Could you elaborate why? To me this seems like your typical, not based on actual science, 1 minute to conclude form put together by content marketing in typeform or something similar.
Ok, so what actual science is this based on? Why should I give out personal stuff like "What are you avoiding right now" if it doesn't have an effect on the outcome when completing this form (because you're probably trying to figure out what people procrastinate most often...)?
Anyways, not sure about this type of application. In general one should avoid medical apps or forms put together by a start up. It typically doesn't involve any science or actual medical advice, and with things that can also be caused by some serious medical issue (procrastination can be caused by depression) I don't really think this is the right way to go.
If you actually did not just pull a content marketing thing, and this is based on actual science, then why not include some sources?
It took me a year to land this one! My expenses are pretty low and my savings are decent, but if I quit this, I would be on the streets pretty quickly.
I don't have many skills besides convincing people to buy something. These skills aren't particularly marketable in life :)
I would love to have a job selling something that is a real 10x improvement to someone's life and is sustainable and etc etc etc.
However these jobs aren't terribly easy to come by and are mostly handed out based on nepotism in my experience.
But, if you know someone who has made something awesome, and would like to hire me to do marketing + long-cycle sales, then please do let me know how I can contact you :)
I’m in the same boat, advertising with big data and generative deep learning. Harmful garbage if you ask me. I have no savings but I’m quitting as soon as I get an offer. I don’t care if I get fired, I’d rather be homeless.
I've done homelessness in between jobs for this very reason (I used to work for Oracle lol). It was awesome. And I don't mean to imply that I was on the streets, needle in my arm, skid row type homeless. Those men and women and kids are going through really rough shit.
I mean that I was sleeping in my car in the woods or at national parks or in corporate parking lots (not Walmart, more like Regional Shipping Corporation INC after 7PM and all the employees have gone home).
It was the most liberating and freeing period of my life. I came back to work because I want more money and I thought I could save enough money to put an actual roof over my head (and my gf's too). Apparently I'm wrong- this is the most expensive housing market ever, and many cities/towns/counties don't want to let me put a pre-fab house on any piece of land in their jurisdiction...
Seems like a good idea. Two thoughts. I always dislike conjuctions in these kinds of questions: "Today, I tried working on [X], and got distracted everytime." I worry that if I answer 1 out of 5 that it'll assume that that I didn't get distracted every time while instead I just haven't tried working on [X] today. Even if the website handles this correctly, why not make it two questions with the second only done if the first is a yes?
How well supported are the suggestions of this site? One of the ones I got was to imagine the worst case scenario if you kept procrastinating. But, okay, I imagined the worst case scenario and it meant I just had to wing something on the spot and do a little worse at it. Is that supposed to motivate me to stop procrastinating? Or is it supposed to make me realize that "everything's okay, stop worrying about it and maybe you'll enjoy doing it more"?
Yes, in this particular case, it doesn't open a security hole.
But scrub all your inputs anyway. That one time you forget, it will be a cosmetic error due to double encoding instead of a security hole due to no encoding.
I don't really get this criticism. This is a client-only app. Scrubbing input on the client is a bad way to avoid XSS because an attacker can modify the client. So teaching developers to sanitize strings in their frontend JS is not helpful. Why do we care what she does on her single page side project?
> Sorry, we can't seem to find what the problem is.
> TRY AGAIN?
A little disappointing but the link to the book this is based on at the bottom of the page is good. Maybe put that front-and-centre for failures like this?
One thing that helped me with procrastination is to expose it for what it really is.
Let's say you wanted to quit smoking (I've done it cold turkey after smoking a pack a day for over 10 years btw). The only real way you'll have a fighting chance to quit without any alternative drugs is to really want to quit. Not "oh man I wish I could stop smoking", but "ok, I'm done with this, I'm ready to stop".
If you break down and smoke again, you're just creating a negative feedback loop on your self worth while taking the short term gains on how smoking makes you feel. You get some nicotine, but every time you "cheat" on yourself it's a constant reminder that you lack willpower and are worthless. Then suddenly you become that person who thinks they can't quit because it's wired in your DNA, when really, it's just poor habits.
Procrastination is the same thing. Instead of smoking, you're doing something else (reading HN, Youtube, playing games) instead of what you "should" be doing. Sometimes I still need to remind myself that what I'm working on is worth doing and nothing works better than a simple pros / cons sheet. Then you can prove to yourself how ridiculous it is to sit there and spend 6 hours watching Youtube instead of moving towards your goals which likely have very positive benefits to your life.
