This feeling is an extension of the "HN complex", I think. You see when people post amazing things on Show HN, but you don't see when people are sitting around watching House of Cards. It's the developer version of "everyone on Facebook is having more fun than I am." Try to remind yourself that your perception of others is warped.
Past that, I've struggled with this feeling a bit, and this is what I've come up with (YMMV, of course, but it works for me):
- Keep trying new, productive side projects--just a half hour every couple nights, or something. This could be open source work, MOOCs, reading a book, whatever. Anything that makes you proud of yourself the next morning.
- Eventually, you'll stumble upon something that grabs you--you wouldn't care so much about improving if you didn't enjoy some aspect of what you do.
- If a project grabs you, let yourself get carried away. Buy some red bull. If it doesn't, pat yourself on the back for trying, take a few nights off, and keep trying.
The trick here is to keep moving until something clicks. The advantage of this approach is that you're still doing productive things, but you also have plenty of time to goof off between tries, and (at least in my experience) you'll feel less guilty about it. Forcing yourself to spend your free time on something you don't enjoy to the nebulous end of "self-improvement" will accomplish nothing and make you miserable.
EDIT: after re-reading the OP, I wanted to add that all this is completely optional--if you really do enjoy this self-improvement shtick but have trouble getting started or pacing yourself. There are many, many software developers with great jobs that work 9-5 and go home to their families or non-technical hobbies, and there's absolutely no shame in that. All the corporate blathering about "passion" is just a ploy to depress market wages.
> Try to remind yourself that your perception of others is warped.
I am a strong believer in this effect. I saw it expressed well once in a book, paraphrased: "You are comparing your inside with other people's outside."
I've held on to that concept and its been an important part of me keeping my natural self-pessimism in check.
Interesting, I read this quote with the opposite meaning. I use this quote when you are very critic of others, but lenient with yourself.
Example: corruption. You judge others because they evade taxes. You do it too, but you forgive yourself because you are only evading taxes because you need the money to pay for your mother's treatment.
This way you are very harsh on others, using a very rigid moral judgement. But very flexible on your own moral.
To play devil's advocate: I consciously know this, and absolutely do my best to remembering that my perception is warped.
But the better part of my effort goes towards keeping that self-pessimism in check, simply because I naturally compare myself. I've found it better just avoiding a lot of those perception warpers, or remembering that I live my life at my own pace and as long as I stick to what I want to do, I'm better off than most.
Your last sentence is very true. I have recently discovered a new passion on photography, and I feel great with that. Photography, theatre, singing, woodworking, doesn't matter what it is, as long as you like it.
I only feel guilty doing things that don't improve me, such as playing games or reading HN. I guess one could argue that the concept of "improvement" is fuzzy (why is photography better than playing Dota?), but I have my own classification.
> I only feel guilty doing things that don't improve me, such as playing games or reading HN.
I fell for a trap here, because for me HN feels like improving. I spend my time here mostly on comment threads, and I learn something new every day, while refining my communication skills thanks to reading and participating in thoughtful discussions with many smart people that frequent this site.
Or at least that's how I rationalize to myself the immense amount of time I spend on this site.
I'm starting to classify it as my own interpretation of information diet. HN is like fast-food - very tasty, addicting, but nowhere near as healthy as reading a good book, or even a paper or a good article on some particular subject. I definitely don't want to remove fast-food from my life altogether, but it shouldn't be the main part of the diet.
I learn a lot here, but I think I could be more cost-effective wrt. amount of time I spend on this site. Still figuring out the right balance.
I've noticed that there are extremely diminishing returns here. You get 95% of the benefit of HN in the first 20 minutes of skimming the front page and commenting, and the rest of the time is significantly less beneficial. Thus, I try to only visit it once or twice a day for ten minutes or so, and have reply notification to comments set up.
How do you do that? That would probably cut my procrastination in half! HN used to be connected with some push notification startup and there was an option for it in profile, but it seems missing now.
I've managed to address this by only playing games with an excellent plot/atmosphere/gameplay, ones with a specific beginning and an ending. So it's like reading a good book or watching a good film.
Your concept of improvement making things worthy is interesting, but very subjective. What is the difference between getting better at photography and getting better at playing Dota (or chess for that matter). These kind of discussions evolve into meaning of life debates really fast.
Yeah, I guess there's really no qualitative difference. It's just that I suck too much at DotA to justify the hours upon hours I spend on it, whereas my photography is rather better without spending that much time on it. That makes the latter a more worthy pursuit.
If I had a hope of being a professional DotA player, maybe the distinction would not be as clear.
DotA is a competitive game, and if you compare yourself to other players, you're chasing a moving goalpost while your returns are diminishing. It would be the same if you were measuring your photography skills by one-upping other photographers on a some kind of daily amateur photography tournament.
I like to look at things as training skills (see my 10-100-10k model, [0], nicely improved by noahl). If you never played DotA before and sit on it for a dozen hours of so, you'll be familiar enough with it to decide whether to continue deliberately training it to get better, just play it casually for fun, or drop it altogether. The first implies that you have a goal, so I'd classify this as productive (towards that goal, maybe you really want to be on top of a local ladder, or whatever it is in DotA; I don't play it). The second means that it's just recreation for you, and it's fair to classify it as such. We all need to do something for leisure, one man plays football, another plays guitar, yet another plays StarCraft.
