin paperwork is to just admit to myself I hate it but it has to get done, it has to get done right now, no amount of procrastiworking is going to make me stop hating it, so I should just get it over with so it's not sitting like a lead weight in the back of my head. And then when 5pm rolls around, I won't hate myself for letting yet another day go by without having the job reqs written.
Things I do to deal with the mental state procrastination lie:
- Start things. If after actually trying the thing I am truly not in a conducive mental state for the activity I can quit. Mostly evidence for this bad mental state is repeated mistakes at things I can already do. I think starting also weakens procrastination habits because you know you’re going to experience the thing you’re avoiding anyway even if you end up quitting part way through.
- Focus on whether it is a bad mental state for the activity rather than “the right” mental state for the activity. Most mental states will be good enough for most tasks. You don’t need code flow to code, even if you want it and it helps. You just need to not be in a state where you can’t figure things out or you keep introducing bugs.
- Completely reject my feelings about doing the task. If you’re in those feelings the task is a lot harder and the procrastination lies a lot easier to believe. It doesn’t matter in the short term how you feel about tasks you have to do.
- Constantly question the veracity of procrastinations lies. “Is this true?” “If it is true what can I do about it right now?”
- Reward myself after completing the task if I don’t get any kind of internal satisfaction naturally.
Sanding and cleaning are absolutely parts of painting. As is the wait until the paint dries.
Preparing the work area isn't. If you can get away without doing it (like if you can move the piece into some area you don't need to prepare), you should.
I read your first sentence and I thought "Yes, just like painting" and then you hit me with:
Painting is a good example
While I agree with your point, I believe this post is just psychological pep talk aimed at people like me (and probably the author) who dance around in endless preparation/postponing because they can't bring themselves to do the ting. It's generally an emotional issue: You are afraid of messing it up or of the consequences of the thing etc.
I wish I didn't but I need that kind of pep talk in my life
Painting is such a good example, and is one of the closest analogies to programming. You can do it fast and it’ll be done but you probably won’t like it. Or you can prep for it and it’ll take 10x longer, you won’t see anything for 90% of the time and it’ll be done in the blink of an eye.
At work I got asked for a feature a while back. We tee shirt size estimates and I said it was an XL. I came back a week later at our next planning sync and said I was going to work on it that day and we’d have it tomorrow. PM was very confused and worried about committing to an XL task in 24 hours - but I’d spent probably 3 days of the last week planning, doing requirements, writing up a spec sheet, weighing up against alternatives etc, and came up with the “simple solution” that we could smash out in a few hours. All of that time was “doing the thing”.
(Well, most of it. Some of it was just naval gazing and wondering if it really could be that simple…)
Prep work sucks. In whatever field, I always love hearing from the greats how they make the hard work a little less sucky. Good tools, better workflows, figuring out what they can let slide, accepting the struggle and getting zen. The people who do it 80% right and manage to make peace with that always seem the most productive.
You can do a good job if you want to. But that usually required taking a step back and thinking about these 20% you didn't manage last time. Maybe you use the wrong approach, the wrong tool, maybe your tool is no longer sharp because you told yourself prep sucks. 80/20 is a good philosophy if you just want to earn a living, but a bad philosophy if you want to reach mastery (which coincidentally can translate into making a relatively good living).
The important part is, that the greats never were okay with just 80%. Their goal is usually to make the best work they can and that means improving on things they have previously done. That doesn't mean the project needs more work or resources. It means it makes best use of the work and resources available while delivering something that satisfies the masters quality standards.
Also: In some cases 80/20 mediocrity does in fact not cut it and it is just an excuse to do less work and not to think hard about things.
In most of my hobbies I feel like my growth and talent is limited by lack of volume, not my care or attention to detail. It's hard to let go and use one color instead of three, or not fix a flaw in model part nobody will ever see. I'm sure other people have the opposite challenge.
If it is a hobby then probably the most important bit of advice is that you keep doing it in a way that lets you enjoy it. If you feel you need to become better regularity (translating to quantity) is in fact important, especially if you're the perfectionist type.
Coincidentally I teach (medialab) at one of the most recognized art universities in Europe and have a MA of fine arts and my mother is a painter. In my judgement the most overlooked (or most underrated) skill when it comes to painting is perception. Being a good painter aside from the manual skill has a lot to do with seeing or being able to see, even if you're not doing figurative paintings.
Painting more and more different things can be a good way to raise your own perception skills. It is also important to revisit old works occasionally. Ideally you will immediately see what was wring (or good) with them, something you may have not perceived back when you did it. This is proof that you leveled up.
Painting is such a great way to explain this. I've made many mistakes painting myself, and only came to appreciate the amount of extra work involved when I looked closely at how a pro does it.
Things that have caused me to screw up various paint jobs:
- not color matching white paint to my existing white paint, causing a visible color difference
- buying the wrong kind of brush for my paint
- buying cheap brushes and then needing to dig hairs out of the paint
- not priming, which caused me to have to do multiple layers to get good coverage
- buying cheap paint, which together with not priming, caused me to have to do multiple layers to get good coverage
- buying too little paint because I did not estimate carefully and then having to pause mid-job to go buy more paint and extending the total time to more than a week (because I did not have time to finish the job the next day)
- not buying and putting down floor protection which caused a lot of extra time in cleanup and never actually getting the paint out of the crevices in the floorboards
- not taping out the windows and doors which slowed down painting and required a lot of just-in-time cleanups
- taping out carelessly with poor-quality tape, causing paint to get under the tape, and defeating the purpose of taping
- not changing clothes before a tiny paint job and needing to throw away a very decent t-shirt because metal paint does not wash out well
- buying very expensive paint for a rough paint job in my garage because I did not spend a minute to think about the final effect, and wasting a bunch of money for a poor effect
To avoid each of these mistakes you have to spend time not-painting. It's time well spent.
I've tried doing a work breakdown, and watching a pro do it, it seems roughly 0.75 units of time for prep, 1 unit of time for painting, and 0.5 units of time for cleanup. I did not count the time for researching and buying, but once you add commute, it's easy for it to be 0.5 unit of time, depending on size of job. Roughly 1.5x-2x of not-painting to 1x of painting.
You can make many software-development analogies to painting.
If we're mature experience painters, all of these things not-painting things are still "doing things".
I think what the author means here is that doing prep work is useless if you don't follow on it. No amount of investigation, planning or organization is going to be worth anything until you finally apply it to do the actual core of the thing.
Prep can be the thing when it's an intentional, necessary part of the process. The key difference is whether you're preparing with purpose, or just endlessly circling the task to avoid actually starting
Right but I see this taken too far. Getting side eyed for creating a Jira ticket not doing it now. Dude, I am creating a Jira ticket because I have 100 things to do and need to actual priorise this! If I do stuff in the order of serendipity I will definitely be inefficient.
1. Ticket
2. Feature branch
3. Write unit test
4. Periodically merge from main.
5. Implement to get tests to pass
6. Push changes
7. Create PR
8. Wait for PR feedback
9. Address feedback and repeat
10. Close and merge PR
11. Automated CI deploy
12. Integration testing as needed
13. Close ticket
14. Include in next prod release
All of these are good things. But the overhead is significant. And there may be times when you want to do spikes that forgo some of these.
> That is all part of doing the thing called quality software develeopment
It's all part of doing software development on a team that has embraced the trappings of agile, at any rate. Less clear that any of these steps are actually essential to quality.
There are teams who use a workflow that looks more like push-to-merge-queue -> if-tests-pass -> deploy-to-prod, and in my experience this results in significantly higher velocity (provided your e2e tests are actually sufficient to prevent outages).
I don't think that this is an indictment of creating the Jira ticket, or prioritization, or anything. It reads to me like a reminder that we often focus too heavily on the other work and thoughts that are adjacent to doing something, get lost in the weeds, and don't actually end up doing the thing.
If you don't create the ticket, it may never get done, too! That not doing the thing might lead to convincing others the thing needs to be done which directly leads to doing the thing.
It may not be doing the thing, but it enabled the thing to be able to be done at all. Cheers to the precursors, the planners and the annotators. Through you, more things are done.
I am creating a jira ticket because I will forget I have done the thing.