No apps or gimmicks needed. You'll eventually cure yourself of all procrastination (which by the way shouldn't be confused with taking breaks and giving yourself some time to slack off, because that's completely fine).
Interesting comparison between smoking and procrastination. If we examine the neurology of both, we see a dopamine-centric reward system behind task completion, and probably a very small dopamine hit after procrastination. Similarly, nicotine has been shown to affect the very dopaminergic pathways involved in reward/pleasure systems. So, in a very real neurological way, the comparison is apt. I wonder if people who succesfully go cold-turkey off nicotine have some tendency to procrastinate or not? Or generally, do those who smoke have a tendency to procrastinate or not?
Smoking and procrastination are both correlated with ADHD (for which dopamine has also been implicated) so there almost certainly is a correlation between them.
Oh true, I studied ADHD a bit, it's a neuro-developmental disorder of the dopaminergic system. Specifically, the motor cortex will develop more quickly/strongly than the executive function system, leading to a hyperactivity of motor activity and a hypo*activity of the "secretary" of the mind which filters/prioritizes/plans behaviors. Now there is a subset of primarily inattentive ADHD, which has less to do with movement and more to do with "spacing out" and lack of focus/attention, which can be combined with hyperactivity in the combined type (CT), versus the primarily inattentive subtype (PI). Also, yes, those with ADHD are much more likely to abuse stimulants, marijuana, and alcohol, anything with which to alter the brain chemistry away from a normal modality which might be stressful to be in. I have heard anecdotal tales about ADHD medications as revelations bordering on spirituality, people crying after taking their first dose at age 30 and realizing how much more "normal" it might make them. Really good to know that people can react so positively, though we also know that many non-ADHD individuals abuse the drugs as well.
> I have heard anecdotal tales about ADHD medications as revelations bordering on spirituality, people crying after taking their first dose at age 30 and realizing how much more "normal" it might make them.
It really does whenever you have ADHD and you feel like your restless mind is finally at rest. It's absolutely infuriating to be unable to concentrate throughout most of my days.
I was one of those people, who got diagnosed in my early 30s (wasn't hyper as a child, therefore not AD"H"D, so). My medication, dexadrine, was indeed a revelation. But daily use for a couple of years led to a major mental breakdown, all the "amphetamine psychosis" symptoms. I was paranoid, angry, depressed, and suicidal.
I long ago stopped taking medication for it at all - I don't even have a prescription anymore. I just use coping strategies, many of which are about avoiding situations where it's a problem entirely. I have ADD, and I live with it. Because medication was better, until it was worse.
I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was a kid and have recently (last few months) had some pretty bad anxiety - this comment makes me wonder is the anxiety just restless of the mind? Will tell my GP I have ADD next time I see him and see what he thinks.
My procrastination is weird. I do freelance web development (solo-solopreneur) and when I take on a contract there's no stopping me from fulfilling it. I will work on it relentlessly until it's done and there will be no urge to do anything else until it's complete. You could even say it's the opposite of procrastination.
But when it comes to doing certain things (even things that I like) I can easily talk myself into putting it off until the end of time, but once I finally get started, I usually end up engulfed in it -- at least for that day. Like last week, I wrote no joke... 8,500 words towards scripting out my next dev course in the period of about 12 hours and that was with walking about ~2 miles twice as breaks + meals, etc..
What should I be doing? I enjoy meaningful work and have to accept that I may have to take a pay cut to do it. Chasing money got me in a terrible position with “should”. I can’t stomach busy work any more, not when the world is suffering as it is so greatly now.
Procrastination is the avoidance of activity due to a discomfort/fear/anxiety and subsequent inability to scale the discomfort wall that exists between you and the tasks' completion. Other comments mention a pointlessness or lack of purpose, which I consider secondary, since it's arguable if it's truly procrastination if the work is truly pointless. Procrastination as a term seems best applied to important/mandatory tasks. Though, I acknowledge many BS tasks of today's workplace are both pointless and mandatory.
The reason for the discomfort wall's existence is important to figuring out the best way to get over it. Certainly being required to do something day-in and day-out that you find purposeless is one way that the wall might be created.
