Oh the irony. I came across this here, while procrastinating, and decided this was too long so I sent it to Instapaper, where I will probably never read it...
Somewhat off topic but I hadn't heard of Instapaper before, have you used Pocket and if so what do you like better about Instapaper? Looks like they have a speed reading and kindle sync option which is pretty cool.
I use Instapaper. I haven't heard of Pocket. I like Instapaper's really minimal design, their "Instapaper Text" extension, and the ability to save and sort articles for later.
Just procrastinated for 10-15 minutes setting up Instapaper on my machine and on my iPhone and testing it out.
Looks good. Now I can procrastinate more efficiently :)
1. Don't worry about it. We all procrastinate and most of the time it works out OK. Our instincts know what they're doing.
2. Break tough tasks down into very, very laughably small tasks. Don't even worry about doing them. Once the first task in the list is small enough you'll think "sod it" and do it right away.
If you try to improve your self control you will fail. Go with the grain -- either stop worrying, or find a chunk of the task so is tiny and easy that it becomes instantly gratifying to do it.
I didn't even click the article (the pain of reading it seemed too large) so I came directly to the comments.
Awesome tips! "Our instincts know what they're doing" is very true. I tend to procrastinate when two conditions are fulfilled 1) the task is boring/painful, and 2) in the back of my mind, I've already calculated out the time and I can afford to push it until later. Trying to force myself just increases my expected pain of the task, so I should just go with it.
(And look, I'm procrastinating so much I made a HN account so I could comment about procrastination!)
Isn't procrastination a way of converting painfully boring tasks into fun adrenaline rushes? It seems like a pretty good evolutionary adaption: I perform better when all my senses are elevated, so why not?
Problem arises when you don't have a hard deadline (I.e., you are only accountable to yourself).
Which is why on the worst of days I set up timers. "Ok, I'm going to work for 15/20/30 minutes straight and then I'm kicking up my feet". I always keep going after the timer goes off.
The third major one, for me, is "I don't know enough to start on this task, but don't realize it". That's another thing that breaking down the task helps solve.
Our instincts don't know they're doing actually. It's an ancient system that is designed for survival but in the modern world it's easily tricked and manipulated.
Just by doing something over and over, our instinctual caveman brain rewards with dopamine, which automatically forms habits over time. Imagine a caveman looking left and right before he leaves his cave: it just started out as a random occurance, but since he didn't get eaten he gets a dope hit which forms the neural pathways to continue the habit. Great adaptation for basic survival, and social mechanisms will even propagate the habit to others.
However, the habit forming dope reward system doesn't "know" what the behaviors are. It's not making any rational or moral judgement. Habits like addiction are extremely maladaptive, formed by the same feedback loop. This is why withdrawals actually feel like a threat to an addicts' survival. Breaking it feels like a threat triggering a fight or flight response. Trusting your instincts or feelings won't help you break a bad habit.
Thinking can help, though, which is where the forebrain comes in. By thinking, we can break a bad habit by creating a different, better adapted habit to replace it. This requires the force of the will, at least in the beginning until the new and improved neural pathway is formed. But once it is, you'll have a shiny new habit that's actually beneficial.
tl; dr. Think and use your forebrain to form the habits you want.
Both those ideas appear is some form in David Allen's GTD (Getting Things Done). I'm not a particularly big fan overall--I don't much care for systems. But some of his individual ideas include:
- the idea that, if you can do something in 5 minutes or so, just do it rather than keep putting it on to do lists.
- breaking down complex projects into discrete small concrete tasks.
Both are good ideas which do help me.
One thing about procrastination that often seems to be overlooked though is procrastinating about things that really do need to get done sooner or later (If I don't do the expense report, no one else is going to do it for me.) versus procrastinating about doing some project or making some plans because there's a voice questioning whether you really need to or want to do this project at all.
Now, I suppose in the latter case, a hyper-organized person would create an action item to "get more information" or something along those lines. But sometimes letting ideas just sit and percolate in a future projects queue works OK too.
Though I've had the GTD book sitting in my bookshelf (unread) for a few years, I finally read about GTD on a blog just yesterday :-) And that was the one of the things I tried out yesterday. If a task takes around 2 minutes, just do it. And suddenly I felt like I had a productive day. I got many such small tasks done that were just sitting there in the back of my mind causing cognitive load.