I am also creating a jira ticket because 11 months later when another engineer is trying to figure out if the code they're staring at is still actually valuable or if they can rip it out safely, they are going to use git blame to find the pull request where the thing was done, that pull request is going to mention the jira ticket, and the jira ticket is going to reference the design document that justified why we did the thing. If we don't do those things, that engineer is going to yank that functionality out and something way over there is going to break without anybody realizing it broke.
Your mileage may vary. Some teams make the PRs detailed enough that they don't have to fall back on jira. Other teams try to encode this information into unit tests (that helps but it's circular reasoning; the unit test will tell you that somebody at one point thought that this was important enough to verify that it keeps doing the thing; they won't tell you why the thing matters or what customer wanted the thing or whether the thing was the thing we did before we pivoted to doing the new thing cuz the old thing didn't make money).
I see this as a kind of inspiration / perspiration thing, and I’m on Tesla’s side that you perspire less if you think more. I like to not do the thing for a really long time, and then do it quickly, having thought it through. I see some people that jump into things without thinking, and take what is imo the more difficult route, with worse results.
I know there are some things you need to start to really understand what’s going on, but as much as possible I’d rather mull over things a lot and gather information and clarify my thinking before doing the thing.
Sometimes "not doing the thing" is actually the most productive phase, especially when you're consciously incubating ideas or working through complexity in your head
I like to think this advice is aimed at things that can't be done by thinking them through and doing them, but that have to be started and done repeatedly to be successful.
I think the transition between things being done is maybe a bit more interesting.
"Build a house," is a thing, but at which point of the dreaming, designing, planning, permitting, architecting, financing, contracting, acquiring, installing, verifying, reworking, coordinating, inspecting, styling, unpacking, cleaning, landscaping, repairing, upgrading, and waiting, are you doing it?
Perhaps each discrete thing is itself a thing, and when you do a thing, or transition between things, is the matter needing clarifying.
If you are coordinating on how to do a thing, you are doing the thing, as long as the thing is coordinating on how to do the next thing. This "coordinating a thing" is a discrete thing we should not confuse for any other thing.
TFA's examples are unforgiving in that they suppose there is only ever one thing and all else should be nothing.
I'm inspired by this and want to extend it, perhaps telescopically, by discussing what the thing is.
Sometimes we see our task as being, "do C," and we forget the "B" and "A" that come before.
Maybe you can't do "C" without discussing it ("B") or researching how others did it ("A"). In these cases, we shouldn't simply think the thing is "C"—the thing must first be "A," then "B," and then, "C."
If we forget this, we're bound to think "C" is the only thing of value, that it should take an hour and not a week, or that people doing the "A's" or "B's" to enable the "Cs" must be doing nothing at all!
It's easy to underestimate that groundwork because it's less flashy or quantifiable. But skipping it usually just means C turns out half-baked, or takes even longer in the end
It's not wrong, that's exactly what I'm paying them for. If they didn't have the education then they wouldn't be a doctor, and I wouldn't be seeing them for a consultation.
I'm well compensated not because I'm good at googling things, but because I have a proven track record of being good at googling things. If a junior was able to produce the same results they wouldnt be paid more.
If you pay a doctor, the thing you're doing is paying a doctor. Your "A" or "B" might be booking the appointment or figuring out how to send the payment. I'm not sure I follow.
Meaningless platitude. All the things mentioned (visualisation, scheduling, breaking into smaller tasks, etc.) are proven to work. If you cannot do a task but you do the above things, you will eventually be able to do the task. You know what isn't proven to work? Willing your brain to "just do it" like this article implies.
Agreed. But there’s still a type of Zeno’s paradox if you don’t start and continue and finish the thing. As someone that has no trouble planning or starting but a lot of trouble continuing to the end, I find this kind of stuff helpful to completing what I set out to do.
Half the struggle is that all the meta actions around doing the thing create a kind of synthetic realness. It feels like progress, but it’s just noise. When the Reality Drift Equation tilts toward excess entropy, your brain mistakes preparation loops for actual work and you end up in identity drift instead of momentum. The only way out is collapsing the loop by acting, not optimizing the wrapper around the action.
Yeah sure. The tricky part is if you even know which action to take.
To actually do that you need to research enough, conceptualize the end goal and envison a rough but workable plan.
Most people don't and blindly stumble going after short term to mid term reward.
Then later life crashes them hard, except for the lucky few.
And the truth is, now some people have many more luck coupons to spend than others.
I have a print out of this on my wall. I also have pretty bad ADHD. It's been on my wall a year and I still haven't done the thing (really a series of small aversive, timeliness and administration heavy things). I oscillate between trying to do the thing, and trying to treat ADHD or at least not regress (sleep (difficult), exercise, nutrition, intoxicants socially only, stay away from digital dopamine sinks (really hard)). Then I have a burst of panic that trying to improve executive function is itself not doing the thing.
I think you really want to be marketing concurrently with doing the thing. Saving it all for the end is probably a mistake. And a lot of projects don't have defined "end"s, like open source projects, or websites.
Marketing can also lead to you receiving feedback for what the users actually want. Doing the thing does not imply doing the right thing. You can be super productive building the wrong thing that no one wants.
That depends. If OP’s job is marketing then doing it before is doing the thing even if it pisses off the people who’ll have to do the thing OP made up.
Sometimes not doing the ‘thing’ (in the sense of not jumping into a goal or project) is actually a deliberate, healthy choice — resting, recharging, being in a better mental/physical state. That’s not laziness or procrastination; it’s recovery or self-care.
For me, sometimes encouragement that what I'm doing is in support of Doing the Thing has helped me not feel so discouraged that I actually just give up on Doing the Thing altogether. Other times it has felt like a cheap excuse that allows me to delay. I'm not sure the function of all the ancillary activities, relative to Doing the Thing, is actually fixed.
This hits hard, not in my programming work which it also hits but there at least I am sharpening my toolset by reading books, and learning things. This hits the hardest for me training Jiu Jitsu, where I do love the sport but I feel it's so hard to come back to training when I am in such a bad shape. So I say to people that I do Jiu Jitsu, I watch videos, I follow some competitions. Heck I even go with my kids to THEIR training but I only train myself once a month maybe at this rate.
There is an extreme where you procrastinate on the real work, yes. But half the things on the list are not procrastination, but preparation. If you skip those you hit the other extreme where you are so focused on doing the thing, you waste your time because you don't know the background or context.
Doing a thing involves doing it, but it's very unlikely that doing a thing will involve exactly one atomic movement. So you have cutpoints at doing the thing.
So to do the thing you first have to decide to do the thing. You have to decide what the thing is, or at least have enough of a vision of the thing to take the first step at doing a thing that might look like the thing.
So "doing the thing" involves a lot of doing things that aren't the thing, but without which you won't get towards the thing.
In other words: sitting down and writing down what the thing is _can very well_ be part of doing the thing.
There's a sort of philosophical point too, about whether the thing is what you think it is. Plenty of people have had the "I thought this feature was going to do X, you thought it was going to do Y, and we all realised the mismatch very late in the process".
I think both visions of the world are valid, and things you can keep in your mind at the same time to deploy as needed.
Or you could try and learn by experience. Software is an example, but so could be drawing or composing music. All of those things have been taken to extreme highs by people who had no idea what they were doing.
Becoming someone who can do the thing is how you get to do a lot of things
Not what your boss and your bosses’ boss wants you to do, instead of doing other things you can do to maximize value for shareholders in some arbitrarily chosen amount of time
But thinking of how you wouldn’t have permission to get ready to do the thing in a business context, also, isn’t doing the thing
Ironically, sometimes the only thing that will get you doing the thing is explicitly not doing the thing (but also no other thing either), until there's nothing to do but the thing.
It's amazing how many people utterly missed the point. I think the first 6 or so top comments just totally wiffed it.
There is nothing wrong with planning/scheduling/marketing/whatever. But a LOT of people use all that as excuses and never actually do the thing.
If you are the kind of person for whom which those are useful, great. Or if you have the self-displine/self awareness to do all that stuff and still follow through, great. But some people just need to do the fucking thing or they never will.
I was just reading about Ron Jeffries' disastrous attempts to write a Sudoku program because he dogmatically refused to do any preparatory work--including spending any time at all thinking about the nature of the problem and what sorts of data structures would be suitable for solving it.
I agree with most of this but not the todo list part. I think more successful projects tend to have upfront planning and consider it a real part of the work. Even more successful projects will continue to revisit and update their plan as the project is ongoing.
