Trouble doing tasks I'm not interested in

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I'm having a problem of motivating myself to do tasks that I have absolutely no interest in. I haven't had this all my life, but I felt it start during my senior year of high school, and it's gotten worse each year. I can focus for hours on programming, video games, and researching some narrow topic on the internet, but typing a one page paper for English class is like a monumental task for me. It's extremely hard to find motivation to do such things. I force, and I mean force, myself to start working on it, and all I can think of is improving this algorithm for a game I'm making, and then I bust out the terminal and text editor and start coding away, even though I know I should be working on the English paper. Sometimes, I just sit there stuck just turning my chair back and forth, wishing I had the motivation. The only time I can actually get motivation and work on it is by staying up late after midnight the night before the paper is due, and give it a half-assed attempt, and this makes me feel horrible because I'm tired and need sleep, and under pressure to get this done.

Has anyone else had this problem and was able to overcome it? Is this common for someone with Aspergers or ADD?

I have trouble with it, too, but I just force myself anyway. Which is very tough, but I manage eventually. ><

The brain is busy assigning values to objects, I take it that yours doesn't value English highly. Thats a shame seeing how you use it all the time.

Thankfully when you leave education and get a job it will hopefully be something that interests you so you no longer have this problem (at least to the same degree). I was the same at school, the subjects I had no interest in I was terrible at, couldn't motivate myself at all. Even when I went to uni there was one or two classes I had no interest in and I really struggled. Now I have a "proper" job it's pretty rare I end up having to do anything I have no interest in.

Perhaps you should look at the English language the way I look at it, in itself a kind of computer code generating the world that we live in, namely our mind, a kind of computer game.

That's pretty much how I view language. It's basically like a programming language with syntax and structure, except that English is chock full of nonsensical rules and exceptions. I was and still am very advanced in the mechanics aspect of language. However, language isn't really the issue here. It's about the subject matter. It feels like I have this general apathy for things outside my special interests. I'm sure I could write on and on about Dijkstra's algorithm and how it works, but analyzing literary techniques in Kate Chopin's The Awakening is not something I care about at all. I guess I'm a very interest driven person. As important as grades and maintaining my GPA are, it doesn't seem to motivate me as much as doing things I enjoy. I'm trying to break this project down into pieces and making it a goal to do a paragraph a day, and I'll see if that helps.

Fortunately, this is the last literature course I'll ever have to take, and I'm taking it over the summer to reduce the work load during the fall, and it will be mostly computer science courses from here on out which is a lot better.

For me I look at language as a form of measurement, we are constantly measuring the world in which we live, measuring each other. Do you ever find yourself considering the relationships between people in terms of computer code. I don't know anything about computer programming so I'm very interested to hear your ideas.

Yeah I feel that way sometimes, I think even neurotypicals feel that way. just not to the same extent, autistic people have stronger interests and as such stronger apathy towards things. It's a pro and con sorta thing. What's the language that you use most often? I'm studying front end then I plan on studying back end. I'm in a similar situation I love programming its relaxing and I enjoy the pure logic but i don't always enjoy learning to programming. I like to know how everything works and is connected to other things but the videos I watch to learn generally don't explain things fulling on a slightly lower level. I find that lack of understanding stressful and it leads to me needing to do more mental work then necessary and it makes it far less enjoyable. I wonder if it's a similar thing with the English the fact that it's not logical but a combination of different languages with conflicting rules makes you less interested. I'd be interested in talking more on programming. I'm trying to build programming connections.

@Brandon30, English is my native language, and the one I use almost all the time. If you mean programming language, I mainly use C for my personal stuff. We also use Java a lot at my university. I was also kind of puzzled at first by lack of understanding. I found that after I learned low-level assembly language, it cleared up a lot of questions I had about higher level languages such as C. You can PM me if you want to talk more about programming.

This is a huge tangent we're going off into, but I'm happy to explain since you're interested. I can't really say that I can compare computer code to personal relationships, or language as a form of measurement. I guess I could see relationships involving measurement, since it requires you to measure the person's emotions and yours, and act accordingly. I do compare language to computer code, though. Both are ways of expressing an idea using words and symbols in a structured way. Consider the sentence "I went to the park." and the C code "int a = max(x, y);". In C, each statement ends with a semicolon, just like each sentence in English ends with a punctuation mark. In that code snippet, I'm declaring (creating) a variable called "a" whose type is int, and I'm assigning it a value using the equal sign. "min" is a subroutine that returns a value and takes two parameters. I'm calling min and passing in the values of two variables "x" and "y", which were declared before, and putting the result of that into variable "a". Similarly, the English sentence has a syntax just like code does. There's a subject "I" followed by a verb "went". And then there's the phrase "to the park" which describes "went". Even further, "the park" describes "to" by specifying the target of that preposition. And finally, "the" is an article (which is a type of adjective) that describes "park". If you mix up the sentence, like "to I park went the.", it doesn't follow the structure, and is nonsensical. Similarly, "x max ) = , y a(;" is not valid C code, and is nonsensical.

I'm just having a hard time getting motivated for things I'm apathetic about, and I'm looking for advice on how to make that easier.

I started learning JavaScript then a bit of Java. I have almost no knowledge of c, assembly, thought sounds like that would help though. I don't like not knowing how native methods and functions are working and the videos sometimes teach in a top down going from less detailed to more detailed instead of detailed to less detailed, so my mind races trying to figure out the finer details which are absent. I try to make a bunch of connections I know exist but lack the necessary data to make those connections.

I sometimes try to trick my brain into temporarily classifying something I'm apathetic about as something I somewhat enjoy, by conciously thinking about what I feel when I'm doing something I enjoy, which we can call thought A. Then I try to think about some of the positives of the thing I'm trying to do which we can call thought B. Then I try to tack on those feelings from of thought A on to thought B. It's a hit or a miss and may take a few tries if it works. So maybe think about how English is a language and try to temporarily tack on the feeling you get when working with programming languages. I hope that helps

I can see that you are very interested in coding.

One of the greatest successes in the last few years has been Mark Zuckerberg (maybe spelt wrong) and Facebook he combined a knowledge of programming with ideas about how people think particularly the way they communicate and relate to each other. Literature is also supposed to help in this regard.

Just a thought.