The Repeating 3-Week Pattern: What I Learned by Finishing the Last Course Myself

POCU video lectures come with transcripts that someone already cleaned up once. The content is mostly accurate, but the line breaks and punctuation are all over the place. To use them in an automated pipeline, they need to be reorganized. One student had been helping me with that work for several years on a part-time basis.

He worked on multiple courses, and strangely, the pattern was always the same.

He did exactly 3 weeks of content very well. Then he disappeared.

A few months later he would reappear, apologize, finish another 3 weeks, and disappear again. It did not matter which course it was; the pattern repeated every single time.

And now that I think about it, it was not because he was lazy. It is simply that the work itself was the kind that wears people out.

I finally understood this very clearly when I tried doing it myself.

The last course, and an 8-month gap

This time, the task he received was truly the last remaining course. Finishing this one would complete a multi-year transcript improvement project. As usual, he completed the first 3 weeks perfectly.

Then he disappeared again. Three weeks later he showed up, extremely apologetic. I could feel his guilt and pressure right through the messages. That heavy feeling of "I know I should do it, but I just cannot get myself to do it."

And after finishing another 3 weeks, he disappeared again. This time, the gap was especially long. About 8 months.

The weight of the guilt he had shown before felt too heavy. I realized it would not be good for either of us to drag this out any longer.

So I decided to finish the last course myself.

And then… I also got stuck exactly at the 3-week mark

Once I started working on it, I realized something funny. I also stopped right at the 3-week mark.

The beginning went smoothly. Cleaning up sentences felt satisfying, and the progress was visible. I thought, "This is going pretty well." The speed was good too.

But the moment I crossed the 3-week line, suddenly nothing was left except endless repetition. The interest vanished. My motivation and energy drained at the same time. I even started disliking myself for sitting at the desk.

That is when I realized:

"Ah… this must have been exactly what he felt every time he stopped at 3 weeks."

Honestly, I had quietly wondered, "Why can he never finish it?" But once I experienced the same block, I had no right to judge him.

To be even more honest, he was better than me. At least he had the courage to apologize and come back after a few months. I was just annoyed at myself.

To keep going, I started stacking reasons

Even so, this time I could not run away. This was the final course. If I dropped it, no one else would pick it up.

So I started collecting reasons to pull myself back to the desk.

1) Finishing this opens the automation pipeline

It is annoying now, but finishing this task will reduce future annoyance hundreds of times over.

2) I cannot enjoy fun projects if this is left unfinished

New lectures, system development, interesting experiments… I want to do all of them, but this unfinished task keeps weighing on my mind.

3) And coincidentally, I was sick for a few days

Strangely, mentally intensive work becomes impossible when I feel unwell, but simple repetitive work actually becomes easier. On the day my condition was the worst, this task progressed the fastest.

Holding onto these reasons, I decided to switch into machine mode again.

In the end, I became a machine once more

People have often told me since I was young that I seem like a machine. I could never tell whether it was a compliment or an insult. But working on this again reminded me why they say that.

I am someone who suppresses emotions well, and once I decide to do something boring and repetitive, I push through it until the end. Emotions can be processed later.

So I finished the rest in just 5 days.

Truly like a machine.

"If I feel less pain doing something others find painful, maybe that is my job"

After saving the final file, I remembered something from the book Atomic Habits. I am paraphrasing, but the idea was this:

What matters is not whether you like the work, but whether you feel the pain less than others do. If you can endure something that others struggle with, that might be the work you are meant to do.

That was exactly the case with this transcript-cleaning task.

For many people, this kind of work is unbearably boring and painful. But I am, unfortunately, someone who feels that pain a little less. So I was the one who ended up finishing this long project.

It is not something to brag about. It is simply how I am wired. You could call it persistence, or stubbornness, or if we are being very honest… just being a bit rigid.

Still, someone had to finish this work, and it happened to be me.

And now, finally, I can move on to the fun things with a lighter heart.