For me, a lot of times it's boredom. It's boring to have to do 2 hours of work sometime in the next week; it's far less boring to have to do 2 hours of work in the next 90 minutes.
(Note I'm not recommending this, as it's basically medicating your boredom with stress, and stress has a lot of well documented side-effects).
That's another good point. I work far better when I have a challenging work-load with real goals. As I mentioned in a nearby post, I found micro-todos to help me visualize my workload (which is usually bigger than I imagined lol), and cause me to understand the weight of the work ahead of me.. thus, giving me a kick to get it the hell out of the way.
Apologies, it's a made up term. It seems fitting though. Rather than plan the todos like it's something anyone else could read, I write them for me. And because they're just for me, I can make them as tiny as I want. My general rule of thumb for writing them is:
1. As I'm writing, if it's in my head as a "oh, that needs to be done", I write it down. Tiny or large.
2. If it's really large, I tend to word the task as to break it up. Otherwise I'll spend a day working on that one item, which defeats the purpose of trying to give my brain dopamine/etc.
3. If at any point in code I think of those "oh, I gotta remember to fix/refactor/add that" I write it down.
It's quick because I don't need to give others context. It's short, because it's just for me and it shouldn't be too far away from my current context anyway. And finally it helps me actually take breaks, and come back getting right into it. I try to never leave without writing what I should do next.
To pair with that, I chose a todo app (Dynalist atm) that I enjoy using. It should be quick to get ideas onto paper so to say, and not bogged down with features. This is more of a notebook, than a todo.
Anyway, it's all an experiment for me. I'm on week two or so of it, and it's been great so far. Good luck if you try it :)
> Procrastination is the avoidance of activity due to a discomfort/fear/anxiety and subsequent inability to scale the discomfort wall that exists between you and the tasks' completion.
I am pretty sure my main reason for procrastination is the fact that I never learned to endure suffering/discomfort while growing up.
I grew up very sheltered and I was never forced to do anything which I did not like (bring out the trash, clean up the room, talk to people, ...). It was kinda nice growing up like this but when you turn 18 and have to enter the real world you realize you miss all the coping mechanisms which you need to do uncomfortable stuff.
procrastination is a fuzzy thing too, I used to LOVE discomfort, because I had this desire to feel capable of achieving anything. Could spend hours, days thinking and trying things.
These days I don't, it's not about discomfort, I need something more human and wise behind my efforts.
I'm sure most parents know that, I've seen some that were demotivated, but when their family started, they were moving everything around.
A balance sense of purpose is worth a lot there.
ps: a distraction heavy context is also bad. ironic :)
I'd warmly encourage you to not make excuses or find reasons from your past to justify current maladaptive behaviors. If you're 18+ and grew up in safety, comfort, and with education you possess all the necessary executive functionality to take hold of what life will deal you.
Just because you possess certain abilities doesn't mean that you have figured out how to make use of them. Working through challenges is an acquired skill, and if you never had the need to acquire said skill until now, it's not entirely surprising when you fail to do so.
I agree with what I think is the spirit of what you say, but it's unhelpfully reductive.
Many, many people who meet your criteria in fact are severely lacking in executive function.
Neurological conditions aside, surely you understand that an adult who's developing years formed a healthy "reward system" for accomplishing tasks will have a much easier time getting things done.
While, yes, most of us have the ability to correct past habits and develop discipline ... It's no different than an athlete who began training at an early age versus someone who took up a sport later in life. The difference in skill and ability is predictably and consistently stark.
A lot of successful entrepreneurs had no safety net, and have been through significant adversity.
Those that have been coddled and never held accountable have worse coping mechanisms and drive than those who have dealt with it and overcome obstacles the majority of their lives.
> Procrastination is the avoidance of activity due to a discomfort/fear/anxiety and subsequent inability to scale the discomfort wall that exists between you and the tasks' completion.
Perhaps this is wrong, but I feel like another important (and possibly most common) source of procrastination is not avoidance, but rather simply getting more enjoyment (dopamine/etc) of other activities. Ie, I don't think I have to be avoiding work to procrastinate, I may simply get more dopamine from Reddit-ing and thus mentally prioritize it.
Focusing on why your work or w/e you're procrastinating from is often the wrong approach in my opinion. The competition for tasks being avoided are typically pure entertainment, all dopamine and no effort. Tasks that are "meaningful" such as work, learning, etc often can't compete with entertainment for your brains drug dependencies.