As I like to put it: not having a plan is not a plan.
Unless you wasted years by going in the wrong direction which could have been avoided by a week of serious thinking and planning...
(Or even a year. Some mistakes are extremely costly.)
I had this Ah-Ha moment a while back when I was presenting on how to shorten cloud outage times, by aggregating impact into a list of details, and hustling around to make connections to support engineers and their customers and the poor backend engineers running around trying to make sense of it all. Putting a little bit of structure to it, so other people can realize they can make a difference in a large organization.
I had a colleague make a passive aggressive comment about it being really cool how I put together "obvious" stuff. Well, it is obvious. At the same time, I have never seen him do this "obvious thing".
Doing the thing is being a performer. Making the thing happen somehow is called leadership. It's all about doing the thing, and not just seeing and understanding the thing - that's the easy part.
Sometimes doing the thing is just doing a thing and then you get done with some milestone on the thing, you're like "why am I doing this thing. am I crazy for undertaking this thing?"
And yeah you probably are. Only in retrospect will it be knowable if it was worth it or not. Perseverance is necessary but rarely sufficient.
> Reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing
In my book, doing research/understanding the domain is a crucial part of "doing the thing". Often reading about how to do the thing makes you reconsider doing it at all.
I also think this is true, but one thing distinguishes the two and that is commitment. Resarch opens up new possibilities while doing the thing narrows them. Many people (myself included) have difficulties with that. Reading will only get you so far and I think that is what the poem adresses.
That text is describing my life since 10 years or so. I am in my 30s and lost the capability to do the thing, _any_ thing, with the exception of going out with friends/family/my partner to do social activities. Everything else is literally impossible for me to do.
I’m currently kicking off my second attempt to fix this by talking to a psychologist about it. But I am not very hopeful. Still searching for the root cause. I have all the ground works set to having a good life, except that I am incapable of moving to start that damn thing.
Where is my interest in stuff gone? Why do I prefer my couch over just typing "git clone" and play with some new tech? Why is my 3D printer sitting dusty in the corner even though I was one of the first adopters? Why is the act of hand-craft wood working, that I am dreaming of since forever and would now be able to do, impossible for me to start?
My motivation is high. My brain thinks whole projects through. I start fixing things in my head. But I am not even capable of dumping all that planning into an speech-to-text-LLM to build an actual design document out of it.
It feels like I played everything through already, so no point in starting that thing.
At the risk of making unqualified self-diagnoses, the phrase that always comes to my mind is "anticipatory anhedonia": On some level I do not expect the thing will actually be that fun, and I'm not filled with bubbly joy now about how awesome it'll be when it happens tomorrow.
I may have fun during the thing, but beforehand it's mostly trying to plan for what might go wrong, and afterwards it fades to the satisfaction of checking something off of a list.
I definitely lack motivation to do anything at my job, but it’s the same will all private/hobby stuff. IT is probably not it for me anymore, however I have that job situation under control. I wish I could do something else though (not IT at all), but that also requires me to start that thing (and take some risk).
Sounds like you'd benefit from working with a therapist, i.e. someone specifically trained in understand these kind of problems and guiding you through them.
To be fair though, for any cool thing I've done, before actually doing the thing, I've also spent time doing the things that TFA says aren't doing the thing.
I'm trying to do the thing, but the thing is horribly documented and doesn't work. And nobody seems to know why. So am I still doing the thing if the thing isn't doing its thing?
The thing about that kind of writing is that the thing is a uniquely characterizable thing that is distinguishable from other things that are not the thing, thereby enabling the realization of the thing to be a thing, rather than not a thing.
Writing a thing about things that aren't doing the thing isn't doing the thing unless the thing happens to be writing a thing about things that aren't doing the thing
Writing a comment about a thing that talks about things that aren't doing the thing isn't doing the thing unless the thing happens to be writing a comment about a thing that talks about things that aren't doing the thing
Writing a Python program to write N deep nested sentences on how writing a comment about a comment about a .... (N times) comment is not doing the thing is not doing the thing.
If doing the thing without preparation would have taken 50hrs, and sitting down to plan cuts that down to 20hrs, I'd argue that planning did "get a chunk of the thing done".
For someone without ADHD's `executive disfunction`, one of the code ADHD struggles, this post reads as nonsense. Thus only minority could relate to the post: the ones who have ADHD ones who think they understand ADHD.
I've got ADHD and Preparing to do the thing, Scheduling time to do the thing and Making a to-do list for the thing are actually what enable me to Do The Thing in the first place.
If you're gonna build a house, building scaffolding is not a waste of time.
Problem with this approach is someone who follows it will find themselves doing something totally useless almost all of the time. "Just doing the thing" means that usually you are merely doing a hobby - most of the time, being unaware of that, believing you were building a business.
If you work with a bunch of people who “just do things” you very well may wish to spend a lot more time “thinking about things” before you do them. If those things are more complicated and nuanced than “doing the dishes” or “putting away the laundry”. Sure, in those cases, just do it.
Yes, holy shit yes.... This has been my sentiment for a while now. I see lots of people everywhere especially on social media talking about the thing and no one actually did the thing or is even attempting to do the thing. Honestly thats why i dont have youtube channels or write blogs or anything past casual posts here or reddit... i always think to myself why waste time talking about the thing when i could be doing it now... anyways ima go back to doing the thing. cheers. !
Granted the humorous intent, it's a reductionist outlook. If we were to embrace the premise, then life would be about spawning replacements, or, as is sometimes said, "A chicken is an egg's way to make another egg."
When expressed that way, I must differ. Reproduction per se is the least interesting part of human life. Talking about reproduction is much more interesting ... wait, I think that's called "literature."
It is certainly a truth that many people have a fear to cross the threshold of doing something for real. That fear is usually a fear of committing to a potentially substandard result or a fear of getting started on the meat of what feels like a herculean problem. In short it is the fear of failing.
As an university level educator that helps students with mostly technical projects (so stuff neither I nor them have ever done): This fear is very common. But what I dislike about this advice is that preparing the thing is often in fact a necessary step of (A) deciding whether the thing is feasible and worth doing and (B) a part of what is needed to do the thing. Drafting the general layout and data flow and UI for your software can save you hours later. Having a good and fleshed out concept for a game may tell you if it is even worth putting years of your own time into it, what resources you will need, a research essay on different ways to detect motion may e what makes or breaks the result of your interactive art installation etc.
So preparation is necessary, but true experience only comes from going beyond the preparation phase. Feel it is impossible to start? Usually that means there is something that you feel insecure with. E.g. your game might need an inventory system and while you have a great idea how it should look and work, you have no idea how to actually program it. And if that small part of your task looks impossible, it makes the whole task appear extra-impossible.
The best way to deal with this is usually tackling the problem head on and make it a proof of concept. The problem is you can't program that inventory, and there are many ways to go at that particular problem, but if you can get a draft inventory going that means your biggest worry is taken care of. That means dealing with the hard part first, even if you tell yourself it is just a proof of concept that won't land in the final thing is a good approach. Divide and conquer. The whole thing seems impossible? Break it down into smaller steps thst seem more managable.
I see lots of comments focusing on cases where there is necessary research still to do.
Which I think misses the point - which is there are times when you’ve already done enough research, but you’re afraid to act so you procrastinate. i.e. not doing the thing.
If you haven't started doing the thing while researching it, you're doing archeology or historiography, not research.
(Different scientific fields. Research requires experiment.)
In order to determine if something is or is not "doing the thing" you must first know what "the thing" is. If it's writing your thoughts on your blog, then this is indeed doing the thing.
Not doing the thing would be: planning to write a blog post, tweeting that you're going to write a blog post, reading articles about how best to word your blog posts, watching some YouTube videos as inspiration, etc.
I think the advice here is an anti procrastination advice: do the thing, don't just think about doing the thing.
> Reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing. Reading about how other people did the thing isn't doing the thing."
> Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.
Clearly defining and understanding the thing or, as they say, understanding the problem is half the solution. Real life experiences totally crash the OP statements.
- Ignoring that all people are different does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Discovering what procrastination is (and still failing to name it or provide actual coping mechanisms) does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Failing to recognize elementary human behavior does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Utterly neglecting the act of double creation (first imagine, then create) does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Being energetic and with only a few tasks at hand and writing off everyone else as lazy does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Writing a post about human psychology does not make you an expert in human psychology
I would continue my list, but gotta go. To do... , you know.
