There are times when you just don’t feel like doing anything. It’s like nothing can motivate you to get up and get things done.

I’ve come to realize that this happens to everyone and it’s completely fine to feel this way!

However, it’s very important to be prepared and have a plan for these situations.

Think of it as an emergency response plan for when you’re not motivated to do anything. Like a government’s emergency plan for responding to disasters.

Here is my plan for dealing with days when I feel down.

Step 1: Write a little note for your future unmotivated self

Tell yourself that’s it’s okay to be feeling this way. Explain that you’ve experienced this before and you have a step-by-step process for breaking out of this loop.

Step 2: Understanding why you don’t want to do anything

You need to understand why you’re feeling this way. Is there a specific feeling or need that’s making you unmotivated? Maybe you’re just hungry or tired or afraid. Simply understanding what you’re feeling will help you feel better.

Step 3: Put together a step-by-step plan for handling this situation

Make everything very easy for yourself. Tell yourself to only think about (or write down) one task that has to be done that day. You don’t have to do it. Just think about it.

Then only think about the simplest first step that has to be taken.

For example, if I have to send an email, the very first step is to go to my workstation and sit behind my desk. Then think about the next immediate step which in this case could be to turn on my laptop. Thinking about doing tiny atomic steps can make the task less daunting and motivate you to complete it.

Finally, remember that this happens to everyone and it’s completely normal.

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Do a single thing at a time. Keep it simple. Don’t overwhelm yourself. Avoid burnout. Set limits.

List the tasks you need to complete to achieve your main goal.

Break each task into smaller subtasks.

List them based on the order they need to be completed.

Focus on one subtask at a time.

Let’s use building a daily writing habit as an example

My goal is to write an atomic essay a day. To achieve this goal, I need to complete the following daily tasks (in this order):

1. Write and publish content that would be useful to readers
2. Interact with others online who are completing this challenge for support and guidance
3. Read other people’s work for inspiration

To simplify this process I only focus on one of these tasks at a time. And I break down each task into smaller sub-tasks and focus on one subtask at a time.

Subtasks

For example, writing and publishing content can be broken down into:

1. Ideate
2. Write
3. Edit
4. Publish

Again I only focus on one of these tasks at a time and I would break them down even further if possible.

I have also decided to mainly focus on writing and publishing, leaving other tasks to be optional. This is mainly for me to enjoy the writing without overwhelming myself.

Final thought

This is not to say you should also limit yourself. No! Keep it open-ended. List everything that you want to do. But set concrete milestones. Specify what’s enough and what counts as extra points. And take on one small and manageable subtask at a time.

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I have been publishing atomic essays for the past 4 days, and I will be doing this for 30 consecutive days.

It has been immensely rewarding to consistently hit publish every day, and I want to show you how you can experience it too.

99% of people on the internet only consume content, while the other 1% create all the content.

While the internet allows anyone to freely create and distribute ideas, most people choose the easy path and stay passive consumers. Creators who make the most of this opportunity by sharing their ideas are rewarded for their efforts. So why not take advantage?

Reduce Friction. Hit Publish. Join the 1%

People mainly struggle to consistently create content because it can seem like a lot of work. And that can be true if you have to overcome multiple obstacles to produce content.

The solution is to create processes and frameworks that make writing seamless and easy.

Here is my approach for eliminating all possible frictions when writing:

Do One Thing At A Time

There are 3 main steps when writing or creating: Ideate, Write, and Edit

The key is to keep these steps separate from each other.

Ideate

At this stage, just write down ideas no matter how crazy or unpopular they might seem. Don’t worry about expanding and writing about them in detail.

It also helps to do a dedicated ideation session the night before and go straight to writing during your writing session.

Write

Do not hit the delete key. Do not go back and change words. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar. Just write!

Avoid the fear of starting from a blank page by using templates.

Edit

In this final step quickly fix any spelling or grammatical errors and rearrange your writing if needed.

Make sure you use automated tools such as Grammarly to quickly identify these errors.

Writing Will Be More Enjoyable if You

Allocate most of your time to writing and ideation and spend as little time as possible editing.

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Are you applying for data science and machine learning roles and not hearing back from companies?

In fact, 95% of your applications to job boards will go unnoticed.

On top of that, you have no control over the response time. It could take months before you start hearing back from employers.

Here is how you can gain more control over your job search and avoid shooting in the dark.

Send out cold emails and messages.

There is no downside to sending cold messages but there is a huge upside.

It can increase your response rate to 30%. Compare this to the 5% response rate from job boards and sending out cold messages becomes a no-brainer.

Send an email to someone who is in a role you’re interested in and ask for a quick chat with them. Prepare to ask questions that help you learn more about the role as well as the person’s experience in this role and at the company.