Instead of focusing on tactics to improve procrastinated tasks, I've found my life is better when I instead limit their competition. I've had serious Reddit problems in the past, where I become basically addicted to it, and so my brain keeps injecting Reddit it any time I'm compiling or w/e. If I instead break that habit through heavy limitation of the dopamine provider, I've found myself to be far more productive.
Now methods to make tasks you want to do give you more dopamine are always welcome. I love micro-todos, and found them to be pretty effective at giving me a sense of accomplishment and, I imagine, dopamine. But micro-todos will never compete with pure entertainment, so I need to cut that. Or, at the very least, cut it from my default response of when I'm having spare brain cycles (like compiling) and jumping to fill it with entertainment dopamine.
Maybe there are 2 kinds or conscious expressions of procrastination:
- One related to lust for fun. Like you describe.
- One related to inhibition, fatigue, powerlessness, dread. You escape work even though you feel bad because you know you should be doing it to avoid an even worse situation. You do something else in the (false) hope to relax and to improve your mood and motivation for the task.
I’m glad you spelled it out like that - I can clearly feel the difference between the two in my own life. The first case, choosing fun, is much rarer and always conscious, e.g. “I can mow the grass tomorrow, but my good friend is only in town today”. I normally have to talk myself into it, because my default is to plow ahead with whatever is in front of me, as long as it is clear what I need to do.
I find the second type of procrastination to be 50x more common in my life, a daily occurrence of painfully trying to find /something/ else to do to avoid the wall of dreaded tasks that I don’t know how to resolve.
I agree that it's too easy to just blame avoidance. For me there is a very viscerally different feeling when I'm avoiding something because I really don't want to do it, vs. when there are other things I want to do because they're entertaining.
The difference is that if I genuinely have other things I want to do, I'll get enjoyment out of it, while if I'm trying to avoid something else I'll get to a point where I'll think "hold on; why am I doing this? I'm not enjoying this" and realise I'm doing it to avoid something else, and still feel the pull to do some nonsense activity while getting more and more miserable.
One strategy I've used is to try to stop regularly and simply ask myself "am I actually enjoying this? why am I doing it?" - I give myself relatively wide latitude to continue "wasting" time if I'm actually enjoying what I'm doing, because sooner or later I'm "done", and if I was actually myself I often feel energised enough to get much more done afterwards.
But the moment I'm not enjoying myself, I'll start probing into why I feel that way.
Some of it certainly fits under "avoidance", but that's also a very broad category and not very useful without exploring the more specific reasons I'm avoiding things.
Sometimes it's because it's too much to bite over, so I instead "procrastinate" by deciding to break down my todo list into smaller chunks. Often that will break the deadlock by identifying small-enough tasks that I'll be happy to get out of the way (I guess that fits into your "micro-todos").
Sometimes it's just not a fun task, and I'm pushing it ahead of me because I know my self-imposed deadline is not real and is just waiting until I really have to do it. In which case I'll try to reorganise things and do something else instead and just accept my tendency to do things right before a deadline when I know how long it'll take.
Sometimes I'm just too tired, in which case I either go rest or try to pick activities I can do while tired (benefit of working from home: if I'm mentally worn out, there's always housework to get out of the way which doesn't require much thinking).
Sometimes I "trick" myself into it by setting a schedule of 30-60 minutes of different sets of tasks. So I'll commit to "only" doing 30 minutes of what I need to get done, then maybe an hour of something lower priority that I actually enjoy, then another hour of my urgent tasks. Sometimes I'll find when I've just tricked myself into starting, I'll keep going longer than scheduled, if so I'll let it happen, but if not I'll strictly adhere to the limit on the more enjoyable tasks and keep track of whether or not I start lagging behind my schedule.
Sometimes the things I've decided logically I "should" be doing just don't emotionally feel like a good way to spend my time. E.g. I might have decided I "should" be planning some new project because I think it's important, but emotionally I might be drained and need downtime, and dragging my heels is a way of not having to acknowledge I have too much on my plate.