The idea of a book that could solve your procrastination problems sitting unread on a shelf is an amusing irony. And I say this as someone who has multiple procrastination books on my shelves. :-)
> the idea that, if you can do something in 5 minutes or so, just do it rather than keep putting it on to do lists.
A small, but important part of GTD: there is a concept of a "capture system". As soon as there's something that's a TODO or task to be done and you are working on something, put it into your capture system, be it a text file, a TODO app, etc. Process the capture system regularly, filing the items into projects (can be as simple as separate TODO lists). So here's the key difference to what you mentioned: only now while you are filing, do you do those tasks that take 5 (or 2) minutes or less.
As a developer who works on my laptop most of the time, I have a global keyboard shortcut that brings up a prompt with textbox that lets me quickly something (appended to a text file) and go back to work without disrupting my flow.
often, no matter how stupidly simple a task is, I'll goo full meta and reflect on how to do it properly, the solve all these problem on paper by reflecting on how to do them properly, hey, time to take cook dinner and the garbage out !
Yes, but there's a fine line between pondering a task or doing "research" and procrastination. I do a lot of writing of various sorts and an editor of mine had the saying that "writing is discovery." By which he meant that, to a significant degree, you have to just get into some tasks before you can know how to complete them.
+1 whenever I really need to get stuff done at work (and particularly helpful when working from home), I split my time into pomodoros. 25 minutes is a short enough time I can fully concentrate, but long enough to actually get a great deal of "knowledge worker" work done.
Admittedly I've never tried it, but from the description, the pomodoro technique would drive me mad. It often takes me more than 20 minutes (sometimes an hour or two!) to get "in the zone" but once I've got my head in the game I can smash through work for hours. The idea of just getting some flow going and then being interrupted seems awful. The only thing I can think of which it really sounds good for is boring, easy tasks that I have to do but really don't want to.
What makes it so good? Obviously it works for a lot of people.
It might not be appropriate for all kinds of work, but there is also a flow aspect to the rhythm of work and rest. Try it for a couple of days and see what happens. The break times may not be as disruptive as you imagine.
It's also (as i was taught) a way to break up the mental processes, giving your brain time to analyze your problems without being so intently focused on them. "Focused" mode for 25m, "Diffuse" mode for 5m
I use a modified version of the pomodoro technique in combination with David Seah's Emergent Task Planner [0].
The problem you describe is familiar to me - once I am in the zone I can continue there for hours, and taking enforced breaks every 20 minutes would force this streak to end early.
To work around this I just made the breaks optional, and use blocks of 15 minutes (as described in the Emergent Task Planner).
So, my timer goes off every 15 minutes. This breaks my concentration for a couple of seconds so I can reset my timer and tick a box to show I have completed another 15 minute block, and then I jump immediately back in to my task. A couple of seconds is not enough to take me out of the zone, but it lets me keep track of my progress on tasks and see where my time has been spent throughout the day.
Personally speaking, my biggest procrastination problems arise when I lack clarity about exactly what I should be working on at this precise moment, or when I finish a task and need to think of what to do next.
My bastardised pomodoro technique solves this problem for me by always making it clear what I should be doing right now. If my mind wanders for a moment, or I get distracted by an urgent task, this list allows me to immediately refocus without any mental effort. When a task is complete I might take 5 minutes as a break, and then jump on to the next task.
If my procrastination problems sound familiar I highly recommend the ETP approach. Print out five of them, grab a timer set to 15 minutes, and give it a try for a week. Make it part of your morning routine - plan out what you want to achieve for the day, write it down, and start the timer!
I recently learned of this via a MOOC, and oh man has it been helping me. 25m chunks of work are much easier to push myself through, and the 5m breaks really give me a sense of freedom.
The length of the day also doesn't seem to weigh on me - i just focus on being completely on task for 25m chunks at a time, and the day flies by. No more `compile; open reddit.com`
Step 2 is key, but does not come naturally to me. In fact, I usually don't notice that a task is big and undefined until I've spent some time stuck, not getting anything done.
I also find it hard to ask for help, so I often get stuck when the next logical step is "admit that you don't know what to do next, and find someone to help."
Your advice sounds a little like telling lonely people go out more and everything will be fine. It's not so simple for a lot of people. I have serious procrastination issues in some areas (anything that involves paperwork) and it's causing me a lot of stress despite having followed your advice many times.
Advice is good if it helps people but you have to resist the urge to generalize.
