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[darkhog]

I've hit a wall. Not programming challenge, not boredom of a project which I want to finish. I perfectly know what I want to do, how I will achieve this and even tinkered all implementation details. But I can't just get to it. I feel lazy.

How can I snap out of it???

[Conker534]

Just do it

[zovirl]

Hard to say without more info...


When this happens to me, it usually means one of:

• I don't really know what I want, and the laziness is a response to the indecision.
• I haven't thought hard enough about the details. Asking "What is the smallest thing I could work on to move forward?" sometimes helps.
• Not enough sleep.
• Not enough exercise.
• Too much stress (maybe not from the game, but from somewhere else).

[Barch]

The Barch's Guide to Getting Shit done

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Let me start by saying that it is good that you addressed your problem - most of us never do such things letting ourselfs dilute our passions with drink and other nonsense. By asking the questions we seek out; Like the barch has done himself we blaze a trail of information to others. Other journeys to our own mind peaks allow others to do the same. Not that the barch has made his destination of course but he has learnt how to march. Now I lay 10 kilometres ahead of you. I have learnt the way to march in the progress of games devolopoment.

Now I have learnt two strides one I call the zen way - the other the diluted way; both lead the destination one pace is quicker then the other.

//Zen Method; the hard and faster way                       

Remove all programs that do not have anything to do with the game itself; Music videos get rid of your modems that connect you to the outside world. this is to prevent you from being distracted. I mean all - a reformat is useful with just you ; your means of tools and the game.

Take a deep breath and release your mind do not think; If you have the ability to program as one speaks, then it is possible to program without thinking. What man can speak well while he thinks beh no one. What not thinking while creating games does is to avoid the traps of "I want to watch tv" or other non gamedev facts and most importantly it beats the stupid thinking of I'm not motivated to work on this.

Oh speak great masters of the oblivion nothingless mind let your voice become a choir.


Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate. ― Zhuangzi



To be accepting of what you are doing; when you could be doing anything is easy. But when you try to do it - it becomes hard. Try to relax into it dont force it take it easy. Your fingers will find their place in your code just sit down relax dont think and code.

//Diluted Method; the easier to start and slower way                       

Get a youtube downloader; there is some good ones on firefox addddon page. Download a series of motivation videos + lectures on gamedevolopment - Eric thomas Elliot Hulse those guys I'm a big fan of. For Devolopers Jonathan blows pretty intearsting; will wrights another good one. Ted talks lots of things that intearst you.

While your creating simply let the playlist run - the act of just wanting to listen to the simple things should allow you to simply enjoy working with intearsting talk; Like my grandpa who created metal furniture with the cricket in the background -what joy he found in his boys paradise.

While I recommend the zen method - it is a burden to set up. Either way I hope you find your tao your way

[deWiTTERS]

The task you want to start is probably too big, so break it down in smaller steps. Then do the first step. If you still don't feel like doing the first step, break that down in smaller steps. Continue until you are able to do the first step, possibly "Move hand to mouse".

Let me know if this works for you. Getting started is the hardest part, after that first tiny step the rest should follow.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

it's hard to say without knowing more, but i'd suggest a good first start is exercise and diet. i find that most of people's "laziness" is actually lack of energy, in a physical sense: lack of metabolic energy to think and act. and that can be fixed through improving diet and exercise and other stuff like posture. you also may have a hidden low-level disease which makes you tired but which isn't bad enough to notice unless you specifically get tested for it, such as anemia

if your laziness isn't primarily a health problem (although usually it is), the next most common issue is psychology (having depression, ADD, anxiety, or similar). that's more complex to solve, but there are known things which work for a good percent of people that can be tried out. related to this is "worldview" -- how you see the world influences motivation (e.g. if you see the world or humanity as a terrible thing you would be less likely to want to make games than if you see them as a wonderful thing, and if you believe virtue and hard work are punished rather than rewarded in this world that would also be an unconscious inhibition)

if neither of those is a problem, it's probably just lack of experience and knowledge. in that case i'd recommend teaming up with others or helping others make games before you attempt to make your own game. there's a lot that goes into making a game besides knowing how to program and knowing what games you find fun

[Belimoth]

Learn from the lives of others.

Also the words of Paul Eres are poison.

[Oskuro]

Read this interesting article from You Are Not So Smart.

Procrastination

The Misconception: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well.

The Truth: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.