For things like Reddit, I find a major factor is the inbox. If someone replies, and I read their reply chances are I'll compulsively reply. This is easier to avoid with HN. With Reddit, what helped immensely was when I recognised what I was doing, and every now and again go "ok, enough" and click the inbox and physically look away until I've gone back to the main page to get the unread messages safely out of the way without having them draw me in again. Making it less intensive by cutting off heated arguments that way makes it much easier for me to break away and do something else.
> Procrastination is the avoidance of activity due to a discomfort/fear/anxiety and subsequent inability to scale the discomfort wall that exists between you and the tasks' completion.
The cause isn't part of the definition. Procrastination is simply the delaying of something, whatever the reason for doing do. One can procrastinate due to wanting to do something else. It doesn't have to be from an aversion.
I got back from a week long vacation and when i got back there were issues on github for open source projects i maintain. I was able to crush them quickly without that "discomfort/fear/anxiety". it makes me believe that those feeling start to occur when we need a break, which is why we are procrastinating in the first place.
Procrastination is the avoidance of activity due to a discomfort/fear/anxiety and subsequent inability to scale the discomfort wall that exists between you and the tasks' completion.
Incorrect. The dictionary definition of procrastination is To put off doing something, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness or To postpone or delay needlessly. Literally meaning, from Latin, putting off until tomorrow. I procrastinate way too much, but because I get bored, distracted and I'm lazy. None of which is a discomfort, fear or anxiety.
Nope, I absolutely don't feel the need to ascribe my negative habits to some fear or anxiety whatever thing. Not everything in life is a drama. I am fully aware of my strengths and weaknesses, and my personal opinion is that ascribing a negative trait (procrastination) to something that is somehow "external" is a subtle refusal to take responsibility. Often (and I am not saying this is the case for OP) the "oh, this is a fear or anxiety I have" is followed by either the direct or implied expression of "so it isn't really something I can do anything about right now".
That is the attitude I found to be holding myself back in a dark past. What turned the page for me was reading "Invictus" from Henley, who was a man that was absolutely beaten and battered by life, and still refused to give up:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
I don't give up and I own my shit, not sure what the contradiction is here. That poem could be better, how about Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note:
And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.
There's been plenty of research that suggests that at a substantial proportion of procrastination is due to discomforts and anxieties, so I wouldn't dismiss it that quickly.
This questionnaire is entirely incompatible with enterprise environments, where the work is not only boring, but also pointless (as results are way further down the line and deliverables will surely change multiple times).
It'd be cool see some stats for the results people get. I'm sure a lot of people are taking the quiz right now. Could we find what makes people procrastinate most often?
Spoiler, I got 'lack of value' and for some reason I bet it's gonna be a winner, at least when it comes to the HN userbase
With regard to dealing with impulsiveness on the internet by "throwing away the keys", the site recommends the StayFocusd extension for Chrome, but doesn't recommend anything for other browsers. For Firefox users, I recommend LeechBlock, which has a long history of maintenance, lots of users, and versions for both old and new Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng...
Ditto. In my case it's just that the amount of work I would have to do to be happy with my own side projects causes me to procrastinate on starting them, as I don't have a perfect image in my head of an objectively successful outcome yet so I just delay.
The way you put this really resonates with me. Often when I'm procrastinating it's because a task seems/feels/sounds really daunting, but the "daunting" feeling is because I'm imagining just how damn hard it's going to be to do the task perfectly. It creates this mental barrier to getting started because completing it perfectly (or, to my expectations) seems too hard.
Breaking out of this by realizing that "perfect" is not the goal, and setting more attainable sub-goals for myself is key, but hard.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadAnyways, not sure about this type of application. In general one should avoid medical apps or forms put together by a start up. It typically doesn't involve any science or actual medical advice, and with things that can also be caused by some serious medical issue (procrastination can be caused by depression) I don't really think this is the right way to go.
If you actually did not just pull a content marketing thing, and this is based on actual science, then why not include some sources?
And my job honestly is a negative value to society. I am a salesman at a rent seeking corporation.
I would literally do society more good if I wasn't driving a gas guzzler to work every day and sitting in a giant air conditioned office.
I don't have many skills besides convincing people to buy something. These skills aren't particularly marketable in life :)
However these jobs aren't terribly easy to come by and are mostly handed out based on nepotism in my experience.
But, if you know someone who has made something awesome, and would like to hire me to do marketing + long-cycle sales, then please do let me know how I can contact you :)
I've done homelessness in between jobs for this very reason (I used to work for Oracle lol). It was awesome. And I don't mean to imply that I was on the streets, needle in my arm, skid row type homeless. Those men and women and kids are going through really rough shit.
