

Ask YC: How do you maintain motivation in face of boredom? - shabda

I left my job around 3 months ago to start a startup (Single founder). Built staging.dashbard.com , www.42topics.com . Now I need to market www.42topics.com , but 3 months working alone has left me bored out of my mind! I  am reasonably social (Well for a geek!), but working alone is just getting on my nerves! And as long as I was coding, I was happy. But now i find marketing this unsatisfying and boring. Did I say boring enough times? What do I do?
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tom_rath
I find it helps to remember that if I don't do the boring stuff my company is
going to fail, I'll be working for someone else again and the only reason for
failure will be that I was too bored to do the work that was essential for
success (which is a really lame excuse).

If you can't focus today, get outside for a bit and stretch your legs. Watch
the pretty people in the park. Get a coffee, sit on a sunny patio and revel in
the fact that you're an entrepreneur driving your own destiny and can take a
goddamn afternoon off if you need it.

Then, when you're recharged, return to your office and get back to it, because
that work isn't going to finish itself.

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michael_dorfman
Try to think more carefully about why it is boring. Examine the boringness.
What's boring about it? What is there within you that is unable to connect
with it? Don't worry about blame, or being judgmental-- just try to figure out
what's really going on beneath the surface. If you do so, the answer to your
problem will be apparent.

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girk
Have you heard about coworking?

To learn more about coworking, check out this article:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/business/businessspecial2/...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/business/businessspecial2/20cowork.html?ex=1204174800&en=c575d28423557c14&ei=5070&emc=eta1)

If you're interested in the concept, find a Jelly near you:
<http://workatjelly.com/>

You can also read more at the coworking wiki: <http://coworking.pbwiki.com/>

I think you should go to a Jelly. Seems like it would an especially effective
way to alleviate "boredom" you are experiencing, which may not be stemming
from the work you're doing, but rather just the lack of social interaction as
a result of working very hard by yourself for an extended period of time. At a
Jelly, you are working "by yourself," but amongst others.

Also, if it really is the marketing-type work that you find unsatisfying and
boring, going to a Jelly will possibly help you find a
cofounder/designer/marketing-type person with which to team up.

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blender
Highly suggest you find someone that likes marketing:

kluster.com cambrianhouse.com

You should be prepared to give equity in return for services.

Cheers

~~~
aaronblohowiak
outsource boredom!

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epi0Bauqu
I know what you mean. I am a single founder for half of my projects, and for
the other half I'm the sole coder in a virtual office. In both cases, the
situation is the same: I'm coding by myself in my house.

One solution I've found for the boredom is to switch between projects when you
get bored, or work on different (non-boring) aspects of the same project.

Another is to just get out of the house. I usually go out for lunch. And I've
been trying to go to local startup events, including a monthly hackathon I
created for that very purpose.

A third is of course to get a face to face co-founder (at least for some of
the time), or to move your working environment to a shared space with other
startups. I haven't taken the latter step mainly because I live pretty far
from startup central in Philly and I don't want to pay for office space.

~~~
randallsquared
I haven't found a solution to boredom. That said, as someone who's been
programming at home for years, knowing that I was going to go out at lunch
would destroy much of the benefit of working at home. In order to start work
in earnest, it's important for me to feel that I won't have any interruptions
indefinitely.

Today, for example, I'm expecting to go to _dinner_ , and here it is before
2pm, and I'm reading news.yc instead of working, because it's really hard to
start working when "I know I'll just have to stop", in spite of also knowing
that I could get a lot done before then.

Nevermind, I guess this is just a personal failing. :)

~~~
epi0Bauqu
It's probably more like my personal failing :)

I work great for a few hours at a time, but then I need an extended break. My
best hours are in the morning. So I usually work from around 8am to
11:30-noon, and then go out to lunch. Granted, sometimes I don't do that and
work through lunch at home and go out to dinner instead. But often, I need a
break about then.

I usually read the papers (WSJ and local) during lunch, and then when I come
home I'm up for a few more hours of work before dinner.

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edw519
Your boredom is a signal from within that something is fundamentally wrong. I
would find out the cause of the boredom rather than work on the effect(s).

You've done all this great work and now it's time to share it. (Don't even use
the word "market". It's so overused, it's meaningless.) You should be having a
ball doing that. Why not?

Have you lost passion about your "mission"? If so, why?

Is there something wrong with your site that makes you reluctant to promote
it? Then maybe you should fix that.

Is this a startup or a hobby? If it's a hobby, then forget about "marketing";
just move on to the next one.

Would you be more comfortable on a team? If so, then work on that.

This is simply another puzzle to be solved, but instead of data and
algorithms, it's people and ideas. Hope to soon be hearing about how you
solved it. Good luck.

~~~
apu
I wouldn't agree with your first statement. In any job, no matter how
enjoyable or rewarding overall, there are elements which are more interesting
and others that are less so.

In my job, the ratio of fun stuff to non-fun stuff is quite high, but still
finite -- there's still a fair amount of boring stuff I need to work on
periodically. I find that one technique which works well is to try to pipeline
my work (if possible) such that I can work on multiple aspects of it
simultaneously. Then I can devote a few hours per day (or days per week) on
the boring stuff, with the thought of working on the exciting stuff
immediately afterwards as a strong motivator.