That is completely opposite of what article implied. Do not
(over)feed the "lets have fun/lets not suffer" monkey (like the point 2 says). Do not ignore the red "consequences" deamon (like point 1 says).
As an engineer who has been fired twice for performance problems, I don't have that luxury.
> Break touch tasks down into very, very laughably small tasks.
This works well if you've used the technology/tool before and you feel like you understand what you are doing. It is very difficult if you are in the circumstance of having to learn things as you go and having to prodding at things and trying things to figure out how things work. In cases like these, it is better to just figure out what the smallest first step is and iterate that way.
Unless of course you have the breathing room to spend time working through a tutorial on whatever set of abstractions you are trying to work with.
> It is very difficult if you are in the circumstance of having to learn things as you go and having to prodding at things and trying things to figure out how things work.
With respect, it sounds like you are describing a problem caused by not knowing the technology/tooling well enough to begin completing the task, rather than a problem directly caused by procrastination.
That being said, one can easily procrastinate the task of learning too :-)
In cases like this, the first item on the to-do list could be a time-limited R&D task where the goal is to learn enough so that you can compose a more concrete plan.
> caused by not knowing the technology/tool well enough.
Yes. But given the average quality of documentation and the fact that the most common advice for how to learn a new technology is just to build something with it, how uncommon is this?
Breaking things into small pieces works great when you know what to do. The tasks that I find myself procrastinating the most are the ones that are hard to break down. For example, right now I need to implement a feature that will touch many parts of a software. I don't know how to do it yet, and figuring out the best way to do it will require a lot of mental effort, because I need to take several technical and business variables into consideration.
This may may have been just the article I needed, but I will never know because I realised it must be a good three or four months since I last refreshed my memory about the events leading up to the Chernobyl disaster.
I read the original Wait But Why essays a few months ago and it really helped. Glad to see there is (not sure which came first) research that backs it up.
I always procrastinate when I want o learn something new. In this case. relearning web technologies and whatnot. The best way I see is to force myself to think up of something that I would find interesting to do.
Something I've noticed with my own procrastination is that it often has a strong emotional component. For example, I'll often procrastinate with anything to do with taxes because, even though I know I HAVE to pay it on an intellectual level, it's emotionally difficult for me to part with money.
Often when I've rationally examined the underlying anxiety it becomes much easier to accomplish things.
Depression is a know cause of adhd type symptoms, which include procrastination. Find a good shrink (I know it's hard and you probably won't listen to me, but on the off chance you are looking for advice just try)
I try to say this whenever the subject comes up, procrastination is a form of anxiety and is a real mental health issue. You should talk to a professional about it if it's affecting your life.
It comes and goes, for me. I notice I'm much more susceptible to falling into a procrastination/unhappiness loop if I haven't done any exercise for a while. Energy starts to wane, and if I trip into procrastination, it kind of builds on itself and gets worse.
Procrastinate -> Feel Bad -> What's the point -> So far behind -> Procrastinate...
I would have to say that my problem has more to do with too many easily available distractions, instead of procrastination. I made a point that while at work my browser was never used for anything except work and email was only to be read and answered at specific points during the day, and sometimes only at the end of the day. In addition, I discouraged anyone from sending me personal email to my work address so any personal items were addressed when I got home. All of this seemed to cure my "procrastination" problem.
I feel like I can attribute my procrastination to a few things
1. choice paralysis
I'm fairly certain I have a cavity in one of my teeth, I can basically see it when I look in the mirror, in addition to sensitivity to temperature. So I need to find a dentist a) in my area b) that accepts my insurance. There are multiple options. I want to know who the optimal dentist is; I want the one who can pull off a painless root canal if need be, but I definitely don't want the one who will cause agony or perform a procedure incorrectly. I think, maybe I'll Google them and see if I can find any reviews or other indications that one dentist is better than the next. Confronted by 20 options, I spend more time on the whole thing than I need to, optimizing the odds that I get distracted along the way.
2. various forms of anxiety, mostly social anxiety
I really don't want to call and talk to a stranger on the phone to schedule that appointment. I'm not even that bad at talking to people, and yet it makes my heart race. I'm afraid to drive to places that I've never been, to awkwardly enter an unfamiliar building trying to figure out where to go. I'm afraid of not being able to find a parking space. I'm afraid of a lot of stupid things that don't matter.