And a short quote from the article explaining how to deal with Procrastination, for all you TL;DR people:

The trick is to accept the now you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future you – a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

that's actually a pretty good tactic, i've used it myself. it's somewhat advanced tho, and usually not necessary -- i mean, most people who don't procrastinate (most non-lazy people) don't go around thinking their future self can't be trusted or whatever, so stuff like that feels somewhat hacky

but if we are talking about short-term hacky tricks to avoid laziness, here's another that i like and have used: start doing an even more boring task than working on your game, such as cleaning your room, studying kanji, or anything that you *really* don't want to do, something that's almost painful. compared to that, working on your game would be a relief, you'd *want* to stop doing the onerous task and work in your game instead. so it's basically a trick that uses relativity: there's no task so unpleasant that it can't be made pleasant by comparing it to something even more unpleasant

there's all sorts of hacks like those that work for some people some of the time. timeboxing, etc. -- steve pavlina has made his fortune largely on coming up with hacks like these (and many of them are worthwhile). i think the root of the problem is fundamentally a problem of lack of energy due to the modern junk food / being sedentary that most of the first world lives with, but since that's hard to change all at once these other methods are useful crutches

[moi]

There are two types of procrastinators
-the people who can't take a decision and waste a lot of time thinking about doing the right thing and are never happy
-the people who have no problem taking decisions, but who can sometimes lack energy because they want to do several things at the same time or who procrastinate because they subconsciously know that the task is too difficult

[Oskuro]

most people who don't procrastinate (most non-lazy people) don't go around thinking their future self can't be trusted or whatever, so stuff like that feels somewhat hacky

The rest of the article goes in depth about the issue. The point it gets across is that the human ability to resist temptation is limited (for everyone) and people who manage to overcome said temptations often do, almost without realizing it, through strategies to force themselves to do what they need to do.

So, for example, giving your internet router to a friend for the weekend so you can't slack off online when you need to study is one such strategy. You know you will fail if the temptation remains, so you look for ways to force your future self into action.

The beautiful thing is that if you keep certain routines long enough (over two months usually), the brain assimilates them as a regular routine and you no longer need to fight yourself to do things (not as hard, at least).


Oh, and our willpower is at its highest when we've slept well, are under no undue mental stress, and have just eaten.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

that may work a bit like posture -- the ligaments of the spine adapt to your posture, so that if you force yourself into bad or good posture long enough the other one becomes uncomfortable due to the body adapting

perhaps people who get things done feel uncomfortable when they aren't getting things done, in exactly the same way that people who don't get things done feel uncomfortable when they try to get things done

[aberrantmind]

make a reasonable list of things you need to do and pretend that if you don't do them by a certain time than you're going to have no money and starve. now I'm not saying if you miss the deadline to starve, but having no money because you missed a deadline and now you can't eat works really good at completely destroying laziness.

a starving artist is a very productive artist. but make sure you eat, because starving is very unhealthy.

[Barch]

@Paul Eres

I'm getting a tad off topic.

But have you ever been able to work - from your waking moment to the moment you hit the bed?  excluding Meal breaks and the toilet of course. have you been able to drive yourself as Sisyphus did? Rolling his game to the mountain of progress only to see his progress not sit the way he wants it? At all waking moments for about a period of a week?

If so I would like to hear your opinion on how you did it and how you felt about it

You stated here.

it's also hard to do 8 or more hours a day on something creative/artistic. if it's something mundane and repetitive, some part of a game that doesn't require much creativity, i can work on it all day (14 hours or more) without a problem, but when it's something that requires a lot of thought, such as level design, i get tired out earlier

Could you go into more detail about this tiredness?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

as i said, when the work doesn't require any difficult problem solving or decision making or contemplation, there have been times i've been able to work all day, sure

some example types of work that i can work all day at:

- proofreading / spellchecking / grammar editing (i often do this for my friend hardi gosal's writing; he writes adventure games such as fedora spade and missing but isn't a native english speaker, he's indonesian, so i have to go through hundreds of pages of his writing and fix thousands of mistakes)

- simple coding, such as converting a game from one programming language to another, or converting between earlier versions of an engine and later ones that required large coding changes (such as going from gm6 to gm studio)

- taking pages and pages of written sheet music and converting it into MIDI by entering it into the computer note by note (i once had to do this for like 50 pages of sheet music for my games)