Today I learned that I know what the thing is, not because I know what the thing is, but because I was informed that I know what the thing is, and that to know what the thing is merely requires to be informed that I know by any person willing to allege such possession of knowledge, thereby eliminating any effort on my part to know the thing and appropriating such effort imposed on other persons whom are able and willing to indicate to me that I know the thing.
All true, but worth noting that sometimes making that to-do list is the first step to doing the thing because picking the first item off the list and taking 10 minutes to do it is doing the thing. If you aren't doing the thing because it's a monolith in your brain that is going to consume the next 6 months of your life and you're paralyzed by its enormity, salami slicing 10 minute chunks off the front of it can be a good way to get started.
What's the thing? If we're being shitty about systems neurodivergent people use to get their laundry done, stop. If you're complaining about the overhead it takes to manage a project with 10,000+ people, yeah no. If there are 2 ICs, 4 managers, a TPM, a PM, a other "P" PM, a UX person, an HR person and a lawyer, yeah you might have a point.
I get the thrust of this; it's to help Virgos[0] stop procrastinating by over-preparing. But you do need some minimal level of preparation. So declaring that preparing to do a thing isn't doing the thing becomes almost a tautology, or a meaningless question of what the words mean in the dictionary.
[0] Please just let this slide.
In the Viable System Model[0], "doing the thing" is System 1. Yes of course you need System 1 or the thing won't get done.
But in any viable system, you also have the "meta-systems", Systems 2-5:
- System 2: coordination between multiple Systems 1 (which includes prioritization, communication, and exceptional conditions)
- System 3: resource allocation and process development
- System 4: strategy and risk management
- System 5: values and holistic organizational design
As a human, you are also striving to be a viable system. You can't only just "do the thing", you have to:
- prioritize which thing to do
- take notes and keep records to communicate between past and future versions of yourself
- make sure you have the requisite resources for doing the thing
- construct your environment and processes for long-term success (habits not motivation)
- consider what happens when the thing is done and how it fits into your larger strategy
- keep your head and heart connected to make sure you're doing the right thing
None of these things are doing the thing! But they're also rather essential for getting the right things done well.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model
Certainly, but don't get confused: You are not doing the thing, until you do the thing.
There are many ways to do the thing. There are many more ways to not do the thing.
That's right, you're not producing paperclips unless one minute you have metal wire and the next minute you have a paperclip.
The ways in which you can do things around, but never actually producing a single paperclip are infinite.
That's true, but the number of paperclips you'll produce if you only devote effort to things that directly produce paperclips is also very low.
It can be really difficult to strike that productive balance.
Oh you are absolutely doing the thing in this situation, as in you're in the process of doing it, somewhere between 1% and 99% of the way there depending on the context. You haven't done the thing until you actually fully do the thing, it is true. But most of the work could be in this preparatory meta work, and of course it means nothing without the final all important step of doing the thing, but there you have it, doing the thing before having fully done the thing.
Redefining doing the thing into a complex process, where actually doing the thing is only one step of the process, and then other steps, is not doing the thing.
Buying the wire and the pliers is not doing the thing either, but you can't do the thing if you don't have them.
It's still not doing the thing
How far along are you on the action item?
The item is all done. I'm waiting for the action.
Au contraire! Almost all the time you spend doing the thing is actually doing the things required before the final completion of the thing. I've taken to calling this "the work before the work" and it's at least 90% of the work.
Example: I get asked at the start of a project to provide ModbusTCP comms mapping for a new control panel, so that the client can start integrating it into their SCADA system. It's just a spreadsheet, maybe 100 rows, how hard could it be? They need it right now, why am I telling them it'll take 6 months?
Typing the addresses and descriptions into the spreadsheet is 'the work', and it only takes an afternoon, but it can't start until we do the work before the work:
- To document the ModbusTCP mapping I need to the PLC program
- To finish the PLC program I need the electrical drawings
- To finish the electrical drawings, the electrical engineer needs the device list, datasheets for all the devices, and the functional spec
- To finish the device list and functional spec, we need to agree with the client exactly what we're building and what it's meant to do
None of these things are 'the work' but all of them are 'the work before the work' and usually nobody wants to do, to wait for, or pay for this work.
You can’t know in the moment whether the thing you are doing is doing the thing. In retrospect alone does it become clear.
Thing is, you have to start doing the thing to figure out what things you need to do the thing.
Well, to really know how things would pan out, you have to indeed do the thing.
And it happens that people will procrastinate with preparation. But as someone who does not and is fast at doing things I can tell you that if I want something done really fast preparation will be a good chunk of a projects time. If I want to toy around and the project doesn't matter that much, just doing the thing may do the trick.
Now the advice on that site aims to get people started with the actual work part and tries to do so by telling you preparation doesn't matter. That is not true. But it is true that people prepare forever because they are afraid to cross the threshold where they start translating grand ideas into concrete, protentially flawed reality. That means actually good advice would deal with the question where this fear comes from, how to address it and how to notice you have been preparing too long.
If you want to build a house, drawing the plans and finding the right location where to put said house is part of building a house. Or you could just mash bricks on top of each other in your backyard and then realize you forgot the foundation.
Yes. Also, attempting to do the thing and failing is indeed doing the thing. (although you may only know in retrospect)
This would have been neat in business school
people have to keep rediscovering/reinventing cybernetics because society keeps forgetting it lol
Business school is a great way to postpone doing the thing...
writing this reply on hackernews is not "doing the thing" bro.
You have no idea what my thing is and whether or not I'm doing it via this post on HN.
Some replies I have made in Hacker news I later expanded, refined, and included in my classes or books.
[flagged]
In his case, his domain shows up on HN periodically. Like simonw or tptacek, interacting with the audience is doing the thing in his case. Haha. But probably not for the audience!
Wow this article is an amazing rorschach test! Each defensive comment here is a person defending what he thinks this article is personally attacking him on!
It's also unclear to me if people are intentionally ignoring the fact that it's about procrastination, or actually don't realize that in the rush to argue about what constitutes productive work.
> Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
For some types of work, the work we call prep work is 90% of the work and most of what determines how well the finished product turns out.
Painting is a good example. You can grab a bucket of paint and paint brush and start “doing the thing” by slapping paint on the surface. Your paint job is going to be very poor and fail early relative to a professional who properly sands, cleans the surface, preps the work area, and does it right. You might save some time now by skipping straight to doing the thing, but you might also lose more time later when you have to repeat the job because the paint is peeling or you’re cleaning up a paint mess that spilled on to another surface because you didn’t prepare.
I think in this example those prep work items _are_ doing the thing.
But then telling people about a new product could also be doing the thing.
There’s definitely something to be said for defining what the thing really is being an important part of doing it, but that can also spiral out of control into not doing the thing.
I think thingness is more of a variable property of the current thing you are doing. Than a binary is or isn’t the thing.
All we can really do is regularly check how much the thingness of the current thing is aligned with the main thing’s thingness.
I'd say for the purposes of this article anything that is required in order to have done the thing is "doing the thing".
If you need to read something to get the thing done you are doing the thing. If you already know everything to get started but still read another article you are procrastinating. If you need to sand this part to do a good job painting it, then you are doing the thing. If you just continue sanding with no benefit you are no longer doing the thing, you are now just delaying the next step
Additionally, a lot of people will describe doing completely unrelated things as "(mentally) preparing to do the thing."
I catch myself doing this. I will put off writing a job requisition by spending time on code. I will tell myself, "ugh, I'm just not in the right mental state to write a job req right now. Let me focus on some code until I'm ready." Which never works. I end up getting into a code flow state and that's all I work on for the rest of the day, or until I get interrupted by a meeting.
And then I get back from the meeting and say, "I got interrupted, I should just finish what I started and then I'll write the job reqs." And that never happens. I always pick up yet another coding task instead.
The only way I am ever able to get through admin paperwork is to just admit to myself I hate it but it has to get done, it has to get done right now, no amount of procrastiworking is going to make me stop hating it, so I should just get it over with so it's not sitting like a lead weight in the back of my head. And then when 5pm rolls around, I won't hate myself for letting yet another day go by without having the job reqs written.
But right now it's the weekend.