3. extreme lethargy
Is something I've been trying to overcome for literally years. Inadequate nutrition is the main factor in this. I am mentally and physically tired almost all of the time, to varying degrees, which slows me down, and makes it harder to focus on something. I don't eat right, sometimes eating but a single meal in a day. Sometimes I will eat nothing substantial for an entire day. I recently tried "Mealsquares" (basically Soylent in solid form) as means to ensure I get all the nutrients I need. I've yet to be able to eat more than 2 in a day (usually just 1), which would equate to 400-800 calories at most. At 6' height, a target weight of a 170lbs requires me to consume an excess of 2000 calories per day, so imagine getting 1/4-1/2 of that on average per day. I don't even know how I get through the days as well as I do, what is my body running on? I actually know how to prepare multiple meals, I just don't. Instead of hunger making me voracious, it makes me feel lazy and depressed. If hiring a full-time cook were affordable, I would do it.
At the end of the day, nothing is getting done if I simply don't have the fuel to power my body to do it.
Procrastination feels like a pattern, a vicious cycle that feeds on itself, a loop from which I'm trying to break free. I'm trying to reverse it and emerge on top, and it sounds like something that can be turned around in a week, but I feel like it's been an upward battle for most of my adulthood.
Some people call it procrastination, other people call it thinking. A little bit of procrastination is correlated with increased creativity. When people procrastinate too little or too much, they are less creative, but when they procrastinate just enough to get away from the problem but not too far away, then new perspectives pop up.
That title sure promises a lot. I read all the way to the end and this is their solution:
1. Forgive yourself
2. Ignore your feelings about whether you're in the mood to work on it
3. Break it down into small steps
I would say #2 is easier said than done for an extreme procrastinator. But, decent article. Sometimes it's good just to hear that change is possible.
I would add to it that once you adopt new patterns they can set in and make productivity easier. It's sort of like drinking or other chronic problems.. It's rooted in your DNA and you do have to watch out for it creeping up on you, but the more successful you are the easier it gets.
In my case, making really granular todo lists and then crossing things off helped establish a rhythm. It showed me I could in fact accomplish a lot. It does take time to make and prioritize the list, but good prioritization is really important and totally worth it. Wunderlist helped a lot. Made it super easy to add things, prioritize in free moments, and constantly check it and "live by the list".
I would still let some high priority stuff live on top of the list for weeks sometimes, but I could forgive myself for those lapses more readily because I could see how overall better I was doing. And that vastly increased my chances of eventually tackling those big scary tasks as opposed to spiraling into a negative feedback loop.
As the article notes, it really is about emotional management. Todo lists would be useless without structuring them in a way that lets you build up emotional gratification and self confidence.
Neil Fiore's "The Now Habit" deals with the emotional baggage and provides techniques (including "time boxing" which is championed by The Pomodoro Technique) for dealing with the emotional baggage.
I have found both books very helpful, especially in terms of dealing with my emotional self-sabotage ("why bother starting, you know you're not going to get it right.")
I was thinking about this article and feel it 'clicked' for me. Especially since HN had another article about procrastination recently [1]. I know abalone is saying it's all about emotional management but...I feel the writer of the article was confused since they quote 'you don't tell a depressed person to be less apathetic' yet the author seems like they are encouraging emotional management.
My big takeaway from this article and the last [1] is that two major ideas are being seen in the research:
1. Forgive yourself.
2. Be kind to your future self.
#1 can be done with some mental tricks, if someone is having difficulty. Namely, thinking about 'what if my friend did x [something i just did], what would be my response to them'. This answer is generally positive and procrastinators tend to be hard on themselves, so...looking at how we would treat others would be a mental hack, for us to treat ourselves better.
#2 is where I feel something just 'clicked' for me just now. In some ways, it's developing on the idea of 'a procrastinator would be nice to someone else, so be nice to yourself'. Since this 'someone else' is your future you.
Self control, emotional regulation, yadda yadda. I think all of those can help but don't help everyone. They didn't help me.
These two beliefs and mental hacks have given me insight to my behavior. I hope the next time this issue comes up on HN, that we can have more research into the procrastinator's disassociation between time and self. Because to me, that's the problem, not self-control nor emotional regulation.
> I feel the writer of the article was confused since they quote 'you don't tell a depressed person to be less apathetic' yet the author seems like they are encouraging emotional management
Those are not in conflict. A clearer analogy would be, you don't tell an alcoholic to just stop drinking. You focus on judgement-free emotional support systems. You go to meetings, you get a chip for making it 24 hours sober, 1 month, etc.
