This kind of thing is pretty common, especially when you have multiple projects and you are in love with one.

If the problem is you are thinking too much in your head, open notepad and simply type out everything your head is saying=) Always works for me.

Last October I was experiencing something similar to what you describe and my life had virtually stopped. Friend of mine suggested I start a "secret" blog on blogspot. I wrote 3-4 super long posts rambling and clearing my head. The next day I got the idea for my start-up and had the best two months of my life in Nov. and Dec. '06.

> This kind of thing is pretty common, especially when you have multiple projects and you are in love with one.

I came to this realization myself in the past couple of weeks. Nothing focuses the mind like realizing what you really want and going for it.

Thanks for the blogging idea - anonymous blog might be really better for my current state of mind. I definitely have the too many projects problem, and I am not even sure which one I am in love with.

1. If this is a difficulty that is permeating the rest of your life. Go to a doctor or therapists of some sort and get help. There's no shame in it. I had a bought of depression once, went to therapy, and am much better now.

2. If it's just this one issue, it sounds like you might need a partner who doesn't mind setup. I find I'm very good at sitting and coding, but it is about ten times as hard for me to do setup. And often enough you need to do the setup to start coding anyway.

3. The other thing you might try is getting out of the house. If you're at home, you can be acclimated to a certain behavior. Getting out to a coffee shop or a friends house can change things up in a positive way. I go to a coffee shop whenever I've hit a wall at home.

4. Thinking in circles trying to self motivate can be very alluring. It is a natural impulse to analyze a problem. But if you run over the same ground, you stop learning anything new, and thinking about it starts to create anxiety. Letting go of that cycle can be done, sometime it requires conversation with others. Your posting here is a very good step.

> Why can't I do it? I feel like the people in the Bunuel > movie who can't leave the party.

I got to exactly this stage when I was working on my own projects last year. I was excited about them in concept but lost the ability to do work. I decided to move to a city with dull, predictable work and better wages in order to re-motivate myself and reduce mental stress. It has mostly worked - I've saved up a lot of cash this year and am now getting back into my projects. But whereas I thought it would take three months to get there, it was more like ten or eleven in the end but I'm back in form now and have resigned.

Last weekend I decided I needed a better backup strategy and just did it. This time last year I just would have felt extra stress at the prospect of it, and then not done it.

Here are the big factors I found:

1) Exercise and health. I have long-term back and shoulder problems. Since moving to london I've got into semi-regular exercise (still don't do enough) and have seen improvements this year with help from a physio. Being in regular exercise makes everything about life better, including those times where you settle down to do some work.

2) Bad goals leads to mental stress. I spent way too much time working on goals that were too distant from my project. Now I'm setting myself easy goals, and whever anything seems not quite easy I refuse to do it unless I can find a way to make it easy.

3) Having a well-defined home-life where you can have a clean house, and a simple spread of food available so that you have variety but don't have to think too hard when you go shopping. I've turned doing the dishes and ironing into relaxing, therapeutic exercises - works for me. There's nothing quite so simple and delighting as sweeping a wooden floor and having it clean at the end.

If you've never had a burnout before, it's probably worth seeing a councilor or a doctor just to talk through it with them. I find that I generally avoid talking about my problems because I was brought up in an environment where people who whinged were just "attention-seeking". But if I see someone where I don't give a damn what they think of me, and where I paying good money to sort out a problem, then my reticence goes.

In my experience, burnout is a curve, and once you've got to the point you're at now it requires dealing with and gets worse before it plateaus and gets better. If you're mentally exhausted it can be hard to build a plan for dealing with it, also. The authority of a plan defined by someone else for me to follow helps me in these circumstances.

"Having a well-defined home-life where you can have a clean house, and a simple spread of food available so that you have variety but don't have to think too hard when you go shopping. I've turned doing the dishes and ironing into relaxing, therapeutic exercises - works for me. There's nothing quite so simple and delighting as sweeping a wooden floor and having it clean at the end."

I agree. I find that if I am working (reading) all the time [I have a full time job and am moonlighting] its hard to keep the house clean and organized, but having a clean, well organized home really helps me have a clear head, and get something done. It also reduces the amount of stress you feel. I know this sounds very "new-agey" but it does help. Further, the very task of cleaning has a very cathartic effect on me. Start small, with the kitchen or the restroom, find a place for everything, and put everything in its place and see how you feel. This will also get you away from the computer for a while, and normally, after a few hours of cleaning I have neither the energy or the motivation to get any work done, so its a good day to take the evening off.

Hope this helps.

The best definition of burnout I have read is a "crisis of self-efficacy". You know all the stuff you're supposed to do, and you may tell yourself you love doing this, but deep down you don't have any faith that anything will get better.

Burnout can happen if your expectations don't match what the task will deliver. Sometimes the job is the problem. Paradigmatic example: idealistic teacher in dysfunctional school. Sometimes your expectations are the problem. Paradigmatic example: former prodigy trying to make a living by being more brilliant / dedicated / obsessive than others. Unfortunately, there's always someone nerdier than you.

