Ask HN: Tips on hiring a “life manager” or coach to be productive?
Long story short, I work remotely, am building a few side projects, trying to get in shape, learn a foreign language and a million other things. Unfortunately, like everyone else, I end up wasting time on the internet and making excuses. Self-motivation has its limits. Specifically as a remote worker, I’ve found it’s easy to fall into an “unstructured abyss.”
I recently had the idea of hiring someone to ‘keep me on track’, so to speak. A cross between an assistant and a coach.
Has anyone done something like this? I’m even thinking a 60 minute session once a week to just review my goals, make sure I’m getting stuff done, and being accountable to someone is a good start.
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I agree that self-motivation has its limits but I think the solution is to just do less.
Is there any reason you need to be building all of your side projects, getting into shape, learning a foreign language, and whatever else you’re trying to do right now?
Maybe just work on one side project. Maybe focus on getting in shape and six months or a year from now, once you’ve built some good habits, start working on that foreign language.
I understand the temptation to do everything ASAP but I believe it’s an unhealthy way to live.
I was in the exact position as OP and I think wasting time on the internet is bad because:
1. You trust a few sources, and you forget to see hidden bias. HN, Reddit, Facebook, other misc forums.
2. Internet addiction is real, it's a continued feedback loop that creates a dopamine addiction, especially if you lack dopamine in the first place. e.g. ADD/ADHD, like me.
Self improvement is discipline, and I always suggest it --- I wasted a year, and my teenage years just messing around on the Internet. Sure it shaped my life, future into being in IT, but it can be a bad cycle if you don't know how to properly use time management techniques to reduce "wasting time."
Time is valuable.
Setting aside time per day compounds to week/monthly accured time. This can lead to new skills.
OR just knowing the newest gossip.
Learning new skills is good, and OP should do it. Seek experts, in what you want. Network, travel and be friends.
Frittering away on the Internee in an endless loop of content is not the way to do it.
It's not possible to have 20 interests and spend 2 hours each day on all of them. You need to choose some of them.
How to do that? Calculate your free time and use it for the things which are important/you want to develop. Eg. each day you need 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work - that gives us 8 hours a day for other things. From that take some time for commuting, higene, shopping, eating. Let's say that you have 4 hours from Monday to Friday. Plan those slots. Taking care of your body: 1 hour phisical traning Mon, Wed, Fri. Plus 10 minutes stretching each day. Learning language? One hour Tue and Thu. Plus Anki session each day. And so on. Start with that. Then if you see that you still have some time available, add next thing. Remember - consequence is the key. You can't do 3 fitness trainings on Saturday to cover whole week. You can't sleep 24 hours to cover next 3 sleepless nights.
> and a million other things.
You simply can't. Sad but true.
[1] Podcast #450: How to Make Time for What Really Matters Every Day
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/podcast-450-how-to-m...
If you're interested, I'll create a "remote-worker" group for us so we can help motivate each other from a distance.
Any other remote workers are welcome to join too, email me at steve at haxel.ca and I'll hook you up.
Edit: does this help?
The basic idea is that to solve a problem, you must take the right kind of action more often. Yet what compels us to take these actions when we are not self-motivated? Functional does, by taking it social.
1. Identify your problem or interest
2. Join or create a group whose topic is that problem or interest. The group may provide seed activities. Each activity has a target frequency (e.g. once per week)
3. Optional: add more activities you'd like to do more often
4. Tell the Functional when you do those activities
5. Everyone in your group gets to see how you're doing. Nobody gets to see what you're doing.
6. If you fall behind on an activity, you'll receive a message to do that activity from someone in your group.
The system is designed to be persuasive so that those simple messages (and other stuff) are as compelling as possible.
While the system does support non-SMS communication channels, it looks like the regulatory overhead (GDPRS, etc) means I'd need a fair bit of funding before expanding to Europe.
One alternative idea is rather than making it one person's job to hold you accountable, spread that out to multiple people.
Have routine online meetings with people you work with. They can hold you accountable for the work.
Get a personal trainer for fitness.
Find someone who might be a user or otherwise care about your side projects and share progress updates or get feedback from them.
You obviously do not want to actually do any of these things if you're not doing them already. You probably feel social pressure from HN to be super cool startup person.
Schedule your days and focus on doing things well. Gym to me is now easy but for beginners they might feel a bit discomfort going there. Get a PT if necessary but do not quit.