BTW if anyone finds a job that's uniformly exciting/fun throughout with no
boring parts, let me know =)

~~~
edw519
"In any job", "In my job", "if anyone finds a job"

Notice a pattern?

You're right, most jobs can have boring elements.

I assumed that OP was talking about his startup, not his job.

I am building a startup that, by definition, is what I want it to be. I can't
imagine anything about it being "boring".

~~~
alex_c
_I am building a startup that, by definition, is what I want it to be. I can't
imagine anything about it being "boring"._

This kind of, for lack of a better term, blind optimism, is one thing that
gets to me after a while on News.YC, and I'm a pretty positive guy to start
with.

I simply cannot believe that every single last aspect of your start-up is
enjoyable to you. Either you have someone else doing the parts you find
boring, or you steer around the boring parts (possibly to the detriment of
your start-up), or you're convincing yourself that you don't find them boring.

I've spent the last week and a bit doing some work which is at best mind-
numbingly boring, but which might be essential to our success. I will
definitely be happy with the results, but that doesn't mean I wasn't bored out
of my mind and whining about it the entire time; it just means I want to get
it done faster so I can go back to something fun.

There's nothing WRONG with finding certain aspects of the work boring, and I
think that's a dangerous signal to send. The boring parts have to be done too.
What happened to "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent
perspiration"?

~~~
edw519
Maybe "boring" is not the best word. Maybe we are really talking about "more
fun" vs. "less fun".

Naturally, some things are more fun that others, but I am never bored in my
startup.

Frustrated sometimes, yes. This week I lost a whole day because I had
overlooked something simple one day last week. Had to retool the whole stupid
thing when I really wanted to build the next level up. So the exciting part
had to wait a day. No big deal. It happens. But was I ever "bored"? Hardly.

A little background. I sat in class bored to tears for 17 years. Then, I did
work in 86 other companies (none of them mine) before I started this one. I
have a clear vision of what I want and a fairly clear idea of how things
should work. I love both the technical details and the people part. Usually, I
can't wait to get to the next thing.

The only thing I really don't like is when a client calls for me to fix
something on their crappy system. Shifting gears sucks.

Boring? No, I just don't see it.

~~~
alex_c
Maybe we can find some common ground in the word "tedious" rather than
"boring". Boring does have the connotation of waiting for class to end or
waiting for 5PM to go home.

~~~
edw519
Agreed

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Tichy
I need marketing for my astrological moon calendar, too. In fact, I have not
updated it for months. But maybe if somebody else became interested...

While I was at it, it was lurking around page 3 or 4 in Google searches. Now
it is not even among the first 10 pages anymore :-(

Lesson: only take on projects that I can really identify with (astrology
doesn't fall into that category...).

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babul
Find someone to join you who loves doing that e.g. with marketing
experience/degree and passion for online marketing i.e. who is into SEO, SEM,
AdWord marketing, affiliate linking/campaigns, article publishing campaigns
etc. etc.

So you can do what you love, they can do what they love, and you should both
be moving in the same direction to achieve success at an optimal pace for you.

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epi0Bauqu
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121175>

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wenbert
I have been developing my product for a few months now. It is starting to get
boring - a bit. Usually I have to push myself and find some motivation. That
is why I decided to rent a room with my hacker friend and designer cousin. We
are setting things up as I type this comment :P Perfect mix... ^_^

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jdavid
a thought:

why are you ok coding alone, but with marketing you feel like you need someone
around?

i wonder if it has anything to do with confidence? when i am doing something i
know. being alone is fun, because i feel productive. when i am doing something
where, i might have at least a moderate amount of learning to do, i like to
bounce the ideas off of someone. i also find that doing things like:

 _writing business plans

_ graphic design

 _marketing

_ etc.. other socially reflective processes

I find its really hard to do it alone, I usually need people to bounce the
idea off of. I also, find that customers are great at playing this role for
marketing. They know what they want, and why they would like your service.
They have given me plenty of ideas in this realm.

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gcheong
Is it your idea of what "marketing" is that turns you off? If so, I suggest
you take a look at Bob Walsh's eBook "MicroISV Sites That Sell" at 47hats.com.
It's a book aimed at developers who need to market their work, but don't
consider themselves marketers.

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wheels
Sometimes you can work out trades. Do you know anyone that works in marketing
that could use some web work done? (I've done this before with programming in
exchange for graphic design.)

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babul
Find a co-founder to bounce material off and interact with. Ideally, you will
motivate each other!

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giles_bowkett
I think this is probably why YC looks for co-founders.

Personally I handle boredom by doing something else. This works incredibly
well for programming and incredibly badly for interacting with the government.
To be more specific, if something is boring, I won't do it, so if you're the
government, and I haven't been paying my parking tickets, your only option is
to make paying my parking tickets more interesting. In practice this has meant
stealing my car.

It's actually very unwise to create incentives for the government to make your
life more interesting. The only leverage they have there is various forms of
bullying.

I now motivate myself with fear as well as curiousity, but unfortunately,
curiousity remains much more effective.