Whatever the reason, you may have inadvertently trained yourself that work = dissatisfaction. The solution may be to try to train yourself out of this. You know yourself the best; figure something out.

Suggestions:

- pair programming. Instant social rewards, shared victories, less chance of distraction.

- accomplish something smaller but still valuable. Start a fucking Blogger account, fuck managing yet another stupid piece of software.

- visualize what it will be like once the task is accomplished. Do you feel better? If so, try to keep your "eyes on the prize". (If worse, re-evaluate).

I've been in this position before. The reason is pretty simple: it's boring. More to the point, it's too much stuff to do for the payoff you'll get from it. C'mon, 5 steps to install a blog server?

I'll second everyone who says "Do something else." This is your subconscious telling you that the work you're doing is not important. Go find something that is. Then when you've gotten farther on whatever that other stuff is, come back to this and see if it's time to do it yet. If installing a blog is really a pressing problem, you'll be motivated to do it.

It's definitely boring, and in the "should do" category rather than the "want do" one. I'd really like to blog, on the other hand.

I am guessing from this that there is a market for hosting blogs with domain names. Blogger supposedly does it, but I could not get it to work yet.

This happened to me last year. Then I bought Final Fantasy XII for ps2 and played it for 2 or 3 days straight. After that I felt a lot better and was able to do work again.

I'm not sure why this was voted down. Sometimes playing games helps. I play Nethack or FreeCiv when I'm feeling overwhelmed or under-enthusiastic (the only problem is they are both very long games...I need to find some less-demanding distractions, like heroin or hookers).

But getting out and exercising is usually better for me.

Nethack is a long game? You must be ascending every time..

I don't count the "you were killed by a kitten while frozen" insta-deaths--obviously that game didn't count, and I have to start over immediately. Once you survive to level 7 or so, and have the intrinsics, it becomes a very long game.

I agree. Beyond the Castle likes tedium.

Oops, lies. Not likes. I should not be awake at night.

Worked for me at times, too ;-) At the moment can't think of a game I'd like to play, and don't feel as if I have earned it.

Not really nice to hear about somebody else through the same, really. I can not code a single routine since a week ago. Eight months working like a maniac on my startup. Alone. Crazy? Yeah.

Exhaustion? Probably. What to do? I was thinking on a small flight to Rome (I am in Madrid) I have friends there, but I do not fell very social. Ski? May be. What the hell! I hate feeling this way.

Max

Book the damn flight. Go meet your friends. If and when the time is right, open up about what is happening. Otherwise, just say that you are there to get away from it for a bit.

At least you had 8 productive months. I say definitely go on the vacation, you have earned it!

My suggestion for you is that you to set one small task for yourself per day and force yourself to complete it until you feel compelled to work hard at it again. While it may be a real challenge for a time, at least then you will continue making forward progress. Nothing like progress makes you want to work on something. Good luck!

Spooky, just made several (checked in, checked, released, reverted) fixes... this is a time of year of deep internal distractions. I know I just don't get as much exercises as other seasons, just a good walk can help.

Spooky that I was just at a chapter in Waitzkins' book (joshwaitzkin.com "The Art of Learning" - bit of a pretentious title but a fairly down to earth read about his struggles as a kid becoming a grand master) on keeping focus. Has some good ideas about re-focusing. Do programmers really have a monopoly on hyper-focus? I can't imagine now, let alone as a 10 yr old, being in a nine hour game that the (adult) opponent is dragging as a strategy to wear one down.

I feel the same way about at least one or two of my courses every semester. Case in point - I have my linear algebra final tonight, I know what I need to be studying and how to study for it, but I just can't make myself go to the library.

Ditto. I'm sitting in the university library. Linear Algebra final in 1.5 hours. And I'm reading Hacker News...

I find that having to study something takes away most of my natural desire to learn something. I have a psych final tonight, and instead I'm going through a CS textbook. I bet before my next CS exam I will suddenly be more interested in psychology.

I hope it went OK nevertheless!

Tell at least one of your users that you're going to do it. Then you'll do it.

This is actually a serious problem for me. I tell everybody I'll do everything (at least everything that is sane and good for a sizable number of our customers). I eventually will, but sometimes it gets overwhelming and I end up weeks behind on some of those promises. (My current albatross is that I promised full FreeBSD support in our products well over a year ago...I still haven't released complete FreeBSD support. I think I probably would have finished it long ago if it hadn't taken on this feeling of dread and perpetuity that it has gained in my head.)

Yes. Underpromise, and over-deliver. Never the other way around.

Ditch it and work on something that interests you.

This is really simple but it works really well for me.

I write the things I want to do today on a notecard and then cross them out as I do them.

I do the same thing with a legal pad... it's just a running log of ideas I want to do. New stuff is appended to the bottom, so I can tell how old an idea by where it is on the page.

A lot of stuff never actually gets done (sometimes the idea no longer makes sense or isn't important in light of new ones), but I think the big advantage is getting the stuff out of your head. There is a lot of mental effort involved in holding on to several ideas at once. If you write them down, you don't have to constantly keep them in mind, so you can focus on actually doing something.

