10 Tips on Combatting Resistance

I understand that compared to my previous, highly technical, posts, this will be a more general self-help type of article applicable beyond my domain of software development. I am no self-help guru, nor do I claim to be perfect at the tips I recommend, but nevertheless I have found some preferred ways of boosting my productivity which I, of course, want to share.

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I am writing this post to elaborate on Steven Pressfield’s idea of Resistance. I’ve set my Pomodoro timer for 25 minutes with 5-minute breaks, and I will do absolutely nothing else for the upcoming 2 Pomodoro’s (i.e. the following 55 minutes).

I’ve had a rather slow day up to this moment. I went to bed late yesterday. When I woke up, it was quite dark and cloudy for mid-July, so I slept in. It took me hours before I would do something remotely productive.
Finally, I’ve had an epiphany when I decided to head out for some groceries and re-listen to Steven Pressfield’s War of Art. The symptoms of slowness and procrastination did not wane immediately. Instead, they were less and less dominant.
This lead me to cook lunch for today and tomorrow, wash dishes and sit down to write these paragraphs. I still have a lot to do after I’m done with this activity. The whole apartment needs to be vacuumed and mopped, the shower also needs some thorough cleaning, not to mention professional aspirations that need some of my attention as well. I will not go to bed until I’m done with these things.

Literally every single individual struggles with some lack of motivation and procrastination. If you’re not familiar with War of Art, feel free to read or listen to it (it’s quite short). Some may find it rather new-agey because it mentions some symbolic and even supernatural forces, but I still think it’s worth a read even for more materialistic readers.
The core idea is that there is a natural force called Resistance. It acts in a similar way as resistance in classical mechanics or electrical engineering, against motion, slowing things down to the closest equilibrium. Its influence increases disorder (entropy) in a system which, over time, becomes less defined, more homogeneous, and subsequently capable of less work.

Pressfield’s Resistance occurs in the mind. It is the antithesis of progress, of problems being solved, of perception being more defined, of experience being gained. For every living organism, certain tasks need to be performed to maintain homeostasis and avoid death. This scales to a higher level when cells form a living multicellular organism with tissues and organs performing their call of duty. Finally, there is the fragile stability of social interactions among pack animals, including humans. Pressfield argues that there is an even higher mode of being, experienced by artists and enerpreneurs or any other creative or constructive professionals, that “calls” individuals “to action” of creating their pieces of art. An artist has to create, otherwise they deteriorate, suffering an unfulfilled and meaningless life. And much like natural forces generate mutations and disorder in organ systems leading to health problems and eventual death, Resistance is responsible for failing lives of individuals whose reach fades before it could achieve its potential.

“Someone once told me the definition of hell; on your last day on earth, the person you could have become will meet the person you became,” says an anonymous quote which, I’m confident to state, speaks to the very essence of everyone’s being. Every little action accumulates over the course of years and decades, leading to some result. When we take a time-slice of our life at, say, here and now, whether we admit it or not, we look at all the sleepless nights, all the hours of work and entertainment and meaningless instant gratification that had piled up.

The ideal self we are to meet at the end of our journey is, fortunately, precisely what it is: an ideal. Just like a perfect rigid body or a frictionless surface. It does not exist anywhere in reality, but nevertheless serves an essential role in all practical calculations that allow mankind to land on the Moon. Most importantly, it simplifies the model of reality to a minimum required level of complexity to complete a certain task (maneuver a spacecraft towards Moon orbit, for example). Without this theoretical model, the practical implementation would be reduced to uneducated trial and error, much like man’s early attempts to fly which often involved some flimsy contraption and a leap from considerable height, often leading to certain death.

Combatting Resistance

The overwhelming complexity of tasks at hand, the amount of different things to do, lack of sleep, distraction, sources of instant gratification, discouragement, criticism, and many more aspects of our lives, prevent us from doing what we desire to do. This applies even to more technical areas of expertise, like software development. Pressfield’s take on Resistance comes from a writer of novels and screenplay, mine will tune in for areas like software development where intense focus and working memory for extended periods of time is required.

Tip 1: Regular Schedule

This point cannot be emphasized more. Regularity is not only what produces natural order, it is downright essential for survival among species that evolved on the surface of a planet with a day/night cycle. We excrete melatonin which helps us fall asleep when it gets dark, and the lack of which wakes us up when our environment becomes brighter. Some, including me, may experience longer streaks of focus even after sunset, pulling all-nighters. All of this is not a good long-term strategy. Some can shift their cycle a few hours forward, allowing them to work till late AM, but still require regularity in the time they wake up at. Shift from the natural light/darkness cycle is unavoidable especially during winter, but still if the society you live in becomes mostly active at 9 AM, you should as well. One 9 AM appointment or meeting you have to attend, and your late-night-shifted schedule goes down the drain.

Tip 2: Mindfulness Meditation

When I first started meditating, my mind was so preoccupied with thoughts I haven’t been able to achieve any progress or regularity in my practice. It was only a few years later when I was so preoccupied with duties, working on my diploma thesis while completing courses and coding for a company, that I tried again, this time via a guided meditation course – Waking Up by Sam Harris. To my surprise, after only a few sessions of sitting down an becoming a passive observer of first, my breath, and then the surrounding environment, I started becoming more present and focused after only five minute sessions.

