I second this: reading all this can create a sense of guilt.

I think for myself, the key is knowing that the guy who biked across India wasn't writing a novel. Or at least, he wasn't biking across India, writing a novel, and maintaining a 40+ hour job and raising a family.

I'm a husband, father of two kids, am involved in my church, and own a house with a yard. So, "contributing to open source" and "writing every day" or "learning a new skill" is #5 on my list. Probably further down the list if I think about it.

That said, I think it is possible to do _one_ of those things well on a regular basis. Right now I'm learning a new programming language. Before that I was reading a number of books.

Bottom line: it starts with knowing your own personal bandwidth limits, and knowing your prioritizes. Then backfill with the rest.

> I think for myself, the key is knowing that the guy who biked across India wasn't writing a novel. Or at least, he wasn't biking across India, writing a novel, and maintaining a 40+ hour job and raising a family.

Well exactly.

A bit of back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that (to sicken the GP) I write at least 30000 words every 5 months - and that's with a time investment of 3-5 hours on a Tuesday evening (I write commentary for a weekly paper). I could hit eighty or ninety thousand if I didn't like video games and talking to my girlfriend etc. There's no magic there - my dad is a writer, and when I was 6 I wanted to Be Like Him, and ever since I've enjoyed writing. You do that for 22 years, you pick up some speed and style.

On the other hand, whenever I think "I need to contribute to $OPEN_SOURCE_PROJECT", I suffer immediately from 'don't know where to start' paralysis, and usually give up pretty quickly.

Nobody's ever going to be confident at everything.

EDIT: The other thing is sort of 'confirmation bias' - stuff you're very productive at feels very easy, so you don't notice the productivity so much as you feel acutely useless at things which feel difficult.

You don't contribute to open source because you think you need to contribute to open source. That only leads to "don't know where to start" paralysis.

You contribute to an open source project because it had a bug or lacked a feature you needed and you took care of it. There is no paralysis when you have laser-focus on a particular problem.

I have always picked up things because I have found them interesting but the sense of guilt of not doing enough plagues you when you see success and recognition of other people in those fields.

For eg, someone who didn't waste his time during grad years and was able to complete many awesome things, fetched a job that I could only imagine. Lately, I have been avoiding going out on weekends, because "I have to do build something for world to show". Has this been helpful? Yes maybe, but not certainly, "very enjoyable".

I agree. It's easy to overlook the sustainability advantage of doing something every day.

With the rarest exceptions, I've spent at least an hour every day on preparing for, executing, and fulfilling the Kickstarter I ran last year (http://planetoz.net/kickstarter). It's only an hour, but it adds up.

It's taken much longer to complete than I anticipated. However, I've made steady progress despite losing one job, moving to a new state, and starting a new job over the course of that year. If I had tried to put in 2-4 hours of work every day, on top of managing my full time career, I know (from many a HN comment) that I would have burned out.

Instead, I have all my bills in order, steady income, and the funds I need to get the external help (editors, proofreaders, cover artists) that I need beyond what the Kickstarter helped cover. This means a longer wait for my backers, but also much better rewards for their patience. With the hour a day pace, a finished novel looks like an inevitability rather than a mere dream.

> Bottom line: it starts with knowing your own personal bandwidth limits, and knowing your prioritizes. Then backfill with the rest.

I agree with this. All these articles about doing X number of things in order to be productive really are just ideas. They are ideas that you may or may not incorporate depending on what is beneficial for yourself.

I work out and stretch every morning, and have recently started to write and read a little bit before I get to work. I don't do these things so I can tell other people about my accomplishments or my awesome rituals. I do these things because they help me throughout my day. Stretching and working out gives me more energy while writing in the morning helps organize my thoughts for the day.

> Someone has written 40K words in five months, someone has created a kernel at the age of 18, someone has made 365 days streak on github and someone has done a biking trip across India. I wish there was an easy way to avoid feeling guilty when you see other people's achievements.

