
Stop trying to make hard work easy - feross
https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/stop-trying-to-make-hard-work-easy
======
Someone1234
Long but the meat is missing.

The most important subsection is "Most moments of distraction are caused by
internal triggers." But that section lacks anything approaching concrete
advice. It just repeats already written ideas then offers this:

> So if you want to deal with distraction the first thing you have to do is
> deal with the negative emotional triggers that lead to it.

The next section, regardless of the title, is about routines rather than
internal-emotional triggers and is primarily an anecdote about their writing
with no larger take-aways.

I think it is an article with good ideas, going down the right road, but never
quite reaches a useful destination. Too bad.

~~~
runawaybottle
Sometimes one of the triggers _is_ that it’s hard, and if it’s a hard thing
you have to regularly do, you _should_ be looking to find a way to do it
easier.

Otherwise it becomes a suck-it-up-and-just-do-it strategy, which is a fine
when used reasonably, but it too can be exhausted as a strategy.

But anyway, all of our tools and progress flys in the face of the author’s
suggestion. We are at this point in society because we put a lot of thought
into not having to work hard.

The irony of working hard to not work hard.

~~~
cseleborg
I think it's worth distinguishing between hard work (working long hours), rote
work (doing lots of menial work) and challenging work (important work that
requires attention/concentration).

I agree with you that rote work should be minimized with better tools and
processes. I can delegate the bookkeeping for example.

Hard work seems like a matter of culture. There might be the expectation from
your organisation, family, community etc. that working long hours is the only
right way of working. But I don't think that's what the author is addresssing
here.

So that leaves challenging work, like writing, marketing, cold-calling, etc. I
should be cold-calling much more for example, but I've become quite proficient
in finding excuses not to do it (one of them is that it's illegal here in
Germany for my product in many cases). I certainly see the author's point
about avoiding the discomfort for these types of activities.

~~~
kd5bjo
Sometimes completely eliminating rote work is a mistake. If there’s a lot of
challenging work to be done, doing some rote work can be used to rest some
while still staying basically on-task and minimizing context-switching costs.

------
troughway
Can we get a "request title change" button similar to "flag"? A significant
number of articles get to the front page due to a flashy title and are a
complete bait-and-switch when you read the actual content.

------
csours
Distractions are definitely caused by internal triggers and sometimes there is
no perfect way to deal with them.

I'm adding features to an existing service, and it causes me emotional
distress, because there are 3 layers of legacy code next to the stuff I'm
adding. I so want to go hog wild and rip up the old stuff. The only problem
being, we're short on time and devs right now, so I have to add these
strategic features.

Here's how I deal with it: Chunk up the work, and think of the next small
piece I can accomplish. Get started on something, and leave the last easy
piece sitting there while I take a break. When I come back and finish that
chunk I have a positive reward feeling for finishing a chunk of code. Then I
feel more like starting the next piece.

~~~
loquor
How do you establish a no-tech-distractions policy?

I can relate to your experience. However, I struggle with keeping digital
entertainment away from me. On good days, I keep away from entertainment until
I'm done with work. On unproductive days, I start one thing piece of
entertainment and collapse through a series of distractions. It's like, I
start with Instagram, find myself on reddit, then on Youtube, then on Netflix,
then on porn. I have this problem of the dopamine train which I unwillingly
get on. Can you offer some advice?

~~~
csours
Honestly I don't, and I know it slows me down.

I think it's important to have something to return to after your break. It's
also important to feel like you are making progress.

If you can think of your breaks as breaks, that may help. It is important to
recognize and deal with the emotions that are keeping you away from work. The
time away from work/code/whatever is not the problem.

But really, this is the key problem of my digital worklife. I used to work
construction and I was able to stay on task all day. For a long time I thought
I was able to do that because I was away from distractions; and that is
definitely part of it. But another part is the fact that software development
is creative work and technical in a league almost by itself.

You have to be creative, but you also have to be correct. It's hard to be both
at the same time. Maybe if you split your time between being creative and
correct it could help?

Sorry I can't help more.

------
pmiller2
This has already been posted 5 other times in the past week:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=stop%20trying%20to%20make%20hard%20work%20easy&sort=byDate&type=story)

~~~
fastball
Reposting is not against the HN guidelines.

The is the first time I have seen it.

~~~
pmiller2
Never said it was. But, I'm not interested in seeing the same thing 6 times,
either.

------
FrankyHollywood
"In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on
the TEX project is that software is hard. It's harder than anything else I've
ever had to do."

Donald Knuth

------
gitgud
The title _" Stop trying to make hard work easy"_ resonates with me. And is
closely related to [1] Yak Shaving and [2] Premature Optimisation.

What I always seem to forget is that; Making the hard work easy has
diminishing returns.

For example; If I spend 10 hours making a website deployable in 1 click, how
many websites do I have to deploy before it's worth doing?

Of course it depends, but usually it's important to work on the problem that
matters, not the _meta_ problem.

[1]
[https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving)

[2]
[https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization](https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization)

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _For example; If I spend 10 hours making a website deployable in 1 click,
> how many websites do I have to deploy before it 's worth doing?_

How many times do you need to deploy a website? At certain stages of
development, probably many times a day. Automating it would not only pay for
itself in few days, it also enables CI/CD and a whole new category of tests to
be run.

------
austincheney
I wish technical people would stop using the words _hard_ and _easy_. In
general use when developers use the word easy is it supposed to mean simple,
convenient, done by somebody else, low timeframe, fewer steps, less research,
faster learning, something else, or all of the above?

~~~
granshaw
Even more, the words “bad” and “good”. Yes we should be using the words
“simpler”, “more maintainable”, “more approachable for newcomers” etc and
their opposites.