Create your role even if it doesn’t exist yet.

With smaller companies and startups you can reach out even if there is no relevant opening at the company.

You can message the CEO or the CTO in small companies (< 10 employees) and describe how you can help them leverage data to improve their product, processes, etc.

Read about the company and their product to understand what data they might be collecting and think about how you can add value to the company using this data. Come up with a few ideas and discuss them in your conversation with this person.

Chances are that they have been looking for someone with your capabilities but didn’t have the time or resources to look for the right candidate.

And now you’ve reached out!

I have reviewed thousands of tech resumes from candidates who are interested in working as data scientists, machine learning engineers, data engineers, or software engineers. There is a common pattern of mistakes that almost all candidates make.

Here is a list of the most common resume mistakes and simple solutions for avoiding them.

Not using an available template

Unless you’re designing a creative and out-of-the-box resume, it’s best to use a template to avoid formatting issues. There are lots of freely available templates in LaTex, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs.

Technical skills not reflected in past experience

You should always list all your technical skills (languages, libraries, techniques) on your resume. What’s more important is to reflect all those skills in your past experience or projects to demonstrate how you’ve utilized them in the past.

Vague descriptions of past experience or projects

Make sure all descriptions are clear and detailed. Try to quantify as much as possible to provide a clear picture to the reader. Each bullet point under an experience or project should clearly describe what the situation was, what you did to resolve it and the tools and techniques you used, and the outcome of your efforts.

No links to Github repositories for personal projects listed

While most candidates include a link to their Github profile, they fail to include a link to the specific Github repository associated with a project. This is so simple yet very important. Make it very easy for hiring managers/teams to find your work. Don’t assume that they will search your Github profile to find the projects you’ve listed on your resume.

Finally, look at other people’s resumes in your field for inspiration. Review those resumes assuming you’re hiring for the role and see if you spot any mistakes and make sure you’re not making those mistakes in your resume.

94% of people who start online coding programs quit.

Coding is hard especially when you’re getting started. You will only become better if you code consistently every day. But you cannot build a daily coding habit by just relying on willpower.

The solution is to define personal rules and processes that set you up for success.

Harness the power of checklists

Checklists can guide you when you are lost.

I have a checklist for my mornings. Every morning I have a 2-hour block of alone time for personal development. My checklist is not set in stone and it constantly improves based on my daily feedback.

The checklist is very simple and it guarantees that I make the most of my mornings no matter how I feel that day.

1. Brush my teeth — 15 min
2. Take a walk — 30 min
3. Code — 1 hr
4. Plan for the day — 15 min

Make internal rules and don’t break them

“You can sit here and write or you can sit here and do nothing, but you can’t sit here and do anything else” — Neil Gaiman

I have a similar rule for my 1-hour coding session and it is very effective.

I am allowed to do nothing during that one hour but if I want to do anything it has to be coding.

Even if I feel unmotivated, I will choose coding after 10 minutes of doing nothing as it gets boring.

What if you only have to imagine coding?

Sometimes you just don’t want to write code.

When this happens, tell yourself to only think about the coding challenge. Doing this exercise for a few minutes gets you motivated to actually do what you imagined doing.

I do this during my 30-minute walk in the morning where I think about my day and I imagine how I would approach each item on my checklist and todo list for the day.

In March 2020, I decided to write online.

This decision was delayed for more than 6 months because I wanted to pick the perfect set of tools for setting up my blog. Once I was done with my research into available tools, I finally started aiweekly.github.io in September 2020.

Everything went well in the first month, and I was writing articles every week. But I stopped publishing after the second month. The project failed!

Then everything changed for me in 2022 with a few mindset shifts.

Here are 5 tips to help you start that one thing you’ve been delaying or restart projects you’ve started but failed to maintain.

Tip #1. Take action! Don’t wait for the right moment.

There is only one thing you have control over — your actions.

You have partial control over your mental state, your thoughts, or your feelings. You only have full control over your actions.

“Mood follows action” — Rich Roll

Tip #2. Avoid analysis paralysis.

Don’t look for the perfect app, tool, or process.

If you find yourself debating which app to use, this is your brain tricking you into procrastination.

Show your brain who’s in charge and take action today.

Tip #3. Continuously improve your process.

Start with a simple system and don’t look for the perfect system from day one.

There is no perfect system. The key is to consistently improve your process over time.

Never settle. Keep experimenting and improving.

Tip #4. Make it a social activity.

Use the power of the internet to share your work and learn in public.

This can be intimidating at first but once you start sharing your work the whole process becomes fun.

You’ll learn faster, get immediate feedback, and meet amazing people along the way.

Tip #5. Join a community.

