Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?
My biggest tip: minimize what you do.<p>Since you want to do more, I know this sounds crazy. But when I set up a personal kanban system, it really changed my life. You establish a backlog of what you want to do. Then you limit the amount of work in process (WIP). That gives you a very small number of open tasks to switch between, which means you end up increasing your focus and being forced to finish things. (Or at least clearly admit that you&#x27;re quitting a thing.)<p>This process is, honestly, pretty unpleasant at first. Being a passive consumer pays off <i>right now</i>. There&#x27;s always a new article, a new tweet. When you&#x27;re bored, you just skip ahead. Real work is frustrating and pays off very slowly. So you&#x27;re going to spend months just breaking yourself of your quick-entertainment habits and learning to put up with the frustration of longer scale.<p>If you really struggle, consider trying out the pomodoro system, which involves fixed periods of focus with breaks. E.g., 25 minutes of work with 5 minutes of break. When I&#x27;m feeling really resistant to production and just want to fuck around on the Internet, I&#x27;ll tell myself, &quot;Ok, one pomodoro of work on the project.&quot; I&#x27;ll set my countdown timer and just fucking do the work for 25 minutes, no matter how much I don&#x27;t want to. Often after that, I get into it and it&#x27;s fine. But that first wall of resistance can be brutal.<p>The other thing that really helped me is taking up running. Pick a race, like a 5K. Train for it and do it. Then pick another race. The main trick to running successfully is not giving up. You learn to put one goddamn foot in front of another. Some days it&#x27;s a joy and some days you hate it, but that ends up not mattering so much. You slowly learn that your feelings are just these things your brain does. You can notice them without having to obey them.