I'm glad you didn't need something like that to overcoming procrastination. But a lot of people don't need full-on Alcoholics Anonymous to get their drinking in control either. Hardcore procrastinators probably need more.
> [i]Tim Urban points out that the typical advice for procrastinators — essentially, to stop what they’re doing and get down to work, is ridiculous, because procrastination isn’t something that extreme procrastinators feel as though they can control.
> “While we’re here, let’s make sure obese people avoid overeating, depressed people avoid apathy, and someone please tell beached whales that they should avoid being out of the ocean,” Urban writes.[/i]
That's a direct quote from the article.
The research supports judgement-free internal thought life. Not support systems. AA isn't a solid comparison but it's close. But apples to oranges doesn't help when the problem is apples. Let's stay focused on what the research says.
Also, I'd consider myself a hardcore procrastinator. My issue could be a symptom of ADHD or something else but I fall in the 'hardcore' category. And it's something that I still struggle with but 'sucking it up' or 'just stop procrastinating with social support' won't change my situation, something deeper needs to occur, which is why I mention the beliefs. Our beliefs affect our behavior.
The real reason you procrastinate: You fundamentally don't want to be doing whatever task it is that you're avoiding, and while it might be the logically "correct" thing to do, that doesn't mean you want to do it. What we want and what we are pushed into doing are not always aligned. News at ten.
I procrastinate a lot and will never stop because in so many cases it makes perfect sense and works out well. I can't tell you how many times it turned out I didn't even need to do something I was procrastinating on, or a far easier way to proceed came up.
It's so easy to wind up with an infinite list of chores. Continually pushing a lot of them off as late as possible works rather well, in my experience.
I disagree. I often procrastinate on the things that I really really want to do.
My explanation for that is not the fundamental lack of interest in the project, but the hidden fear of failure that accompanies every project that I work on.
I've worked on so many failed projects that I've kind of lost hope of actually producing something that won't be forgotten immediately.
(Mind that this is not necessarily true - some of my work (as a comedian/writer/actor) has been viewed millions of times, while some of the code I've written is being executed by millions of machines every day, but I still feel like I've failed at everything, because that was just "blind luck" ).
If all this effort results in disappointment and depression, why bother waste energy on it now - this is the kind of hidden thought process that's going on in my head and I guess in many other's people's heads too.
Paradoxically, this is the thought process that also disarms you a little bit every day, until the task becomes painful and not worth pursuing and once again you've failed to accomplished what you've set out to.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also hard to break since it's not happening on a "rational" level, but on a lower "fight or flight" subconscious level, which is very hard to control.
Sounds like you're espousing the doctrine of Revealed Preference! Here's my reductio proof that actions don't always reveal preferences: http://blog.beeminder.com/revealed/
Short version: People sometimes use commitment devices (like Beeminder!). Doing so is an action and the preference it reveals is that the person engages in actions contrary to their own preferences!
For me, the 2 reasons are 1) forced labor, we're too proud to submit fully and blindly to the system, we're meant to be free, or at least trust the government more, and 2) all the superhero movies and games stuff which make us worried about not being as exceptional as we should, so we need an excuse not to be exceptional, and that's procrastination. I couldn't be a hero, because I have this mysterious disease which stops me from trying, blocking my potential.
My procrastination has a single task buffer. I find a worse task, put that at the top of a list - then procrastinate this decoy task with the real to do list.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] thread1. Don't worry about it. We all procrastinate and most of the time it works out OK. Our instincts know what they're doing.
2. Break tough tasks down into very, very laughably small tasks. Don't even worry about doing them. Once the first task in the list is small enough you'll think "sod it" and do it right away.
If you try to improve your self control you will fail. Go with the grain -- either stop worrying, or find a chunk of the task so is tiny and easy that it becomes instantly gratifying to do it.
Awesome tips! "Our instincts know what they're doing" is very true. I tend to procrastinate when two conditions are fulfilled 1) the task is boring/painful, and 2) in the back of my mind, I've already calculated out the time and I can afford to push it until later. Trying to force myself just increases my expected pain of the task, so I should just go with it.
(And look, I'm procrastinating so much I made a HN account so I could comment about procrastination!)