I mean that I was sleeping in my car in the woods or at national parks or in corporate parking lots (not Walmart, more like Regional Shipping Corporation INC after 7PM and all the employees have gone home).
It was the most liberating and freeing period of my life. I came back to work because I want more money and I thought I could save enough money to put an actual roof over my head (and my gf's too). Apparently I'm wrong- this is the most expensive housing market ever, and many cities/towns/counties don't want to let me put a pre-fab house on any piece of land in their jurisdiction...
Well... that wasn't very helpful, was it? Isn't this the usual reason that one can easily identify?
How well supported are the suggestions of this site? One of the ones I got was to imagine the worst case scenario if you kept procrastinating. But, okay, I imagined the worst case scenario and it meant I just had to wing something on the spot and do a little worse at it. Is that supposed to motivate me to stop procrastinating? Or is it supposed to make me realize that "everything's okay, stop worrying about it and maybe you'll enjoy doing it more"?
Clear security issue appeared when I typed:
...as a reason of my procrastination: https://imgur.com/a/Xmdi9VQEDIT: Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting
> XSS enables attackers to inject client-side scripts into web pages viewed by other users.
Nobody other than you will see your alert("this is bad") so this doesn't seem like XSS.
If it were a reflected XSS you could trigger it with something like https://whydoiprocrastinate.com/#%3Cscript%3Ealert%28%22this..., but I don't think this actually matters.
Sloppy programming, sure, but it isn't a real security issue.
But scrub all your inputs anyway. That one time you forget, it will be a cosmetic error due to double encoding instead of a security hole due to no encoding.
> Sorry, we can't seem to find what the problem is.
> TRY AGAIN?
A little disappointing but the link to the book this is based on at the bottom of the page is good. Maybe put that front-and-centre for failures like this?
Let's say you wanted to quit smoking (I've done it cold turkey after smoking a pack a day for over 10 years btw). The only real way you'll have a fighting chance to quit without any alternative drugs is to really want to quit. Not "oh man I wish I could stop smoking", but "ok, I'm done with this, I'm ready to stop".
If you break down and smoke again, you're just creating a negative feedback loop on your self worth while taking the short term gains on how smoking makes you feel. You get some nicotine, but every time you "cheat" on yourself it's a constant reminder that you lack willpower and are worthless. Then suddenly you become that person who thinks they can't quit because it's wired in your DNA, when really, it's just poor habits.
Procrastination is the same thing. Instead of smoking, you're doing something else (reading HN, Youtube, playing games) instead of what you "should" be doing. Sometimes I still need to remind myself that what I'm working on is worth doing and nothing works better than a simple pros / cons sheet. Then you can prove to yourself how ridiculous it is to sit there and spend 6 hours watching Youtube instead of moving towards your goals which likely have very positive benefits to your life.
No apps or gimmicks needed. You'll eventually cure yourself of all procrastination (which by the way shouldn't be confused with taking breaks and giving yourself some time to slack off, because that's completely fine).
It really does whenever you have ADHD and you feel like your restless mind is finally at rest. It's absolutely infuriating to be unable to concentrate throughout most of my days.
I long ago stopped taking medication for it at all - I don't even have a prescription anymore. I just use coping strategies, many of which are about avoiding situations where it's a problem entirely. I have ADD, and I live with it. Because medication was better, until it was worse.
But when it comes to doing certain things (even things that I like) I can easily talk myself into putting it off until the end of time, but once I finally get started, I usually end up engulfed in it -- at least for that day. Like last week, I wrote no joke... 8,500 words towards scripting out my next dev course in the period of about 12 hours and that was with walking about ~2 miles twice as breaks + meals, etc..
I cycle between hyperactivity and completely unproductive days. Getting up late being the main key to an unproductive day...
Jim Carrey had a good quote on this:
"You can fail at what you don't want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love"
This was after he saw his dad lose his accounting job.
Made no sense :D !
I’ll try it later during a procrastination break.
For me, a lot of times it's boredom. It's boring to have to do 2 hours of work sometime in the next week; it's far less boring to have to do 2 hours of work in the next 90 minutes.