Things I do to deal with the mental state procrastination lie:
- Start things. If after actually trying the thing I am truly not in a conducive mental state for the activity I can quit. Mostly evidence for this bad mental state is repeated mistakes at things I can already do. I think starting also weakens procrastination habits because you know you’re going to experience the thing you’re avoiding anyway even if you end up quitting part way through.
- Focus on whether it is a bad mental state for the activity rather than “the right” mental state for the activity. Most mental states will be good enough for most tasks. You don’t need code flow to code, even if you want it and it helps. You just need to not be in a state where you can’t figure things out or you keep introducing bugs.
- Completely reject my feelings about doing the task. If you’re in those feelings the task is a lot harder and the procrastination lies a lot easier to believe. It doesn’t matter in the short term how you feel about tasks you have to do.
- Constantly question the veracity of procrastinations lies. “Is this true?” “If it is true what can I do about it right now?”
- Reward myself after completing the task if I don’t get any kind of internal satisfaction naturally.
Sanding and cleaning are absolutely parts of painting. As is the wait until the paint dries.
Preparing the work area isn't. If you can get away without doing it (like if you can move the piece into some area you don't need to prepare), you should.
I read your first sentence and I thought "Yes, just like painting" and then you hit me with:
Painting is a good example
While I agree with your point, I believe this post is just psychological pep talk aimed at people like me (and probably the author) who dance around in endless preparation/postponing because they can't bring themselves to do the ting. It's generally an emotional issue: You are afraid of messing it up or of the consequences of the thing etc.
I wish I didn't but I need that kind of pep talk in my life
Painting is such a good example, and is one of the closest analogies to programming. You can do it fast and it’ll be done but you probably won’t like it. Or you can prep for it and it’ll take 10x longer, you won’t see anything for 90% of the time and it’ll be done in the blink of an eye.
At work I got asked for a feature a while back. We tee shirt size estimates and I said it was an XL. I came back a week later at our next planning sync and said I was going to work on it that day and we’d have it tomorrow. PM was very confused and worried about committing to an XL task in 24 hours - but I’d spent probably 3 days of the last week planning, doing requirements, writing up a spec sheet, weighing up against alternatives etc, and came up with the “simple solution” that we could smash out in a few hours. All of that time was “doing the thing”.
(Well, most of it. Some of it was just naval gazing and wondering if it really could be that simple…)
Prep work sucks. In whatever field, I always love hearing from the greats how they make the hard work a little less sucky. Good tools, better workflows, figuring out what they can let slide, accepting the struggle and getting zen. The people who do it 80% right and manage to make peace with that always seem the most productive.
I don’t think prep work sucks. Cleaning up after, though… Although maybe that’s just prep work for the next time ;-).
As German ex-football (soccer) coach Sepp Herberger would say "Nach dem Spiel ist vor dem Spiel" (After the game is before the game).
You can do a good job if you want to. But that usually required taking a step back and thinking about these 20% you didn't manage last time. Maybe you use the wrong approach, the wrong tool, maybe your tool is no longer sharp because you told yourself prep sucks. 80/20 is a good philosophy if you just want to earn a living, but a bad philosophy if you want to reach mastery (which coincidentally can translate into making a relatively good living).
The important part is, that the greats never were okay with just 80%. Their goal is usually to make the best work they can and that means improving on things they have previously done. That doesn't mean the project needs more work or resources. It means it makes best use of the work and resources available while delivering something that satisfies the masters quality standards.
Also: In some cases 80/20 mediocrity does in fact not cut it and it is just an excuse to do less work and not to think hard about things.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. It's complicated.
I'm a perfectionist miniature painter by hobby. I love the stories floating around about how quantity can lead to quality (photography, pottery): https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality...
In most of my hobbies I feel like my growth and talent is limited by lack of volume, not my care or attention to detail. It's hard to let go and use one color instead of three, or not fix a flaw in model part nobody will ever see. I'm sure other people have the opposite challenge.
If it is a hobby then probably the most important bit of advice is that you keep doing it in a way that lets you enjoy it. If you feel you need to become better regularity (translating to quantity) is in fact important, especially if you're the perfectionist type.
Coincidentally I teach (medialab) at one of the most recognized art universities in Europe and have a MA of fine arts and my mother is a painter. In my judgement the most overlooked (or most underrated) skill when it comes to painting is perception. Being a good painter aside from the manual skill has a lot to do with seeing or being able to see, even if you're not doing figurative paintings.
Painting more and more different things can be a good way to raise your own perception skills. It is also important to revisit old works occasionally. Ideally you will immediately see what was wring (or good) with them, something you may have not perceived back when you did it. This is proof that you leveled up.
Unless doing the thing well matters to you.
How do you like those 80% Boeing aircraft with optional parts that may or may not come away in flight?
Painting is such a great way to explain this. I've made many mistakes painting myself, and only came to appreciate the amount of extra work involved when I looked closely at how a pro does it.
Things that have caused me to screw up various paint jobs:
- not color matching white paint to my existing white paint, causing a visible color difference
- buying the wrong kind of brush for my paint
- buying cheap brushes and then needing to dig hairs out of the paint
- not priming, which caused me to have to do multiple layers to get good coverage
- buying cheap paint, which together with not priming, caused me to have to do multiple layers to get good coverage
- buying too little paint because I did not estimate carefully and then having to pause mid-job to go buy more paint and extending the total time to more than a week (because I did not have time to finish the job the next day)
- not buying and putting down floor protection which caused a lot of extra time in cleanup and never actually getting the paint out of the crevices in the floorboards
- not taping out the windows and doors which slowed down painting and required a lot of just-in-time cleanups
- taping out carelessly with poor-quality tape, causing paint to get under the tape, and defeating the purpose of taping
- not changing clothes before a tiny paint job and needing to throw away a very decent t-shirt because metal paint does not wash out well
- buying very expensive paint for a rough paint job in my garage because I did not spend a minute to think about the final effect, and wasting a bunch of money for a poor effect
To avoid each of these mistakes you have to spend time not-painting. It's time well spent.
I've tried doing a work breakdown, and watching a pro do it, it seems roughly 0.75 units of time for prep, 1 unit of time for painting, and 0.5 units of time for cleanup. I did not count the time for researching and buying, but once you add commute, it's easy for it to be 0.5 unit of time, depending on size of job. Roughly 1.5x-2x of not-painting to 1x of painting.
You can make many software-development analogies to painting.
If we're mature experience painters, all of these things not-painting things are still "doing things".
I think what the author means here is that doing prep work is useless if you don't follow on it. No amount of investigation, planning or organization is going to be worth anything until you finally apply it to do the actual core of the thing.
Prep can be the thing when it's an intentional, necessary part of the process. The key difference is whether you're preparing with purpose, or just endlessly circling the task to avoid actually starting
The thing isn't done until the thing is done.
My question to my team was always "Is it done, or done-done?". Which is another way to say this, I suppose.
Related: "Do the Real Thing" by Scott Young (2020): https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/05/04/do-the-real-thin...
Right but I see this taken too far. Getting side eyed for creating a Jira ticket not doing it now. Dude, I am creating a Jira ticket because I have 100 things to do and need to actual priorise this! If I do stuff in the order of serendipity I will definitely be inefficient.
It does add up though.
All of these are good things. But the overhead is significant. And there may be times when you want to do spikes that forgo some of these.That is all part of doing the thing called quality software develeopment.
Quick and dirty does not work in all environments.
> That is all part of doing the thing called quality software develeopment
It's all part of doing software development on a team that has embraced the trappings of agile, at any rate. Less clear that any of these steps are actually essential to quality.
There are teams who use a workflow that looks more like push-to-merge-queue -> if-tests-pass -> deploy-to-prod, and in my experience this results in significantly higher velocity (provided your e2e tests are actually sufficient to prevent outages).
Haha, no! Notice what's missing form that list? QA.
Now introduce change management and corporate into this.
I don't think that this is an indictment of creating the Jira ticket, or prioritization, or anything. It reads to me like a reminder that we often focus too heavily on the other work and thoughts that are adjacent to doing something, get lost in the weeds, and don't actually end up doing the thing.
If you don't create the ticket, it may never get done, too! That not doing the thing might lead to convincing others the thing needs to be done which directly leads to doing the thing.
It may not be doing the thing, but it enabled the thing to be able to be done at all. Cheers to the precursors, the planners and the annotators. Through you, more things are done.
