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Working When You Don’t Want To

My father is an inspiration to me. He has lived with poor health all of his working life, but he has always put in the time. I once asked him “Dad, how do you work when you don’t want to?” He gave some nice, practical advice. I’ve applied his advice, and I’ve collected a few extra tips and tricks, and this short piece is to share them.

I’ve broken them into categories: things that take a while to implement, things you can do in the moment, and thoughts about reframing.

Things that take some time

You probably can guess what will come up here. Mostly general health.

1. Get enough sleep. No caffeine after lunch, don’t look at blue light near bedtime, don’t make a habit of working/eating/watching in bed. Do everything you can to make bedtime the same every day.
2. Diet. Cut sugar and processed food (which is mostly sugar) as much as possible, it will stabilize your energy levels. Avoid sweet things especially at breakfast. Second plug for no caffeine after lunch. Most people have vitamin D deficiency, regardless of sunlight exposure. Other vitamins seem to help to a surprising degree, too. Embrace the placebo effect.
3. Exercise. Just whatever you can do. A lame workout is still better than nothing. If you’re really constrained on energy, lift weights. If you’re constrained on time, do Tabata/HIIT. If you’re constrained by physical limitations or injuries, walk.
4. Deadlines. Never waste a good deadline. Brain fog seems to clear when you’re running out of time. Working in scheduled sprints helps me, especially when other people are depending on my effort.

Things that you can do in the moment

I hesitate to call these things “hacks” but it’s probably still the best term.

1. Clean your desk. When you really don’t want to work, just do things surrounding work. If you despise cleaning your desk and it makes you want to die, no worries, ignore this one. It works almost every time for me.
2. Work on your environment. This is the general version of cleaning your desk. You can get rid of a few low hanging fruit emails. You can literally just close all the programs on your computer and open the one that you need for work, create a new file. So you could start working. But you don’t have to yet. But you really could so easily because there is that document all ready for you.
3. Piggyback on past work. If blankness gets you down, go get an example of a past thing you did that is similar to what you have to do now. Look at it. Think about it. If you can, reuse it by slowly changing the old thing into the new one. If you are a programmer, this could be an old set of scripts, if you’re a writer, an old manuscript, etc.
4. Make a list. If you feel anxiety about all your pressing tasks, just write them down. That’s all you have to do. Then just stare at them for a second. Usually that’s enough.
5. Micronap. Go find the most comfortable and dark place you can and lie down for 10–15 minutes with your eyes closed. Don’t worry about falling asleep, it’s still helpful.
6. Microwalk. Walk outside and back in again, or down the hall or to the bathroom.
7. Have a conversation. If you can talk to anybody in a way that is remotely productive, this always helps me.

Reframing

The truth is I think we probably all work too hard, or at least we work in ways that are too regimented. Scheduling and computers and planning are good but they also squeeze your working life into what can be crushingly mechanical patterns. If you have the liberty, maybe sometimes your mind is telling you to take an actual break and do nothing. You’re not working now so you can work better later. Producing when you don’t want to and don’t feel like it is not noble, it’s just inefficient. Our society is dumb about work. We do a lot of stupid work.

One useful question is: if you don’t feel like working, is there anything you do feel like doing? If the answer is yes you might want to just do that other thing. Maybe? Could be a good idea. Sometimes I read about synthetic spider silk. It has nothing to do with my job but it’s fine.

That’s what I have for you. It doesn’t help a lot, I know, but at least you know someone on the internet struggles to work sometimes too.