This could be attributed to the relative sensory deprivation I experienced during these sessions compared to the unfocused days I had been experiencing. I spent most hours of the day working, but I resorted to watching unproductive YouTube content and other forms of procrastination whenever I encountered an obstacle of some form, so I wasn’t really working, and on top of that, my brain was overstimulated to such a degree that sitting down to complete my assignments was like the most mundane thing ever. It took not doing anything for a few minutes to cool down my desensitized brain and be stunned by how much more I can focus at tasks at hand. However, this is not a universal experience for most people, and usually most people require extended periods of regular practice to feel some results in their life.

Nevertheless, sensory deprivation in any form, practiced regularly is by far the most efficient long-term form of personal development I am aware of. Moreover, I’ve come to understand that intrusive thoughts present in one’s meditation are not an enemy. Thet are a natural occurence, like weather patterns. Interestingly enough, when taking an “outside observer” perspective on an appearing thought leads to it dissipating into nothingness just like a cloud of smoke. This practice becomes increasingly important when encountering self-doubt and other negative emotions, leading to counter-productive impulsive behavior.

Tip 3: Partitioning Larger Tasks into Smaller Bits

TODO Lists become relevant when their individual elements hold sufficient explanatory value to their author (and performer). Writing down “dishes”, “send mail”, “vacuum the apartment” does not require any additional partitioning because all of these items are clearly defined. Dishes will be done when there are no dishes in the sink and perhaps also when the kitchen doesn’t look like a mess. Mail is sent when it is sent, and the apartment vacuumed when all of its rooms are sufficiently dust-free. There is also a risk of spending too much time on self-micromanagement by writing every single mundane thing down into TODO lists (e.g.: sleep, eat, hygiene…).

More complex tasks such as software bug tickets and new feature development, however, become too large to grasp for our minds, especially when lacking previous experience in the relevant areas. The key is to find at least a few first incrementable steps, e.g.:

(1) reproduce the bug,
(2) locate the bug in code and find out what the correct/incorrect value discrepancy is,
(3) figure out at what point the incorrect value is generated,
(4) analyze the source of incorrect input values and how it’s behavior covers the relevant setup…

After more information becomes available, the TODO list accumulates more items, or has its previous items updated. Most importantly, it serves as a trail of breadcrumbs for you to be able to return to a previous state without sacrificing too much progress. This approach is light years beyond simple trial and error or spending days copying code on a piece of paper, trying to understand what it does (been there, done that).

Tip 4: Setting Boundaries for Your Focus

As I mentioned in the previous section of this post, I’m using a Pomodoro timer set for 25-minute work sessions, separated by 5-15 minute breaks. The idea is that one’s attention can be maintained for 20 – 30 minute intervals, and unless separated by short breaks, it becomes weaker. People then tend to procrastinate or move in circles. I personally place most relevance on the concept of setting boundaries for my focus. Sitting down and focusing for a few minutes appears more manageable and less overwhelming than for 8 hours, which also revisits the idea of partitioning tasks into manageable bits.

John Sonmez’s Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual goes even as far as to being able to estimate how many days a task will take based on how many Pomodoro sessions can be done during a single day and whether the manageable bits in one’s TODO list coincide with the 25-minute work sessions. For me personally, the 5-minute interruptions become annoying and I tend to ignore them after I gain more momentum, especially in the late stages of solving a particular problem. I find that the Pomodoro technique is most relevant at early stages of problem solving, when the problem is too large to swallow and the specification too unfocused. This is the time when Resistance is most powerful for me.

Boundaries are also crucial for maintaining work-life balance. Most companies expect 8-hour work days without paid overtime. Putting in too much time usually leads to unproductive unfocused work. For this reason I set a minimum amount of, say, 3 – 5 Pomodoro sessions during a regular day, and the rest is up to me and the momentum I’ve gained after the minimum amount of sessions. Afterwards, even when flooded with many ideas on how to solve a particular problem, one should cease to work after a certain amount of time and do something else (socialize, spend time with loved ones etc.). This is, particularly, a weak spot in my implementation of this tip because once I gain enough momentum, there’s very little I can do to stop, leading to pulling all-nighters, sacrificing relationships etc.

Tip 5: Use External Forces as Tools

Deadlines are, usually, the greatest motivator for most of us. Those that pulled through multiple sleepless days of completing entire projects in college understand that as much as we’d love to be free and independent, an external contract is way more powerful than one’s willpower. Failing a course in college, losing a customer, or being fired from a job will inevitably be a far more devastating failure than not maintaining a personal contract with yourself. We are hardwired to feel the pain of exclusion because we are social animals, willing to sacrifice a lot to be valuable members of the society. Therefore I do not underestimate the power of “officially commiting” to some endeavor, be it school, day-job, freelance contract, or starting a business. Once people expect you to deliver something, it becomes much harder to give in to Resistance and quit. So if there is an opportunity to get into a position of being expected to deliver some results in the area you want to pursue, seize it. Consider it a tool developed by the civilisation one lives in, much like using a debugger instead of print statements, or a car instead of walking.