I am creating a jira ticket because I will forget I have done the thing.
I am also creating a jira ticket because 11 months later when another engineer is trying to figure out if the code they're staring at is still actually valuable or if they can rip it out safely, they are going to use git blame to find the pull request where the thing was done, that pull request is going to mention the jira ticket, and the jira ticket is going to reference the design document that justified why we did the thing. If we don't do those things, that engineer is going to yank that functionality out and something way over there is going to break without anybody realizing it broke.
Your mileage may vary. Some teams make the PRs detailed enough that they don't have to fall back on jira. Other teams try to encode this information into unit tests (that helps but it's circular reasoning; the unit test will tell you that somebody at one point thought that this was important enough to verify that it keeps doing the thing; they won't tell you why the thing matters or what customer wanted the thing or whether the thing was the thing we did before we pivoted to doing the new thing cuz the old thing didn't make money).
It's called documentation. Somehow people forget to include a non-external service dependent version with their code these days.
Probably because "nobody is paid for doing that".
I see this as a kind of inspiration / perspiration thing, and I’m on Tesla’s side that you perspire less if you think more. I like to not do the thing for a really long time, and then do it quickly, having thought it through. I see some people that jump into things without thinking, and take what is imo the more difficult route, with worse results.
I know there are some things you need to start to really understand what’s going on, but as much as possible I’d rather mull over things a lot and gather information and clarify my thinking before doing the thing.
A: There's the right way, the wrong way, and THEN THE MAX POWER WAY!
B: Isn't that just the wrong way?
A: Yes! But faster!
Honestly sometimes that's the right way.
Sometimes "not doing the thing" is actually the most productive phase, especially when you're consciously incubating ideas or working through complexity in your head
I like to think this advice is aimed at things that can't be done by thinking them through and doing them, but that have to be started and done repeatedly to be successful.
I think the transition between things being done is maybe a bit more interesting.
"Build a house," is a thing, but at which point of the dreaming, designing, planning, permitting, architecting, financing, contracting, acquiring, installing, verifying, reworking, coordinating, inspecting, styling, unpacking, cleaning, landscaping, repairing, upgrading, and waiting, are you doing it?
Perhaps each discrete thing is itself a thing, and when you do a thing, or transition between things, is the matter needing clarifying.
If you are coordinating on how to do a thing, you are doing the thing, as long as the thing is coordinating on how to do the next thing. This "coordinating a thing" is a discrete thing we should not confuse for any other thing.
TFA's examples are unforgiving in that they suppose there is only ever one thing and all else should be nothing.
When are you rebuilding the Ship of Theseus?
I'm inspired by this and want to extend it, perhaps telescopically, by discussing what the thing is.
Sometimes we see our task as being, "do C," and we forget the "B" and "A" that come before.
Maybe you can't do "C" without discussing it ("B") or researching how others did it ("A"). In these cases, we shouldn't simply think the thing is "C"—the thing must first be "A," then "B," and then, "C."
If we forget this, we're bound to think "C" is the only thing of value, that it should take an hour and not a week, or that people doing the "A's" or "B's" to enable the "Cs" must be doing nothing at all!
It's easy to underestimate that groundwork because it's less flashy or quantifiable. But skipping it usually just means C turns out half-baked, or takes even longer in the end
You pay a doctor for a consultation. saying you paid the doctor for medical school and for the legacy of doctors that came before him is.... wrong.
It's not wrong, that's exactly what I'm paying them for. If they didn't have the education then they wouldn't be a doctor, and I wouldn't be seeing them for a consultation.
I'm well compensated not because I'm good at googling things, but because I have a proven track record of being good at googling things. If a junior was able to produce the same results they wouldnt be paid more.
Who's paying to school them at googling? Certainly not you...
If you pay a doctor, the thing you're doing is paying a doctor. Your "A" or "B" might be booking the appointment or figuring out how to send the payment. I'm not sure I follow.
If paying for medical school is not what youre doing why not just do your doctors appointment at Burger King?
$5 for adjusting the screw. $495 for knowing which screw to adjust.
Meaningless platitude. All the things mentioned (visualisation, scheduling, breaking into smaller tasks, etc.) are proven to work. If you cannot do a task but you do the above things, you will eventually be able to do the task. You know what isn't proven to work? Willing your brain to "just do it" like this article implies.
Agreed. But there’s still a type of Zeno’s paradox if you don’t start and continue and finish the thing. As someone that has no trouble planning or starting but a lot of trouble continuing to the end, I find this kind of stuff helpful to completing what I set out to do.
As Jobs said “real artists ship.”
They're easy to get stuck in instead of taking action. It's calling out the trap where we mistake prep for progress
Half the struggle is that all the meta actions around doing the thing create a kind of synthetic realness. It feels like progress, but it’s just noise. When the Reality Drift Equation tilts toward excess entropy, your brain mistakes preparation loops for actual work and you end up in identity drift instead of momentum. The only way out is collapsing the loop by acting, not optimizing the wrapper around the action.
Yeah sure. The tricky part is if you even know which action to take. To actually do that you need to research enough, conceptualize the end goal and envison a rough but workable plan.
Most people don't and blindly stumble going after short term to mid term reward. Then later life crashes them hard, except for the lucky few.
And the truth is, now some people have many more luck coupons to spend than others.
I wonder what thing the author was avoiding when they published this thing ;)
IIRC, the author said somewhere that this essay was effectively a “note to self”.
did they tweet about doing the thing while not doing the thing?
Maybe his thing was “write an article about things that aren’t doing the thing”. :)
yep hev forgot to add "riding this blog post" to the list
I have a print out of this on my wall. I also have pretty bad ADHD. It's been on my wall a year and I still haven't done the thing (really a series of small aversive, timeliness and administration heavy things). I oscillate between trying to do the thing, and trying to treat ADHD or at least not regress (sleep (difficult), exercise, nutrition, intoxicants socially only, stay away from digital dopamine sinks (really hard)). Then I have a burst of panic that trying to improve executive function is itself not doing the thing.
Struggle is real. Don't take too seriously the ones who incapable to relate.
Marketing is absolutely doing the thing; ignore this to your peril. I don't think reality is quite as binary as this post suggests.
But that would be doing the thing after you’ve done the thing no?
I think you really want to be marketing concurrently with doing the thing. Saving it all for the end is probably a mistake. And a lot of projects don't have defined "end"s, like open source projects, or websites.
Marketing can also lead to you receiving feedback for what the users actually want. Doing the thing does not imply doing the right thing. You can be super productive building the wrong thing that no one wants.
That depends. If OP’s job is marketing then doing it before is doing the thing even if it pisses off the people who’ll have to do the thing OP made up.
Movie trailers come out before production is finished. In fact sometimes before production has even meaningfully started.
Sometimes not doing the ‘thing’ (in the sense of not jumping into a goal or project) is actually a deliberate, healthy choice — resting, recharging, being in a better mental/physical state. That’s not laziness or procrastination; it’s recovery or self-care.
For me, sometimes encouragement that what I'm doing is in support of Doing the Thing has helped me not feel so discouraged that I actually just give up on Doing the Thing altogether. Other times it has felt like a cheap excuse that allows me to delay. I'm not sure the function of all the ancillary activities, relative to Doing the Thing, is actually fixed.
This hits hard, not in my programming work which it also hits but there at least I am sharpening my toolset by reading books, and learning things. This hits the hardest for me training Jiu Jitsu, where I do love the sport but I feel it's so hard to come back to training when I am in such a bad shape. So I say to people that I do Jiu Jitsu, I watch videos, I follow some competitions. Heck I even go with my kids to THEIR training but I only train myself once a month maybe at this rate.
At the core, doing is paramount.
But doing the wrong thing, poorly, is also not doing the thing. To avoid that, you need to do some of the things that the post mentions.
That concludes my morning dose of Zen.
There is an extreme where you procrastinate on the real work, yes. But half the things on the list are not procrastination, but preparation. If you skip those you hit the other extreme where you are so focused on doing the thing, you waste your time because you don't know the background or context.
> Reading this essay isn't doing the thing.
Writing “$thing isn't doing the thing” 13 times isn’t writing an essay.
That aside, I thought this was going to be about products that fail to fulfill their advertised purpose.
LinkedIn is over there.
