Sounds like you're looking for more hacks.

habits, routines, mindfulness, mantras, mindsets... you're going to hear it all

Maybe it would be first helpful to better understand your problem? Are you?

- Digitally Distracted? You can't stay off HN, Twitter, FB

- A Chronic Procrastinator? You can't will yourself to start work

- Scatterbrained? You jump from thing to thing, never finishing important things?

Assumptions are inherently built into advice, so if you’re looking for some guidance, it may help to be as clear and specific about your problem.

I'm a self-taught developer and went from 1 Lynda course to a career in software. I owe most of my learning to tinkering.

Building small little personal projects just for fun. Taking an interest and trying to manifest it in the form of software.

You put something at stake by trying to make this little toy project work so every time you face a problem you're motivated to figure it out just so you can get to the next step. All the while you're learning from experience. This is a lot like how professional software writing is. Learning in real time from experience.

I definitely relate to this.

Sometimes the anxiety of doing something important makes that something seem much harder than it actually is.

Lowering the bar helps ease that anxiety.

I've picked up a whole flossing habit just by starting with "at least one tooth and then you can stop if you'd like" ha

I did the same thing with flossing! Almost at one year streak now. Glad you've found something that works for you too. :)

I have this idea I like to think about from time to time.

"Know when to be Achilles and know when to be Odysseus."

When it comes to online distractions and addictions, I've found anything that any tool that doesn't offer precommitment and restrictions of editing/removing the intervention will be ineffective in the long run.

If Odysseus could have untied himself from the mast, he would have.

Apps like these seem to be designed for our best selves, when we need help for our worst selves. My best self would probably be successful using this app. But my worst self, probably will ignore the prompts over time until I get annoyed and uninstall the app

My app of choice has been Freedom, where you can set a schedule and prevent quitting the app. I have had problems where I needed to get work done on a website and couldn't so I understand the use case. A work pass feature is something I'll suggest to the Freedom team. But for me as a customer, having success in not over-consuming distracting/addicting sites/apps is immensely more important than the infrequent inconveniences from having to access sites for business/work purposes.

Thank you letting us know your thoughts; you definitely raise some valid points on how much control we should give to our users. In our case, our philosophy is that our product should assist users in making the correct decisions, instead of forcing decisions upon our users.

One middleground we are exploring, though, is making it increasingly more difficult to bypass our interventions each time.

Will be sure to keep an eye on Motion and how the product evolves. Good luck with the product you all.

Thanks!

Depends on your audience.

If you're marketing to tech savvy customers, probably won't matter much

Plenty of apps use .ly, .io and the like. No big deal

If the rest of your branding and marketing is good, probably not a decision to lose sleep over

But again depends on your audience

I recently passed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam. I used acloud.guru to study mostly. Not only are their focused learning tracks based on the different exams (Solutions, Security, Big Data etc.) but there are also more in-depth tutorials for specific services and architectures.

It's a bit pricey at $39.99 a month, but I think for the quality of the courses and the overall number of courses, I think it's worth it

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with acloud.guru

Thanks, that's a good idea.

I think my difficulty remembering the "difficult problems" stems from the problem seeming difficult, but after many flow states and eurekas, I end up with an accomplished task. Then it's on to the next task/feature/product etc.

I can articulate the problem but I can't articulate the eurekas and how I dealt with problem well

Hmm golden handcuffs...

It seems like you feel the work you do, should always be engaging.

What would you do if someone paid you a meager salary to follow what's interesting to you?