There is: accept and own your own past choices and move forward, and stop comparing your achievements to other people as a yardstick of past success (still do it, if you want, as a tool to find ways to improve your own future outcomes, but that's a different function.)

There are billions of people in the world. Most probably, very large (absolutely) numbers of them are going to have done more impressive things in narrow domains of achievement than you, and its quite likely that a sizable number will have done much more impressively in fairly broad areas -- and with modern technology, you are more likely to hear about all of them than in the past. But there is no reason to be guilty about not having the most impressive resume in the world (and in many cases, if you had the capacity to have mirrored their achievement [and fortune of circumstance as well as effort and innate ability often play a role], the cost would have been unacceptable -- lots of people who have done impressive things regret the cost.)

Well, maybe not an easy way, but probably easier than mirroring the all of the kind of achievements you are talking about that make you feel guilty, so easier, at least.

You certainly have to make some trade offs. But as long as you achieved what you want to do, how could that cost be "unacceptable" in any sense? You expected it and wholeheartedly embraced its existence in the very first place!

You might find this amusing:

http://jezebel.com/every-healthy-morning-habit-you-should-ad...

Please forgive the Gawker media owned link; it's worth it.

On a more serious note, this also can be applied to the #YouCanLearnAnything campaign. Sure, it's a positive message, and probably true, but what to learn? I sympathize; what I've found helps is starting with two realizations:

1) The possibilities are quite literally endless; don't tell yourself you can't, because it's probably not true.

2) The one certain limitation is time.

With those two things in mind, it comes down to one question: what do you want to do with what time you have?

More deeply: what is important to you? How can you best achieve it? Is your scope to small? Good, you'll finish it fast. Is your scope too large? Try breaking it down, and realize you're only human. Anyone can change, but most people won't. Don't try to change everything at once; start small and keep focused on your long term goals.

I wish I could do significant research, contribute more to open source, build a business, etc. As it is, I'm too busy coding at the day job, and all my other time is eaten up by training for search and rescue and practicing for musical performances. I'm lucky I got time to setup a self-hosted cloud for the wife's new tablet this weekend. But those are the choices I've made, and I'm mostly happy with them.

Also related is differentiating between the things you want to happen or change vs things you want to change your self.

We are surrounded by problems and it can be easy to become bogged down trying/wanting to solve them all yourselves. Realize you are not alone, that many other people are also working to solve those problems. Try to focus on finding the problems that you can solve and that you want to solve.

> Please forgive the Gawker media owned link; it's worth it.

Why do you aplogize? Is Gawker media a bad source?

The simple solution is finding your niche. I commented on the thread explaining how I blog everything I learn and connect it to previous blog articles I have written (to help my memory).

I intentionally write the articles across multiple blogs to ensure no one expects I write daily and that I can explore various interests.

The point being, this works for me. It doesn't look at all like I write daily (even though I do), and as such I'll never "achieve" what other people do (i.e. I'll never have 1600 blog entries in one blog).

Does this make me feel bad?

Not at all! The point is, I am doing it for myself, not for bragging rights over others. If I wanted to do that, I could totally just set up a program to auto-push to github.

Rather, I feel good at the end of each day because I write out a list of things I need to accomplish: wash dishes, compliment my girlfriend, write a blog post, etc. Every time I cross something off the list I know I am working towards my goals.

Humans are notorious for achieving things no other species can achieve. However, this is only achieved through our consciousness and our ability to see and reach for long-term goals.

No one can achieve every long-term goal, but to achieve one just set aside 20 - 60 minutes a day to work on it. Cross it off your list, and accomplish great things. There's no shame in not writing 40K words in five months if that's not your goal.

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”

― Ernest Hemingway

Well, the competitive nature of humans is both a curse and a blessing, in the end few if any of the things we do will have any long term impact on humanity, most of those will be desctructive, like depleting the resources of the planet or destroying the environment. If you set yourself the goal to have a meaningful impact, then lots of those "achievements" become meaningless.