So obnoxious. More bullshit to make us self-conscious.
If you have no idea how to do the thing, isn't reading about how others did the thing doing the thing?
This hints at the antithesis to this article
Doing a thing involves doing it, but it's very unlikely that doing a thing will involve exactly one atomic movement. So you have cutpoints at doing the thing.
So to do the thing you first have to decide to do the thing. You have to decide what the thing is, or at least have enough of a vision of the thing to take the first step at doing a thing that might look like the thing.
So "doing the thing" involves a lot of doing things that aren't the thing, but without which you won't get towards the thing.
In other words: sitting down and writing down what the thing is _can very well_ be part of doing the thing.
There's a sort of philosophical point too, about whether the thing is what you think it is. Plenty of people have had the "I thought this feature was going to do X, you thought it was going to do Y, and we all realised the mismatch very late in the process".
I think both visions of the world are valid, and things you can keep in your mind at the same time to deploy as needed.
"Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be entreated not to hit the nail at all." -- Nietzsche
Or you could try and learn by experience. Software is an example, but so could be drawing or composing music. All of those things have been taken to extreme highs by people who had no idea what they were doing.
Naivety has its perks.
No, you’ll still need to do it.
Yes just do it without knowing how to do it! That always works out well.
In software, where the consequences for initial failure are extremely minimal, sometimes it does actually work well.
But learning about, while possibly a prerequisite, still isn’t getting it done.
The point is: don’t stop at learning how to do the thing.
Actually do the thing.
So skip medical school and grab a scalpel and cut out brain tumours?
I don’t believe I ever said “don’t learn how to do the thing”.
But many learn how to do the thing, and still never do it.
Then it isn't a thing you can do.
Becoming someone who can do the thing is how you get to do a lot of things
Not what your boss and your bosses’ boss wants you to do, instead of doing other things you can do to maximize value for shareholders in some arbitrarily chosen amount of time
But thinking of how you wouldn’t have permission to get ready to do the thing in a business context, also, isn’t doing the thing
Ironically, sometimes the only thing that will get you doing the thing is explicitly not doing the thing (but also no other thing either), until there's nothing to do but the thing.
It's amazing how many people utterly missed the point. I think the first 6 or so top comments just totally wiffed it.
There is nothing wrong with planning/scheduling/marketing/whatever. But a LOT of people use all that as excuses and never actually do the thing.
If you are the kind of person for whom which those are useful, great. Or if you have the self-displine/self awareness to do all that stuff and still follow through, great. But some people just need to do the fucking thing or they never will.
Source: I'm one of those people.
I was just reading about Ron Jeffries' disastrous attempts to write a Sudoku program because he dogmatically refused to do any preparatory work--including spending any time at all thinking about the nature of the problem and what sorts of data structures would be suitable for solving it.
As I see it he was doing exactly the opposite: prep work in terms of doing the tests.
Is asking an AI to do the think doing the thing ?
I agree with most of this but not the todo list part. I think more successful projects tend to have upfront planning and consider it a real part of the work. Even more successful projects will continue to revisit and update their plan as the project is ongoing.
As I like to put it: not having a plan is not a plan.
It doesn't matter how fast you are moving if you are going in the wrong direction.
Nonetheless, these are good points.
Well, if you learn something along the way that teaches you what the right direction is, then you still made progress.
Unless you wasted years by going in the wrong direction which could have been avoided by a week of serious thinking and planning... (Or even a year. Some mistakes are extremely costly.)
Having a meeting about doing the thing isn’t doing the thing
I find this applies pretty well to creative work, at least from a general mindset perspective and helps those of us who are prone to procrastinating.
It also goes hand in hand with the Cult Of Done Manifesto really well: https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2f...
> “If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it”
These people defo do not have kids…
Go have some kids, then lecture me about how to get things done.
Less drastic alternative: start a small kitchen garden growing some salad and herbs. Same result.
>Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.
To be fair, for me, not making the list is even less like doing the thing, in terms of how frequently it leads to the thing being done!
I had this Ah-Ha moment a while back when I was presenting on how to shorten cloud outage times, by aggregating impact into a list of details, and hustling around to make connections to support engineers and their customers and the poor backend engineers running around trying to make sense of it all. Putting a little bit of structure to it, so other people can realize they can make a difference in a large organization.
I had a colleague make a passive aggressive comment about it being really cool how I put together "obvious" stuff. Well, it is obvious. At the same time, I have never seen him do this "obvious thing".
Doing the thing is being a performer. Making the thing happen somehow is called leadership. It's all about doing the thing, and not just seeing and understanding the thing - that's the easy part.
I’m missing one: Scheduling a weekly status meeting about the thing is not doing the thing.
Sometimes doing the thing is just doing a thing and then you get done with some milestone on the thing, you're like "why am I doing this thing. am I crazy for undertaking this thing?"
And yeah you probably are. Only in retrospect will it be knowable if it was worth it or not. Perseverance is necessary but rarely sufficient.
In other words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXsQAXx_ao0
> Reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing
In my book, doing research/understanding the domain is a crucial part of "doing the thing". Often reading about how to do the thing makes you reconsider doing it at all.
I also think this is true, but one thing distinguishes the two and that is commitment. Resarch opens up new possibilities while doing the thing narrows them. Many people (myself included) have difficulties with that. Reading will only get you so far and I think that is what the poem adresses.
That text is describing my life since 10 years or so. I am in my 30s and lost the capability to do the thing, _any_ thing, with the exception of going out with friends/family/my partner to do social activities. Everything else is literally impossible for me to do.
I’m currently kicking off my second attempt to fix this by talking to a psychologist about it. But I am not very hopeful. Still searching for the root cause. I have all the ground works set to having a good life, except that I am incapable of moving to start that damn thing.
Where is my interest in stuff gone? Why do I prefer my couch over just typing "git clone" and play with some new tech? Why is my 3D printer sitting dusty in the corner even though I was one of the first adopters? Why is the act of hand-craft wood working, that I am dreaming of since forever and would now be able to do, impossible for me to start?
My motivation is high. My brain thinks whole projects through. I start fixing things in my head. But I am not even capable of dumping all that planning into an speech-to-text-LLM to build an actual design document out of it.
It feels like I played everything through already, so no point in starting that thing.
What the fuck is my problem?
At the risk of making unqualified self-diagnoses, the phrase that always comes to my mind is "anticipatory anhedonia": On some level I do not expect the thing will actually be that fun, and I'm not filled with bubbly joy now about how awesome it'll be when it happens tomorrow.
I may have fun during the thing, but beforehand it's mostly trying to plan for what might go wrong, and afterwards it fades to the satisfaction of checking something off of a list.
https://www.britannica.com/science/anhedonia
Thanks, will read about this!
You probably lost the “finish” muscle. That happens when you lack wins for a long time.
Best way to to train yourself to win again. Start, finish, and celebrate a 1h task. Then half day. etc
That is probably one of the causes. I don’t feel comfortable to put in effort into any _thing_. I probably unlearned that.
Finishing small things like cleaning dishes is no problem for me. It gives some sort of gratitude, but most likely not what bigger tasks would give.
Are you burned out at your job maybe?
I definitely lack motivation to do anything at my job, but it’s the same will all private/hobby stuff. IT is probably not it for me anymore, however I have that job situation under control. I wish I could do something else though (not IT at all), but that also requires me to start that thing (and take some risk).
Sounds like you'd benefit from working with a therapist, i.e. someone specifically trained in understand these kind of problems and guiding you through them.
Not doing the thing is a habit that's hard to break. Doing the thing is a powerful habit. Especially when you stop thinking about it.
One day, when I get enough spare time, I will make the thing. I even have some components ready.
Until then I daydream of how I will make it and how it will fit together.
If I never get round to it then that time will have been wasted. But if I do, all that daydreaming will have been useful mental prototyping.
But was it «doing the thing»?
Corollary: Doing the thing and not talking about it in a hammer tweet is also 'not doing the thing'.
It's wild how easy it is to get trapped in the performance of productivity
To be fair though, for any cool thing I've done, before actually doing the thing, I've also spent time doing the things that TFA says aren't doing the thing.
Helps me get pumped up or whatever
Doing the thing that nobody wants is doing the thing.
I'm trying to do the thing, but the thing is horribly documented and doesn't work. And nobody seems to know why. So am I still doing the thing if the thing isn't doing its thing?