Problem arises when you don't have a hard deadline (I.e., you are only accountable to yourself).
must be one of my new favourite quotes. Thanks for this gem
Just by doing something over and over, our instinctual caveman brain rewards with dopamine, which automatically forms habits over time. Imagine a caveman looking left and right before he leaves his cave: it just started out as a random occurance, but since he didn't get eaten he gets a dope hit which forms the neural pathways to continue the habit. Great adaptation for basic survival, and social mechanisms will even propagate the habit to others.
However, the habit forming dope reward system doesn't "know" what the behaviors are. It's not making any rational or moral judgement. Habits like addiction are extremely maladaptive, formed by the same feedback loop. This is why withdrawals actually feel like a threat to an addicts' survival. Breaking it feels like a threat triggering a fight or flight response. Trusting your instincts or feelings won't help you break a bad habit.
Thinking can help, though, which is where the forebrain comes in. By thinking, we can break a bad habit by creating a different, better adapted habit to replace it. This requires the force of the will, at least in the beginning until the new and improved neural pathway is formed. But once it is, you'll have a shiny new habit that's actually beneficial.
tl; dr. Think and use your forebrain to form the habits you want.
- the idea that, if you can do something in 5 minutes or so, just do it rather than keep putting it on to do lists.
- breaking down complex projects into discrete small concrete tasks.
Both are good ideas which do help me.
One thing about procrastination that often seems to be overlooked though is procrastinating about things that really do need to get done sooner or later (If I don't do the expense report, no one else is going to do it for me.) versus procrastinating about doing some project or making some plans because there's a voice questioning whether you really need to or want to do this project at all.
Now, I suppose in the latter case, a hyper-organized person would create an action item to "get more information" or something along those lines. But sometimes letting ideas just sit and percolate in a future projects queue works OK too.
This seems so obvious now I've read it. When I think of how many small tasks I've never got around to doing it's embarrassing.
A small, but important part of GTD: there is a concept of a "capture system". As soon as there's something that's a TODO or task to be done and you are working on something, put it into your capture system, be it a text file, a TODO app, etc. Process the capture system regularly, filing the items into projects (can be as simple as separate TODO lists). So here's the key difference to what you mentioned: only now while you are filing, do you do those tasks that take 5 (or 2) minutes or less.
As a developer who works on my laptop most of the time, I have a global keyboard shortcut that brings up a prompt with textbox that lets me quickly something (appended to a text file) and go back to work without disrupting my flow.
What makes it so good? Obviously it works for a lot of people.
It meshes exceptionally well with Neil Fiore's "The Now Habit".
The problem you describe is familiar to me - once I am in the zone I can continue there for hours, and taking enforced breaks every 20 minutes would force this streak to end early.
To work around this I just made the breaks optional, and use blocks of 15 minutes (as described in the Emergent Task Planner).
So, my timer goes off every 15 minutes. This breaks my concentration for a couple of seconds so I can reset my timer and tick a box to show I have completed another 15 minute block, and then I jump immediately back in to my task. A couple of seconds is not enough to take me out of the zone, but it lets me keep track of my progress on tasks and see where my time has been spent throughout the day.
Personally speaking, my biggest procrastination problems arise when I lack clarity about exactly what I should be working on at this precise moment, or when I finish a task and need to think of what to do next.
My bastardised pomodoro technique solves this problem for me by always making it clear what I should be doing right now. If my mind wanders for a moment, or I get distracted by an urgent task, this list allows me to immediately refocus without any mental effort. When a task is complete I might take 5 minutes as a break, and then jump on to the next task.
If my procrastination problems sound familiar I highly recommend the ETP approach. Print out five of them, grab a timer set to 15 minutes, and give it a try for a week. Make it part of your morning routine - plan out what you want to achieve for the day, write it down, and start the timer!
0: http://davidseah.com/productivity-tools/
The length of the day also doesn't seem to weigh on me - i just focus on being completely on task for 25m chunks at a time, and the day flies by. No more `compile; open reddit.com`
edit: Typed from a 5m break, of course ;)
I also find it hard to ask for help, so I often get stuck when the next logical step is "admit that you don't know what to do next, and find someone to help."
Advice is good if it helps people but you have to resist the urge to generalize.
As an engineer who has been fired twice for performance problems, I don't have that luxury.
> Break touch tasks down into very, very laughably small tasks.