About building side projects i recommend focusing on one thing at a time. Then it's just finding the time coding it, if you feel that it's too hard to even start you should go to an environment where help is available. Internet cafe perhaps? Look around if you see developer looking people and ask for help/opinions about stuff. You have to build momentum to get things moving and doing everything on your own only for yourself makes that difficult.
Good luck! Remember to balance things out, it's very important in the long run. Do sports, do social interactions, do arts if that's your thing. Dont put all your efforts into coding only.
Real talk: Prioritize. Some hobbies or interests will rise to the top, and most others fade off. It is true that the fewer you pick the deeper you will explore them, but many hobbies are quite shallow when you exclude the egocentric powerstruggling communities and focus on the fundamentals, and can be a constant source of unique experinces. Workout in the mornings, do a routine that includes short warmup, resistance training, and stretching/mobility, while keeping heartrate up for extended periods. Record your weights and seek progressive overload as your body adapts. But abs are made in the kitchen, diet is not unimportant.
You know what you need, give yourself that 60 min session. Put it on your calendar, treat it like a job interview. Dress nice, and make it a thing. Review your goals and progress. Set some rewards or perhaps even penalties for stuff you need extra motivation for.
I cannot speak to actual coaches. I am fortunate to have friends who I can occasionally bounce things off. It is always good to have a, somewhat disinterested, outside perspective for spotting 'obvious to anyone else' type issues. Reminder to cultivate your friendships, they are not static.
For doing stuff that does not need the internet, unplug it. Yup. Dead serious. You will feel like a damn fool each time you forget and try to check HN, email, etc. and quietly shame youself into keeping focused. Its like an electric shock when you are confronted with your, usually invisible, lack of self control. May work poorly in shared offices, and shared wifi. If your phone is the problem, turn it off as well. Works even better when it has an obscene boot time to let you remember and confront yourself. Part of improving is learning to change yourself willfully, and choosing to see whats ugly in yourself so you know what to change. Change for its own sake is just chaos, usually only useful when everything is bad and lacking orientation.
I once 'hired' a friend as an adhoc manager. I had a project that would make me money based on performance. Being unmotivated at the time, I offered her a cut, for everything above what I would lazily do. Ended up doing 3x the work just thanks to her refocusing me. She, meanwhile, had zero technical knowledge of my project, and frankly, didn't much care. This helped her see the big picture I was missing with my head buried in the logical challenge.
Never stop learning.
Having a good idea of where you stand and what you are looking for is helpful if you do choose to go into a coaching, therapy, or psychology session.
A psychiatrist is someone who can diagnose you and prescribe medicine. You can talk to them if you want but it costs more.
You shouldn't hire me, because I'm not a professional, and you probably couldn't tell if I were, but I've recently had great personal victories in this area after many years of frustrating failure. I'd be happy to spend some time on Skype sharing what I've learned, particularly on how to approach what you call the "unstructured abyss."
Email is in my profile.
I'd go even one step further - even if you are a good programmer, it's hard to discern between the good and the bad hires. The reason for that is that you can check for technical proficiency, but it's very hard to assess someone's long term motivation levels. There's plenty of candidates who are strong programmers, but are just not motivated and will go to great lenghts to do the bare minimum to not get fired. I think that's BTW why the large corps insist on things like high GPA - not neccessarily for the knowledge gained, but as a proof that you were able to consistently motivate yourself to a high degree over a period of a couple years, doing the work which you weren't neccessarily in love with - which is exactly what they need.
The other consideration is that I am not being completely altruistic here: I would gain something from getting to know keiferski "in person" (or "in video," anyway). A remote dev with some side projects is a valuable person to know, for all sorts of reasons. And of course there's the simple pleasure in getting to know, and hopefully helping, a human being.
Maybe check out the Work Gym from Ultraworking? The basic idea is that everyone brings their own work, and a moderator guides everyone through a structured process for getting things done. Lots of highly motivated people there, and I’ve been really productive on these sessions.
https://www.ultraworking.com/the-work-gym/
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/589c04f52e69cf9719483...
And also, I’d search for a mentor instead of a coach. I would want to learn from a successful person and try to apply that to my own life, rather than having to report to someone about things I already know.
Clarity is as important as motivation and willpower.
Good food-for-thought on defining what is meaningful from Brendon Burchard > https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/brendon-burchard/hph-deluxe...
Seriously. Trim that todo list. That's insane.
Alternatively you could hire his coaches but they are expensive I wager.