In other words, I classify things as something I either deliberately want to get better at (thus doing it is productive), or do just for fun without caring about improving the skill (thus this is doing things for fun). Both ways of spending time are good, but it helps to be clear about which is which.
I don't think it's as clear as that. I want to get good enough to win Dota most of the time, but the global matchmaking means that I only win 50% of games, and enjoy only a percentage of those.
Similarly, for photography, it frustrates me that I can browse the top page on 500px and see thousands of photos per hour that I can never hope to match even once. Still, I do it because I like it. I don't think I've ever done anything just because I want to get good at it, and I've been programming most of the day for 20 years, because it's fun for me.
All in all, there's a spectrum of the metrics you mention, I don't think it's discrete.
You could use an productive/unproductive distinction.
After some hours of photography, you have some photos which did not exist previously. After hours of DotA you have only some improved muscle memory and so on, nothing tangible.
This heuristic would however rule out the learning of more "worthy" pure skills, jazz piano, unicycling etc.
I think adding creative skills and skills of physical mastery both make for more worthy pursuits. This would cover your jazz piano and unicycling and would exclude the Dota example. It also excludes reading fiction, which I think is not much different from watching a movie or playing a game.
Would it not also exclude learning a foreign language, though? Not to mention that it's pretty arbitrary that those skills are considered worthy, but others aren't...
I don't think I can formalize it easily, sadly. I guess I hate Dota because I play it even though it frustrates me most of the time, and it doesn't leave me with any lasting skill other than itself.
Yeah, as icebraining says, photos by themselves aren't worth anything. It's the improvement to my skill in photography that's worth it (and that's as intangible as my skill in DotA, or programming).
This is an interesting perspective. Is the goal of learning photography not ultimately to bring beautiful (or whatever) photos into the world? Or to achieve self-expression by doing so?
To me, creative skills are not inherently meaningful until practiced. Except I suppose for improving ones self-image as a "creative person," which is ultimately a self-destructive pursuit.
If one goes around "being a maker" without actually making, that distinction exists only within ones head. Seems pretty solipsistic.
Ah, I see what you mean. There are probably extrinsic and intrinsic components in everything. In that light, Dota is like most sports, you play because you like it, but you also produce a spectacle to fans in the process.
Photography, for me, is similar. I take photos because I like the process and the output, not specifically so other people can see them. There's a tradeoff there, but I'm not sure I could say that playing basketball is useless, for example (although that has more health benefits than Dota).
It's a hard question. Similarly, learning a foreign language feels very useful to me, even though it doesn't produce anything at all.
I think it's just a matter of how much you value being better at photography vs. being better at DotA. If you care about improving a skill, I'd call actions towards it productive.
Having a subjective criterion is fine, as long as it's applied to oneself, and not to judge others. Telling other people what constitutes improvement for them won't go over well, but could be very useful way of deciding how to spend your own time.
"Forcing yourself to spend your free time on something you don't enjoy to the nebulous end of "self-improvement" will accomplish nothing and make you miserable."
You have a financial and ethical obligation to your employer to spend at least some working time thinking of process improvements, and part of that is self improvement. Don't be "that guy" who spends 10 hours a day on youtube and than has to spend 6 hours of overtime frantically trying to keep up with the 8-5 plodders, but you are literally failing in your obligation to your employer if every time you start to lower your nose to the grindstone you don't at least put forth a minimal google effort for a way to eliminate or automate or shrink the very grindstone you're about to impact. Don't let your employer down, do at least a little self improvement every day. If you feel guilty about it, turn one of your ten daily facebook/twitter/HN breaks into class time, just one is better than nothing.
Programming is not a piecework manual labor job. You're supposed to be learning.
Past that, I've struggled with this feeling a bit, and this is what I've come up with (YMMV, of course, but it works for me):
- Keep trying new, productive side projects--just a half hour every couple nights, or something. This could be open source work, MOOCs, reading a book, whatever. Anything that makes you proud of yourself the next morning.
- Eventually, you'll stumble upon something that grabs you--you wouldn't care so much about improving if you didn't enjoy some aspect of what you do.
- If a project grabs you, let yourself get carried away. Buy some red bull. If it doesn't, pat yourself on the back for trying, take a few nights off, and keep trying.
The trick here is to keep moving until something clicks. The advantage of this approach is that you're still doing productive things, but you also have plenty of time to goof off between tries, and (at least in my experience) you'll feel less guilty about it. Forcing yourself to spend your free time on something you don't enjoy to the nebulous end of "self-improvement" will accomplish nothing and make you miserable.
EDIT: after re-reading the OP, I wanted to add that all this is completely optional--if you really do enjoy this self-improvement shtick but have trouble getting started or pacing yourself. There are many, many software developers with great jobs that work 9-5 and go home to their families or non-technical hobbies, and there's absolutely no shame in that. All the corporate blathering about "passion" is just a ploy to depress market wages.