This works well if you've used the technology/tool before and you feel like you understand what you are doing. It is very difficult if you are in the circumstance of having to learn things as you go and having to prodding at things and trying things to figure out how things work. In cases like these, it is better to just figure out what the smallest first step is and iterate that way.
Unless of course you have the breathing room to spend time working through a tutorial on whatever set of abstractions you are trying to work with.
With respect, it sounds like you are describing a problem caused by not knowing the technology/tooling well enough to begin completing the task, rather than a problem directly caused by procrastination.
That being said, one can easily procrastinate the task of learning too :-)
In cases like this, the first item on the to-do list could be a time-limited R&D task where the goal is to learn enough so that you can compose a more concrete plan.
Yes. But given the average quality of documentation and the fact that the most common advice for how to learn a new technology is just to build something with it, how uncommon is this?
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/214/
http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastin...
http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/my-ted-talk.html
"How to hit your article deadlines: Copy another article and use it as your own."
Yes, they provide references, but it's still just a rehash.
This is a interesting read for sure
(note: I wrote it, and please take it with a grain of humor)
Often when I've rationally examined the underlying anxiety it becomes much easier to accomplish things.
How do we differentiate healthy procrastination from fear or depressive thoughts pattern ?
"If I'm going to die, I might as well finally help those old people at the asylum and see how that feels"
"If I'm going to die, I might as well travel without money through Europe"
Procrastinate -> Feel Bad -> What's the point -> So far behind -> Procrastinate...
- Make a trello list of tasks
- Make sure I always do at least one task a day
The first task I do is usually very small but I find that I usually get on a roll once I have entered 'the zone' and end up getting a lot done.
EDIT: Formatting
https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...
Will print it and stick to my wall... Next time when I need to procrastinate.
It's interesting that this started around January, one month after the headline "Bezos takes more hands on role at WaPo".
1. choice paralysis I'm fairly certain I have a cavity in one of my teeth, I can basically see it when I look in the mirror, in addition to sensitivity to temperature. So I need to find a dentist a) in my area b) that accepts my insurance. There are multiple options. I want to know who the optimal dentist is; I want the one who can pull off a painless root canal if need be, but I definitely don't want the one who will cause agony or perform a procedure incorrectly. I think, maybe I'll Google them and see if I can find any reviews or other indications that one dentist is better than the next. Confronted by 20 options, I spend more time on the whole thing than I need to, optimizing the odds that I get distracted along the way.
2. various forms of anxiety, mostly social anxiety I really don't want to call and talk to a stranger on the phone to schedule that appointment. I'm not even that bad at talking to people, and yet it makes my heart race. I'm afraid to drive to places that I've never been, to awkwardly enter an unfamiliar building trying to figure out where to go. I'm afraid of not being able to find a parking space. I'm afraid of a lot of stupid things that don't matter.
3. extreme lethargy Is something I've been trying to overcome for literally years. Inadequate nutrition is the main factor in this. I am mentally and physically tired almost all of the time, to varying degrees, which slows me down, and makes it harder to focus on something. I don't eat right, sometimes eating but a single meal in a day. Sometimes I will eat nothing substantial for an entire day. I recently tried "Mealsquares" (basically Soylent in solid form) as means to ensure I get all the nutrients I need. I've yet to be able to eat more than 2 in a day (usually just 1), which would equate to 400-800 calories at most. At 6' height, a target weight of a 170lbs requires me to consume an excess of 2000 calories per day, so imagine getting 1/4-1/2 of that on average per day. I don't even know how I get through the days as well as I do, what is my body running on? I actually know how to prepare multiple meals, I just don't. Instead of hunger making me voracious, it makes me feel lazy and depressed. If hiring a full-time cook were affordable, I would do it.
At the end of the day, nothing is getting done if I simply don't have the fuel to power my body to do it.
Procrastination feels like a pattern, a vicious cycle that feeds on itself, a loop from which I'm trying to break free. I'm trying to reverse it and emerge on top, and it sounds like something that can be turned around in a week, but I feel like it's been an upward battle for most of my adulthood.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/why-i-taugh...
1. Forgive yourself
2. Ignore your feelings about whether you're in the mood to work on it
3. Break it down into small steps
I would say #2 is easier said than done for an extreme procrastinator. But, decent article. Sometimes it's good just to hear that change is possible.
I would add to it that once you adopt new patterns they can set in and make productivity easier. It's sort of like drinking or other chronic problems.. It's rooted in your DNA and you do have to watch out for it creeping up on you, but the more successful you are the easier it gets.
