Does anyone else struggle with procrastination when learning something?

Question

I don't know is wrong with me...I've literally wasted a week here trying to dive into learning D3.jsI read a few paragraphs into the documentation, and then it's on to something else.I have this massive sense of dread even thinking about planning to learn it later.It's not difficult to read, I have read through plenty of dryer documentation sites in the past.I think part of this all stems from the fact that I tried to play around with D3 a few years ago and gave up on it rather quickly.I seem to do the same thing with movies... if I start one and don't finish it for whatever reason... it's basically guaranteed that I will never finish watching that movie.My mind has simply been made up that "it's bad enough that you stopped before, so why bother continuing?"I don't really expect any response to this, it was cathartic enough writing it all out.Thanks for reading if you did this far!

topmonk · Accepted Answer

I have a similar problem. I think I need external motivation, like a job or being a member of a team, to really be motivated to do something. Since I retired early, in my mid 30s, though, I don't have this kind of environment.
When I work alone, just a trickle of productivity comes out, unless I really push myself.
Once, I forced myself to work 4 hours a day for months to push a project out. I was able to accomplish this, but I was quite miserable when I was working.
Before I retired and was working for a company, I was able to push out 10 hours a day including a day on the weekend, and felt fine.
I keep thinking if there was only some way to create a team like environment I'd be able to accomplish a lot more, but I'm not sure how to do that. Reporting my results to others who aren't invested in what I'm doing doesn't seem to work. So, I don't know.

mikece · Answer

By far, the most effective motivation to concentrate on and learn something is being assigned to debug/add features in a language/stack I&rsquo;ve not used yet. While this certainly lights a fire and gives me the concentration I need to learn how to get the task done I do wish I had more time to follow up with &ldquo;now that I&rsquo;ve done X in language Y and platform Z, I&rsquo;d like to loop back and actually learn language Y and platform Z &mdash; but I have a new assignment...&rdquo;

PopeDotNinja · Answer

I think it's okay to procrastinate through something that's s really boring. For the last week I've been wrestling with Webpack because I've told myself that I should really be better at frontend stuff, and Webpack has been blocking me in just including stylesheets, JavaScript, fonts, and including a third party theme. It's not that hard, but it's really boring & frustrating to figure out, and the documentation for static assets in the web framework is quite stale. When. I do start working on it, my attention span wants to go elsewhere pretty fast.After a week of chipping away at it as I had time and interest, today it clicked and I started to get it. Sticking with it was key. You have to decide for yourself whether whatever you want to learn is worth the pain, but I think it is useful to learn to stick with things long enough to figure them out.

mavsman · Answer

Amen to the team/peer accountability stuff. It just so happens that I'm in a similar situation with wanting to learn D3. Email me at bradydowling at Gmail if you want to chat and we can come up with some kind of plan for learning together or holding each other accountable.

fforum · Answer

For me it's so important to be able to play with what I want to learn right away, especially with programming. If you want to learn D3 for example, maybe find a live version of D3 on the web where you can see it modify and change right away. You need to see results almost instantly as a beginner to stay motivated, unless you intuitively KNOW how good success shall feel.