I don't see anyone here talking about insidious, negative "competition" at least

Everyone is different. Most people don't feel the need to be productive and improve every hour of every day.

My co-workers are all nice and fun people, I enjoy working my 7-8 hours a day. But when i get home I don't want to keep working, learning new work-related skills and such, I haven't contributed to open source projects since I started where I'm working now.

I couldn't be more happy about how separate my work and non-work life is, I have a ton of fun with my own hobbies during my free time and have no stress whatsoever. If you are very ambitious and have large goals, of course you do have to work hard for it though. That goes without saying.

You do not have to needlessly compare yourself to others all the time in this manner. Doing so invites an unfair comparison where you see all your flaws and only the strong points of others who appear greater than yourself.

Instead, you should focus on comparing yourself to yourself. Have you improved since you last checked up on yourself? That's really what matters.

Now, of course, looking only at yourself in a vacuum is impossible - but the opposite of constant comparison to others is detrimental if it leads to feelings like this.

> I wish there was an easy way to avoid feeling guilty when you see other people's achievements.

I've a very easy solution: you are the only meter. What matters is for you to try to be better to the yesterday's version of you. As long as you try to do this, without stressing, but in a constant way, you'll enjoy the results in the long run.

My solution is to not do any one thing every day, with the exception of common tasks, like eating and breathing. I try to do at least one thing to better myself each day, and that activity can come from a myriad of choices. Even on those days when I seemingly get nothing done, like sitting on the couch stuffing my face and watching football, I feel like I've accomplished resting myself to prepare for a more productive day tomorrow.

Life's to short to worry about doing anything that you don't want to do in the moment, as long as all of your responsibilities are out of the way first. By responsibilities, I mean commitments to others, such as family, friends, and associates. If I don't feel like doing something for myself, I just don't do it, and I'm much better off for it.

>I wish there was an easy way to avoid feeling guilty when you see other people's achievements.

The easiest thing is to be able to look at the achievements you have, and say truthfully, "maybe if I put my mind to it I could bike across India, but I like what I've done more and I'm better at it than I could be at anything else."

That said, spending probably an hour a day on the entire project, you could probably spend ten-minute blocks of writing (250 words in 10 minutes seems totally doable), language learning (I spend 20 minutes a day between duolingo and memrise), exercise (7 minute workout plus stretching), and other skills that are easily parceled into small chunks.

Doing this alone won't make you great, but it'll be a baseline and a foundation you continue to lay. You can build on that.

Here's how to kill two birds with one (gamified) stone : If you host your static blog on GitHub Pages, you'll get a 'contribution' point for every day you post (or even commit) to it. Thus building up your GitHub streak, and post count/size consistently.

Caveat: This only works if you measure your self-worth by your github streak number/commit stats

Perhaps not the most glamorous phrasing, but I think what you just described is the essence (and power) of gamification.

This only works if you value your github streak number/commit stats. "measure your self-worth by" implies that all other values are secondary, which would just be silly.

I think the point of "do X every day" is getting over the physiological hurdle of starting something. If you want to write more but find yourself watching TV all evening because you fell burnt out from working all day. Maybe you should be relaxing in front of the TV, but you are in a better position to make that decision once you have force your self to get over the initial hurdle by writing n words. That n should be sufficiently small that if if are burnt out and want to back to relaxing you have not overly burdened yourself, but you will likely find many occasions when you want to keep writing because its something you would rather do than watch TV.

There is no end, and no answer to that question.

Therefore I'll give you one anyway: Work on that game if you still like it, and otherwise do some truly fun and relaxing and "unproductive", far away from any computer.

I think we just need to prioritize. The world is becoming each day more abundant of interesting things to do, just ask o yourself what is the most interesting to you at the moment.

The only way to not feel guilty is to drop desire to do what other folks are doing or have done. Important thing is being able to create a space for you to enjoy something that you want to do for love of it.

In a different subject, there was this comment that I like:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8323556