In my case, making really granular todo lists and then crossing things off helped establish a rhythm. It showed me I could in fact accomplish a lot. It does take time to make and prioritize the list, but good prioritization is really important and totally worth it. Wunderlist helped a lot. Made it super easy to add things, prioritize in free moments, and constantly check it and "live by the list".
I would still let some high priority stuff live on top of the list for weeks sometimes, but I could forgive myself for those lapses more readily because I could see how overall better I was doing. And that vastly increased my chances of eventually tackling those big scary tasks as opposed to spiraling into a negative feedback loop.
As the article notes, it really is about emotional management. Todo lists would be useless without structuring them in a way that lets you build up emotional gratification and self confidence.
I have found both books very helpful, especially in terms of dealing with my emotional self-sabotage ("why bother starting, you know you're not going to get it right.")
My big takeaway from this article and the last [1] is that two major ideas are being seen in the research:
1. Forgive yourself. 2. Be kind to your future self.
#1 can be done with some mental tricks, if someone is having difficulty. Namely, thinking about 'what if my friend did x [something i just did], what would be my response to them'. This answer is generally positive and procrastinators tend to be hard on themselves, so...looking at how we would treat others would be a mental hack, for us to treat ourselves better.
#2 is where I feel something just 'clicked' for me just now. In some ways, it's developing on the idea of 'a procrastinator would be nice to someone else, so be nice to yourself'. Since this 'someone else' is your future you.
Self control, emotional regulation, yadda yadda. I think all of those can help but don't help everyone. They didn't help me.
These two beliefs and mental hacks have given me insight to my behavior. I hope the next time this issue comes up on HN, that we can have more research into the procrastinator's disassociation between time and self. Because to me, that's the problem, not self-control nor emotional regulation.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11541675
Those are not in conflict. A clearer analogy would be, you don't tell an alcoholic to just stop drinking. You focus on judgement-free emotional support systems. You go to meetings, you get a chip for making it 24 hours sober, 1 month, etc.
I'm glad you didn't need something like that to overcoming procrastination. But a lot of people don't need full-on Alcoholics Anonymous to get their drinking in control either. Hardcore procrastinators probably need more.
> [i]Tim Urban points out that the typical advice for procrastinators — essentially, to stop what they’re doing and get down to work, is ridiculous, because procrastination isn’t something that extreme procrastinators feel as though they can control.
> “While we’re here, let’s make sure obese people avoid overeating, depressed people avoid apathy, and someone please tell beached whales that they should avoid being out of the ocean,” Urban writes.[/i]
That's a direct quote from the article.
The research supports judgement-free internal thought life. Not support systems. AA isn't a solid comparison but it's close. But apples to oranges doesn't help when the problem is apples. Let's stay focused on what the research says.
Also, I'd consider myself a hardcore procrastinator. My issue could be a symptom of ADHD or something else but I fall in the 'hardcore' category. And it's something that I still struggle with but 'sucking it up' or 'just stop procrastinating with social support' won't change my situation, something deeper needs to occur, which is why I mention the beliefs. Our beliefs affect our behavior.
It's so easy to wind up with an infinite list of chores. Continually pushing a lot of them off as late as possible works rather well, in my experience.
1) Finding a better solution and 2) Finding out you didn't need to do it at all are two great outcomes from procrastinating.
My explanation for that is not the fundamental lack of interest in the project, but the hidden fear of failure that accompanies every project that I work on.
I've worked on so many failed projects that I've kind of lost hope of actually producing something that won't be forgotten immediately.
(Mind that this is not necessarily true - some of my work (as a comedian/writer/actor) has been viewed millions of times, while some of the code I've written is being executed by millions of machines every day, but I still feel like I've failed at everything, because that was just "blind luck" ).
If all this effort results in disappointment and depression, why bother waste energy on it now - this is the kind of hidden thought process that's going on in my head and I guess in many other's people's heads too.
Paradoxically, this is the thought process that also disarms you a little bit every day, until the task becomes painful and not worth pursuing and once again you've failed to accomplished what you've set out to.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also hard to break since it's not happening on a "rational" level, but on a lower "fight or flight" subconscious level, which is very hard to control.
Short version: People sometimes use commitment devices (like Beeminder!). Doing so is an action and the preference it reveals is that the person engages in actions contrary to their own preferences!