- bug fixing; going through a large list of bugs for my games and fixing them all (particularly when the bugs are simple to fix)

for any of those i can work from the time i wake up to the time i got to sleep, sure. but i can not do that for complicated tasks that require a lot of mental effort, such as writing dialogue, level design, and the like, because those require breaks for contemplation, planning, and a slower approach in general. you can't really rush through those types of things, you need to take brainstorming breaks

there are probably people who can just e.g. write a novel for 14 hours a day just as easily as i can proofread for 14 hours a day, but i myself can't write a novel for 14 hours a day without feeling like i'm writing bad writing; i can easily proofread for 14 hours a day though

my suspicion is that there is some resource in the brain which is being depleted for creative work but which isn't depleted for mundane, routine work; however, even though i majored in biochemistry, i can't offhand suggest any such substance, although it'd be an interesting thing to research. it may be related to the will power phenomenon, which is well-studied, where will power can be depleted, as if it were a resource

another issue is that even though i have worked from when i wake up to when i go to sleep on occasion, i do not believe it to be healthy, so i rarely do it. i think it's a good idea to take time to exercise, to shower, to go to the bathroom, to prepare food, to eat food, to "socialize" (even if it's just irc or skype chat), to keep up with news and one's field, and in general to take breaks. this is particularly important for people who sit down to work all day, sitting down for long period can be deadly (leg blood clots can kill people who sit for long periods without moving for example)

i don't actually think working from waking to sleeping is more productive than taking breaks; there are studies that show that taking breaks increases rather than reduces productivity, even in mundane tasks such as factory work, but especially in more complicated work. doctors who work 16 hours a day make far more mistakes and are less effective than doctors who work 8 hours a day, for example. so i do not see working without breaks all day as an ideal to strive for, i think we should "work smarter, not harder" as scroooge mcduck says, and get more done in less time

[oahda]

Just do it

I can honestly only agree with this. Self-discipline is where it's at.

[Chromanoid]

I think you should not pathologise it. Creating something on your own requires a huge amount of self-discipline, confidence and time. It's more normal to not create anything special in your free time. Just wait for it and don't put yourself under pressure with anything productive in your free time.

[Gregg Williams]

I agree with Paul. Give me code to port, bugs to find/fix, or even most fairly straight forward implementation tasks, and I can find myself sinking 14 or more hours in a day into that effort with ease. Start throwing in game design, level design, content production, technical architecture work, and other such tasks, and I'm wiped out after a few solid hours of that effort.

[JP (@JTown_)]

I've recently started using the Pomodoro technique -- basically, you pick a task and work without distraction for 25 minutes.  Then you take a 5 minute break to recharge -- do something unrelated to work (might be harder than you think, but it's important).  That 25/5 cycle is a 'pomodori' and you just keep repeating it.  Lots of free pomodoro timer apps on iOS/Android to pick from. 

I had problems actually taking real breaks (I'd drift back into working without noticing), so I've started watching netflix in my 5 minute breaks -- it's actually kind of neat, because I get more done and get caught up on my shows at the same time haha. 

Even if I get into the groove of things and could continue working, I think the recharge time helps in the long run because it prevents burnout.  But most importantly, the clear separation of work time and relax time makes sure I'm not doing that 'half working' thing where I'm always checking email or facebook.  If I get an email or whatever, I wait until my 25 minutes are up before I check it.  Helps train myself to focus on what needs to get done. 

[_Tommo_]

I can honestly only agree with this. Self-discipline is where it's at.

Yep. It has always been a problem for me and I've tried all of these pseudo-bullshity techniques, from keeping a TODO to installing pause timers to changing my daily routine to working out in the pauses and whatever... they don't fix the underlying cause, that is, yourself.

In fact, there is just one thing that you should do, and that's the hardest: care about that annoying little voice that tells you what to do, and don't drown it with thinking etc... when you know you have to do something, just snap out of your lazyness and DO IT. RIGHT NOW.

It's something that has to be learned though - it's really easy to fool yourself around with circular thinking and self-excuses to let you keep doing nothing... you just have to keep "tutoring yourself" in stopping dicking around on twitter and facebook, respect your own plans etc... just think it is a muscle you need to exercise (which you won't like, being lazy ).

I've just started doing this myself, but I can already see that contrary to the other suggestions, it is actually working.
The rest of the stuff can help, though.

PS do not absolutely EVER start thinking about health reasons or illnesses in general as Paul Eres suggested... unless you want to fall in a sanity-destroying vicious circle, of course.
Hypochondriasis is a common side effect of procrastination and powerlessness, that post is probably the worst advice I have read on TIGs.