Engineering is all tradeoffs- let’s be precise on our adjectives unless we’re
talking about things that are like 95% of the time a bad idea (eg goto
statements?)

------
emptysongglass
I don't buy any of his arguments other than pointing out the obvious:
distractions are caused by internal triggers. We've known that attention
deficit disorders have been caused by emotional disregulation for a long time
and you don't even need to look at the studies to figure it out: just sit your
butt down and look at the chaos of your own self bloom, AKA meditate.

I also don't buy into the title's command to stop trying to make hard work
easy. Apart from reproduction, that's literally what organisms are wired to
do: make biologically demanding processes less demanding so we can free up
more energy so we can have more babies.

This is a new person reiterating old ideas in a broken way.

Work becomes hard when you allow yourself to become an agent of your own
negative internal triggers. It's not hard if you possess the techniques to
judo it to the ground (see meditation).

------
toshk
I always feel a bit awkward reading about distraction when I'm distracting
myself :).

------
loopz
ITIL and anything related to providing support and services, is diametrically
opposed to the idea of blocking out and being unhelpful to other peoples'
progress. Support and being supportive, even assisting with organizing
workflows, is work too.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
Completely agree.

But I remember a funny quote, once: "Laziness is the mother of invention."

I'm big on Personal Integrity, Habit, and Personal Challenge.

1) I Have Integrity.

This means that I have a "personal code." There's things that I will do, every
time, and things that I won't do, ever. There's conscious, considered postures
on various aspects of life, accompanied by rigorous self-inventory, and
immediate correction/amends when I stray from beam.

I often think about _why_ I do something, as well as _how_ I do it. I'm
constantly applying my Integrity Lens on what I do.

It's also important that I apply this lens _only to myself_. Life gets fairly
miserable, if I am constantly measuring everyone else with my lens. There was
an episode of "The Adventures of Pete and Pete," where they encountered
"Inspector 34."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyEzVEvQYEc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyEzVEvQYEc)

2) I Establish good habits.

 _" We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a
habit."_ -Aristotle

I cannot stress enough how important habit is to everything I do.

My GitHub ID is solid green. I'm coding many, many hours a day.

I want to be a good coder, so I code. There's no substitute.

Ever watch a really good musician at work? Watch their hands, as they do it?
They have a relaxed, casual demeanor, as they play a cheap, beat-up old
Univox, and we say to ourselves "That's so easy! I could do it!"

Then we run out, buy a PRS guitar and a top-shelf amp, and sound like a couple
of cats... _" having fun."_

That musician spends several hours a day, practicing the most boring stuff
imaginable. I have a friend that picks up his guitar, every chance he gets,
and just runs through scales, constantly. It's completely automatic and
without any thought.

Also, a bit maddening...

3) I Challenge Myself

I try to always be "biting off more than I can chew." If I habitually work on
stuff that makes me sweat and worry, then the basics are almost thoughtless.
Works like a charm.

I write about that here: [https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-
ships-are-...](https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-
built-for-595f4ae2c284)

TL;DR

None of those three things are unique to me. They are _patterns_ , not
inventions. I hang around a lot of folks that are always doing them, and we
seem to be a fairly happy bunch.

I think that a lot of the reasons for "making hard work easy" is a sincere
effort to "commoditize" experience. Corporations, especially in the Software
Development industry, are _obsessed_ with hiring cheap, inexperienced
engineers (often, quite brilliant, but inexperienced), and expecting them to
have output like experienced, top-shelf developers that have been doing the 3
things I mentioned above for decades.

Also, there's what I call a "cargo cult" mentality, where we think that if we
dress the part, and learn the lingo, it will somehow make us what we want to
be.

It makes sense, when we think about it, but never seems to actually work.

In my experience, there's no substitute for Integrity, Habit and Challenge.

 _" There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible
and wrong."_ -H. L. Mencken

 _" Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There
is an almost universal quest for half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some
people more than having to think."_ -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

------
emps-new-groove
Found this to be insightful. Maybe everyone is too use to being spoon fed a
habit or quick trick. Which is the point of the message.

You need to find your own method as you better understand the problem. Ie.,
stop trying to make hard things easy...

~~~
kordlessagain
I suppose y'all pumping this story are aware this concept was already started
by someone else? Which probably makes sense, given the pre-loading of key
terms "stp tring mae har eas" in this new user's post.

[https://medium.com/swlh/stop-trying-to-make-everything-
easy-...](https://medium.com/swlh/stop-trying-to-make-everything-
easy-7da16b6934fa)

------
jpswade
Who is the target audience here? This is probably all very well, when your
primary role is an author.

However, the sections on dealing with external triggers and pacts are pretty
practical advice in the current climate.

~~~
galoisgirl
I like that the actor isn't pretending to have a silver bullet.

This works for him for writing, you see what applies for your field of work.

------
cosmodisk
I disagree with the author. Yes,there are some things out there that are very
difficult and people don't try to pretend they are not(e.g. quantum physics,
biochemistry,etc.). However,very often,it's the middle part between you and
the subject. For instance a poorly written book can make any subject
challenging.A poor teacher can make even elementary things hard to grasp. Poor
communication can lead to situations where nobody would have a clue anymore
and etc.And the worst part, especially in our so beloved tech industry,is that
quite often the loudest voices are exactly the ones that should be kept quiet
at all costs to make things less difficult.

------
ubermonkey
Honestly, this headline seems so transparently clickbaity ("Whaaat? that's
exactly what I want to do!") that I didn't click it.

------
crimsonalucard
>“Well, I have news for you: some things are just hard. There’s no way of
getting around it.”

If you think this, but I have a way to make something 10x easier that you
can't or don't know how to do then I can sell my idea to you as a service for
a monthly subscription fee.