Tip 6: A Healthy Amount of Daily Diversity Breeds Novelty

Work that requires a lot of focus should not be interrupted by less important tasks. There is no such thing as multitasking, only rapid context switching. This context switching becomes quite expensive when performing focused work requiring a lot of working memory. However, referring to Tip 4 switching activities after a substantial block of time spent on focused work, sets boundaries, and thus helps motivate one to move faster and focus on the most relevant tasks at hand. The new activity, however, needs to be different enough from the previous one, so that the brain can actually switch between contexts, preferably to a less focused state. For example, I finish my regular 8-hour work day by 1-2 hours of exercise, after which I eat and spend a few more hours on side projects. The novelty element generated by such routines puts more momentum into these activities.

Tip 7: Productivity Accumulates

One may be tempted to believe that there is no way of accomplishing more than the absolutely necessary tasks throughout the day. This might be true, but only to the extent of the tasks themselves. Not only can simple activities like, making your bed, washing the dishes after you’re done eating, etc., improve your overall existence during the day, they also take way less time and effort than major tasks like work presentations, or coding. If you’re like me, you can take hours to wash dishes, but when there’s someone coming over in 10 minutes, you can easily cram all the housework into this short timeframe. Clearly, you shouldn’t do everything during the last minute, but consider how short can menial tasks, that don’t take much of your attention, actually be. Sometimes when I’m feeling slow in the morning, I push myself to eat basic breakfast, drink coffee, and move out within less than 30 minutes because the very act of accelerating from zero to max early on has a motivating effect on my psyche. When I come to work afterwards, I feel less urge to procrastinate because I have already done some work against Resistance in the morning, so why should I slack off now? Moreover, maintaining order in your surrounding environment is also a productivity booster.

Tip 8: Do the Most Intellectually Challenging Task Early On

Our energy does, in fact, wane over the course of, say, 16 hours of being awake, certainly to a point that in the evening we are no longer capable of performing the same hardcore focused tasks as we were able to accomplish in the morning. Some people might take longer to wake up, but our brains are most capable during the first few waking hours, after which they go down before lunch, and come up a few hours later after much of our food was digested. If I were to choose between doing the dishes and implementing a complicated algorithm, I’d prefer to do the latter as early as possible and mess around with dishes before I go to bed. Even more technical tasks can be graded according to their demands on operating memory and scheduled during a day in descending order (from the hardest, to the most automatic).

Tip 9: Avoid Perfectionism & Quitting After Losing Interest – Be A Finisher

One of the most vile manifestations of Resistance I’ve been experiencing throughout my life was messing around with a project or goal, found out it was much more complicated than I’d previously thought, only to abandon it and start a new one. My portfolio had accumulated exactly zero successful projects over years. I felt terrible because even though I put a lot of effort into things to make them truly stand out, they became so unfinishable that I either just lost interest in them or took way longer than necessary to finish them.

Ever since I started working in a Scrum-based team, I came to appreciate the value of small incremental changes. There is no possible way to get everything right on the first try, and whatever you start as a beginner will suck. You just have to move on, and start the following project after finishing the previous one to the minimum required level (i.e. I’m supposed to implement a login client, and all it does is log users in, nothing fancy). Finishing something that satisfies at least minimum requirements is more powerful than it seems, creating a mental note that one moves in the right direction.

We deal with improving the quality of our content after each individual iteration has already received some feedback, otherwise we can only daydream about all the possible things we might (one day) want to do, so our project is the most perfect project in the universe. Yeah, not really. Just stick to the minimum requirements.

Tip 10: To Err Is Human

We are far from perfect, and literally no one, not even the most impactful human beings in the history of our civilization, have met their ideals. That is to say: one should not let themselves be overwhelmed by the guilt of not meeting their own expectations up until this point. What matters is the action taken from now on. The paralyzing guilt of not meeting one’s own standards is, according to Pressfield, also a manifestation of Resistance. Furthermore, due to the impermanence of focus and the ever-present Resistance, relapse to old ways is to be expected, the probability of which increases with longer streaks of productive time periods. Again, what matters is the rate of recovery. The faster one jumps back to action, the less negative impact the relapse period has on one’s success. For me personally, any action, even doing the dishes drags me from the hole I had unknowingly slipped into. This article serves the same purpose.

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Although the notion of Resistance has taken roots in the form of a slightly different (but still somewhat similar) concept in psychology, perhaps, there will come a time when the “Pressfield-type Resistance” responsible for lack of motivation in productive endeavors will be distinguished and studied by psychologists and neuroscientists as a natural phenomenon, just like entropy in physics and information theory. Until then, it will remain in the realm of self-help literature. Nevertheless, it becomes a useful tool for conceptualizing reality in one’s life because it explains the changing tendencies and fluctuating motivation pitfalls we experience. Resistance is, according to Pressfield, an impersonal force that erodes all individuals without bias, and those that fight it most efficiently are the ones that seem the most immune to it.