Thanks for all your helpful replies! A lot of things ring very true to me, I'll try to sort them out one at a time...

Probably, you are going to do the wrong thing.

Get a girlfriend!

Have one, but long-distance. Might be part of the problem, unresolved issues in private life.

Please, go to a doctor as soon as possible, maybe you are near a burnout and s/he can avoid it.

I thought you had lost (somehow) your capacity to solve some kind of problems. But now I see maybe you are talking about something very different: you aren't being able to do that because you don't have the will to do that.

Sorry to misunderstand you. If that's your problem, you don't need a doctor, my mistake.

I think/hope my mind still works OK when it comes to problem solving. It worked for the project euler problems, which of course had zero commercial value to me. Thanks for trying to help anyway!

get a beer - go out with friends, etc etc. - get drunk as hell - enjoy till you get wasted and then go back to hacking

> Why can't I do it?

Ah, because your brain is rebelling against having to deform itself to fit someone else's mode of thinking. Most software other people have written is full of WTFs even in just setting it up. I had this problem with Trac recently -- I had set it up in the past, but it had been a while, and I found myself banging my head against the wall wondering why I have to learn its setup and command quirks. It SHOULD just ask me for an initial admin account password and the rest should be all point-and-click. (Not to mention, customization is a pain.)

When you're young and don't know any better, you're motivated to learn whatever arcane minutiae the presumably-expert authors of whatever software you're using have required.

Later, your brain will rebel against having to go through the motions because they are boring, tedious, and stupid.

If you have this problem when working on your own code, it's because something is nagging at you for not being as clear and simple as you could be. Maybe you just need a hash table instead of 100 different derived classes. Maybe the framework you're using obfuscates things too much.

This is the paradox of age: younger people are more motivated to do things because more things are NEW, but they lack experience; older people have the experience so their designs are better, but they lack the motivation to do the parts they now feel are tedious and stupid.

It has something to do with gullibility. When software says, "here's how we do things!" younger people are more apt to go along with it. Older people's brains become very skeptical and will refuse to go along with it, demanding a bigger payoff or a different sort of payoff. (For example, you might find you are able to do something tedious for a girlfriend/boyfriend because your motivation to please someone else is much greater than the very minor impulse you have to do it for yourself, since you don't find it interesting enough.)

Our brains put on the brakes more as we age; we have general pattern-matching brains that CAN do a lot of interesting things, but they aren't really designed for it. The payoffs we get for non-essential things tend to decline; our species evolved so that PRIOR to adulthood you should know everything you need for survival in your tribe/area.

Then we become more focused on the important things, evolutionarily: socializing, finding a mate, raising offspring, etc. We become much better at recombining ideas in the pursuit of improvements, but software that requires thousands of prerequisite steps just in order to have the basis for implementing your improvement is something foreign to our nature. Also, working at it alone is foreign; we like to cooperate (look at the overwhelming popularity of team games vs. solo play), and younger people who are excited about something help keep our own motivation up (younger siblings, friends, or teaching our own children who naturally would help take up the reigns more and more as they grew up).

Going off into an ivory tower alone with dusty tomes is just a good way to bore yourself to sleep.

You need a compelling reason WHY that will actually work for you. Finding some way to have fun or at least not suffer in the process of doing whatever the tedious parts are is essential. It needs to feel enjoyable somehow or you won't do it long-term. (Pain can get you to do something short-term but isn't a good way to produce your best work, and as soon as the pain drops below threshold you'll just put it off again.)

You know how you could do this already, because you know what things motivate you. The trick is connecting something that DOES motivate you to doing something that doesn't. This can be hard to talk yourself into because you become skeptical even of yourself.

Besides motivation, one trick is to just turn your brain off. Just think about what you're TRYING to do, not about why you should or how you should do it; don't think about rationalizations. Then you can do it step-by-step almost like blind evolution (works for sysadmin stuff; it does make for pretty ugly code, but it gets done at least; and is only really needed for boring parts which tend to be too simple to interest you anyway).

Basically, our brains aren't really designed for software, which is why so many people have good ideas but so few people IMPLEMENT them. This situation is very, very natural. We think in patterns, in general senses, with specifics only for the KEY innovations; when every single effin' step is specific for thousands of mundane tedious steps, that is NOT what we are made for.

Another trick that might help is to work backward -- start doing the key part first, even though there isn't enough scaffolding around it to do what you want. Then start putting in the minimum amount of scaffolding to make it work.

It's much more natural to make changes to a project than to do a project from scratch.

More as I figure it out...

Very good description! Yes that "software full of WTFs" thing is absolutely part of my problem. But I don't want to be like that - I want to be able to decide on something and do whatever it takes to achieve it. It just seems that my mind doesn't work like a simple machine...

Wow! Just wow! I see myself in all of that (i.e., I'm getting older) and it just hits the mark.

The church speaks in latin because it makes common people look foolish and inadequate.

The computer "programmer" speaks the most needlessly complicated language because it makes him the focal point.