You cannot rely on sporadic actions that depend on your mood or motivation.

Join a community that keeps you accountable to take action consistently every day.

There is no doubt that coding is a valuable skill. And like any other skill the more you do it, the more you learn.

Maybe you’ve tried learning to code in the past but had to quit halfway through. The key is to develop a coding habit that you maintain. I will introduce 4 strategies to make it easier to maintain your coding habit and produce tangible results by making small improvements every day.

1. Avoid anything that delays your coding

Don’t get stuck setting up a perfect environment.

If this is going to be a bottleneck, start with an online environment like replit.com that comes ready out-of-the-box. However, if you know how to set up your coding environment for your desired programming language then go ahead and set it up locally.

2. You learn by coding not watching tutorials

99% of tutorials don’t teach you anything beyond the basics.

Once you know the basics, forget the tutorials and start coding. You don’t need to complete every course, tutorial, or YouTube video before you’re ready to code.

3. Your coding sessions should be only about coding

You need to be 100% focused on writing code during your coding session. For this to happen you can do a few things beforehand:

• Have an arsenal of ideas for coding sessions and keep adding to them
• Pick an idea from your list and plan your session the night before

Some broad idea categories:

1. Solving programming problems on projecteuler.net or leetcode.com
2. Working on a personal side project
3. Contributing to an open-source project
4. Automating a process or task
5. Practicing a new concept by poking around different examples
6. Reading a tool’s documentation and building something simple using the examples

4. Make coding a social activity

Use the power of the internet to share your work and learn in public.

This can be intimidating at first. You might be afraid of being judged if you start sharing in public. But once you start sharing your work, you start learning faster, you get immediate feedback from others, and people share their knowledge with you. You also get to meet amazing people online and build an online audience.

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It took me multiple rounds of trial and error to settle on a list of tools that I use as my second brain.

These tools are all free, but unfortunately they’re not all open-source. I generally prefer open-source tools as you don’t have to risk getting locked into a vendor which later on might charge for the service or remove features that you rely on.

The following tools are still useful although not all are open-source.

My second-brain tools

1. Markfolder https://markfolder.com/
2. This is a tool for bookmarking tweets and organizing them in folders. It is a handy tool with extensions for multiple browsers that allows you to organize your bookmarked tweets without subscribing to Twitter Blue.
3. Pocket https://getpocket.com/
4. Pockets lets you save articles on the web to read later.
5. Hypothesis https://web.hypothes.is/
6. Hypothesis is a free and open-source tool for annotating the web. Pocket also offers a web annotation feature but only to premium users. Hypothesis fills that void.
7. Google Play Books https://play.google.com/store/books
8. I use this for reading and annotating books. The highlights and notes for each book are saved in your Google Drive which you can later review on any device.
9. Momento https://app.momento.fm/
10. This is a smartphone app for annotating podcasts and saving your favourite moments in a podcast.

Daily idea dump sessions

At the end of the day I sit down for an hour for my daily idea dump session.

In this sessions I would go through the content I have saved that day using the tools in my toolbox. I then capture the ideas that resonate with me and use them as a starting point for creating my own content.

I hope this was useful and happy creating.

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So you’ve just started your tech career.

There are a few mistakes you should be aware of that can slow down your progress. Let’s introduce these mistakes and discuss how you can avoid them to become a better engineer and accelerate your career growth.

Mistake #1: Being afraid to reach out when you’re stuck

Avoid spending hours debugging a code while a teammate could help you resolve it in a few minutes.

It gets harder to reach out to someone as you spend more time on a problem and don’t find the solution. Set a rule to spend at least X minutes on a problem before reaching out to someone else, but no more than Y minutes. If you can’t reach a solution by Y minutes then you’d have to ask for help.

Sometime you even find the solution as you’re typing your question to ask a colleague.

Mistake #2: Asking bad questions

Learn to ask good questions.

Once you decide to reach out to a teammate about a problem, you need to ask good questions that make it easy for the other person to give you the information you need.

Here is a list of steps you can take for asking good questions (inspired by an article by Julia Evans on this topic):

1. Do some research before asking your question
2. Find a good time and the right person to ask your question
3. State what you know
4. Ask questions where the answer is a fact
5. Be willing to say what you don’t understand
6. Identify terms you don’t understand

Mistake #3: Avoiding challenges because you think you’re not ready

Nobody is every ready for everything.

The bad news is that early on in your career you will doubt yourself and feel like a fraud. The good news is it’s not just you, everyone else experiences imposter syndrome too. So don’t miss opportunities because you feel like you’re not ready.

There is always more challenges and concepts you are unfamiliar with. And the only way to level up is to stretch yourself and take on those challenges although you feel like you’re not ready.

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