Then the thing becomes :
Understand how to do the thing
Do the thing
Write down fresh documentation about the thing
1st line: >Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
i'm pretty sure there is a "oh no!" comics (https://webcomicname.com/) saying the same but i couldn't find it
https://webcomicname.com/post/183722270609
thank you!
Writing about what things aren't doing the thing is not doing the thing.
The thing about that kind of writing is that the thing is a uniquely characterizable thing that is distinguishable from other things that are not the thing, thereby enabling the realization of the thing to be a thing, rather than not a thing.
Did I just get trolled on HN? Reading the thing wasn't doing anything.
Writing a thing about things that aren't doing the thing isn't doing the thing unless the thing happens to be writing a thing about things that aren't doing the thing
Writing a comment about a thing that talks about things that aren't doing the thing isn't doing the thing unless the thing happens to be writing a comment about a thing that talks about things that aren't doing the thing
Writing a Python program to write N deep nested sentences on how writing a comment about a comment about a .... (N times) comment is not doing the thing is not doing the thing.
What about reading about the thing which is about reading a thing is then the thing of doing the thing.
damn i was really excited to read about how my toaster wasnt actually intended for toasting bread or something like that
Doing the thing without preparing to do the thing is, depending on your exact definitions, either unwise or impossible.
This gives very strong War of Art (Pressfield) vibes.
As simple as it is, just remembering this is enough to make me go do the thing.
And on that note, back to the thing.
Didn't that roughly end with "dying of cancer isn't doing the thing"?
I distinctly recall it becoming a bit extreme in the last chapter(s).
> Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.
Don’t agree. Planning steps is part of doing the thing.
I was thinking the same, but at the end of the day the author has a point and it's not doing the thing.
If doing the thing without preparation would have taken 50hrs, and sitting down to plan cuts that down to 20hrs, I'd argue that planning did "get a chunk of the thing done".
Super reductionist, is the moment between clicks on the keyboard also not doing the thing?
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
For someone without ADHD's `executive disfunction`, one of the code ADHD struggles, this post reads as nonsense. Thus only minority could relate to the post: the ones who have ADHD ones who think they understand ADHD.
I've got ADHD and Preparing to do the thing, Scheduling time to do the thing and Making a to-do list for the thing are actually what enable me to Do The Thing in the first place.
If you're gonna build a house, building scaffolding is not a waste of time.
Problem with this approach is someone who follows it will find themselves doing something totally useless almost all of the time. "Just doing the thing" means that usually you are merely doing a hobby - most of the time, being unaware of that, believing you were building a business.
I am replying to this post without planning whst to actually say
If you work with a bunch of people who “just do things” you very well may wish to spend a lot more time “thinking about things” before you do them. If those things are more complicated and nuanced than “doing the dishes” or “putting away the laundry”. Sure, in those cases, just do it.
I am sitting on the toilet right now, and while reading this article, I am really actually doing the thing.
Yes, holy shit yes.... This has been my sentiment for a while now. I see lots of people everywhere especially on social media talking about the thing and no one actually did the thing or is even attempting to do the thing. Honestly thats why i dont have youtube channels or write blogs or anything past casual posts here or reddit... i always think to myself why waste time talking about the thing when i could be doing it now... anyways ima go back to doing the thing. cheers. !
Granted the humorous intent, it's a reductionist outlook. If we were to embrace the premise, then life would be about spawning replacements, or, as is sometimes said, "A chicken is an egg's way to make another egg."
When expressed that way, I must differ. Reproduction per se is the least interesting part of human life. Talking about reproduction is much more interesting ... wait, I think that's called "literature."
I must add: discussing (or showing HN) To-Do apps or systems on how best organize yourself to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
Obligatory https://youtu.be/mofRHlO1E_A?si=aEimHOsDYa3FkGYv
-Nike
There's a Romanian proverb: Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.
Corollary: Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today, put off until the day after tomorrow, maybe by then it won't be necessary.
For skilled, innovative, and complex work, all the things he says is not doing the thing: are part of doing the thing.
This post is foolish and self-destructive.
If I trace backward from the ideas that earn me money and prestige today, every one of them is rooted in playful or apparently unproductive behavior.
It is certainly a truth that many people have a fear to cross the threshold of doing something for real. That fear is usually a fear of committing to a potentially substandard result or a fear of getting started on the meat of what feels like a herculean problem. In short it is the fear of failing.
As an university level educator that helps students with mostly technical projects (so stuff neither I nor them have ever done): This fear is very common. But what I dislike about this advice is that preparing the thing is often in fact a necessary step of (A) deciding whether the thing is feasible and worth doing and (B) a part of what is needed to do the thing. Drafting the general layout and data flow and UI for your software can save you hours later. Having a good and fleshed out concept for a game may tell you if it is even worth putting years of your own time into it, what resources you will need, a research essay on different ways to detect motion may e what makes or breaks the result of your interactive art installation etc.
So preparation is necessary, but true experience only comes from going beyond the preparation phase. Feel it is impossible to start? Usually that means there is something that you feel insecure with. E.g. your game might need an inventory system and while you have a great idea how it should look and work, you have no idea how to actually program it. And if that small part of your task looks impossible, it makes the whole task appear extra-impossible.
The best way to deal with this is usually tackling the problem head on and make it a proof of concept. The problem is you can't program that inventory, and there are many ways to go at that particular problem, but if you can get a draft inventory going that means your biggest worry is taken care of. That means dealing with the hard part first, even if you tell yourself it is just a proof of concept that won't land in the final thing is a good approach. Divide and conquer. The whole thing seems impossible? Break it down into smaller steps thst seem more managable.
See also: "brain crack" (2006) https://archive.org/details/zefrank-theshow-080
I see lots of comments focusing on cases where there is necessary research still to do.
Which I think misses the point - which is there are times when you’ve already done enough research, but you’re afraid to act so you procrastinate. i.e. not doing the thing.
If you haven't started doing the thing while researching it, you're doing archeology or historiography, not research. (Different scientific fields. Research requires experiment.)
And now we have a whole post about not doing the thing, which is also not doing the thing.
In order to determine if something is or is not "doing the thing" you must first know what "the thing" is. If it's writing your thoughts on your blog, then this is indeed doing the thing.
Not doing the thing would be: planning to write a blog post, tweeting that you're going to write a blog post, reading articles about how best to word your blog posts, watching some YouTube videos as inspiration, etc.
I think the advice here is an anti procrastination advice: do the thing, don't just think about doing the thing.
> Reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing. Reading about how other people did the thing isn't doing the thing."
> Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.
Clearly defining and understanding the thing or, as they say, understanding the problem is half the solution. Real life experiences totally crash the OP statements.
Y'all saying things like "but you still need prioritization and tracking, bro!" are not the target audience of this post.
Here's my take, in no particular order:
- Ignoring that all people are different does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Discovering what procrastination is (and still failing to name it or provide actual coping mechanisms) does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Failing to recognize elementary human behavior does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Utterly neglecting the act of double creation (first imagine, then create) does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Being energetic and with only a few tasks at hand and writing off everyone else as lazy does not make you an expert in human psychology
- Writing a post about human psychology does not make you an expert in human psychology
I would continue my list, but gotta go. To do... , you know.
Today I learned that I know what the thing is, not because I know what the thing is, but because I was informed that I know what the thing is, and that to know what the thing is merely requires to be informed that I know by any person willing to allege such possession of knowledge, thereby eliminating any effort on my part to know the thing and appropriating such effort imposed on other persons whom are able and willing to indicate to me that I know the thing.
All true, but worth noting that sometimes making that to-do list is the first step to doing the thing because picking the first item off the list and taking 10 minutes to do it is doing the thing. If you aren't doing the thing because it's a monolith in your brain that is going to consume the next 6 months of your life and you're paralyzed by its enormity, salami slicing 10 minute chunks off the front of it can be a good way to get started.
Amen.
Now, let’s dream of doing some things!
ok
Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Advice from my Grandpap before he died (must read!)
What's the thing? If we're being shitty about systems neurodivergent people use to get their laundry done, stop. If you're complaining about the overhead it takes to manage a project with 10,000+ people, yeah no. If there are 2 ICs, 4 managers, a TPM, a PM, a other "P" PM, a UX person, an HR person and a lawyer, yeah you might have a point.