(Note I'm not recommending this, as it's basically medicating your boredom with stress, and stress has a lot of well documented side-effects).
1. As I'm writing, if it's in my head as a "oh, that needs to be done", I write it down. Tiny or large.
2. If it's really large, I tend to word the task as to break it up. Otherwise I'll spend a day working on that one item, which defeats the purpose of trying to give my brain dopamine/etc.
3. If at any point in code I think of those "oh, I gotta remember to fix/refactor/add that" I write it down.
It's quick because I don't need to give others context. It's short, because it's just for me and it shouldn't be too far away from my current context anyway. And finally it helps me actually take breaks, and come back getting right into it. I try to never leave without writing what I should do next.
To pair with that, I chose a todo app (Dynalist atm) that I enjoy using. It should be quick to get ideas onto paper so to say, and not bogged down with features. This is more of a notebook, than a todo.
Anyway, it's all an experiment for me. I'm on week two or so of it, and it's been great so far. Good luck if you try it :)
edit: fix stupid list formatting.
I am pretty sure my main reason for procrastination is the fact that I never learned to endure suffering/discomfort while growing up.
I grew up very sheltered and I was never forced to do anything which I did not like (bring out the trash, clean up the room, talk to people, ...). It was kinda nice growing up like this but when you turn 18 and have to enter the real world you realize you miss all the coping mechanisms which you need to do uncomfortable stuff.
These days I don't, it's not about discomfort, I need something more human and wise behind my efforts.
I'm sure most parents know that, I've seen some that were demotivated, but when their family started, they were moving everything around.
A balance sense of purpose is worth a lot there.
ps: a distraction heavy context is also bad. ironic :)
Many, many people who meet your criteria in fact are severely lacking in executive function.
Neurological conditions aside, surely you understand that an adult who's developing years formed a healthy "reward system" for accomplishing tasks will have a much easier time getting things done.
While, yes, most of us have the ability to correct past habits and develop discipline ... It's no different than an athlete who began training at an early age versus someone who took up a sport later in life. The difference in skill and ability is predictably and consistently stark.
A lot of successful entrepreneurs had no safety net, and have been through significant adversity.
Those that have been coddled and never held accountable have worse coping mechanisms and drive than those who have dealt with it and overcome obstacles the majority of their lives.
Perhaps this is wrong, but I feel like another important (and possibly most common) source of procrastination is not avoidance, but rather simply getting more enjoyment (dopamine/etc) of other activities. Ie, I don't think I have to be avoiding work to procrastinate, I may simply get more dopamine from Reddit-ing and thus mentally prioritize it.
Focusing on why your work or w/e you're procrastinating from is often the wrong approach in my opinion. The competition for tasks being avoided are typically pure entertainment, all dopamine and no effort. Tasks that are "meaningful" such as work, learning, etc often can't compete with entertainment for your brains drug dependencies.
Instead of focusing on tactics to improve procrastinated tasks, I've found my life is better when I instead limit their competition. I've had serious Reddit problems in the past, where I become basically addicted to it, and so my brain keeps injecting Reddit it any time I'm compiling or w/e. If I instead break that habit through heavy limitation of the dopamine provider, I've found myself to be far more productive.
Now methods to make tasks you want to do give you more dopamine are always welcome. I love micro-todos, and found them to be pretty effective at giving me a sense of accomplishment and, I imagine, dopamine. But micro-todos will never compete with pure entertainment, so I need to cut that. Or, at the very least, cut it from my default response of when I'm having spare brain cycles (like compiling) and jumping to fill it with entertainment dopamine.
- One related to lust for fun. Like you describe.
- One related to inhibition, fatigue, powerlessness, dread. You escape work even though you feel bad because you know you should be doing it to avoid an even worse situation. You do something else in the (false) hope to relax and to improve your mood and motivation for the task.
I find the second type of procrastination to be 50x more common in my life, a daily occurrence of painfully trying to find /something/ else to do to avoid the wall of dreaded tasks that I don’t know how to resolve.
The difference is that if I genuinely have other things I want to do, I'll get enjoyment out of it, while if I'm trying to avoid something else I'll get to a point where I'll think "hold on; why am I doing this? I'm not enjoying this" and realise I'm doing it to avoid something else, and still feel the pull to do some nonsense activity while getting more and more miserable.
One strategy I've used is to try to stop regularly and simply ask myself "am I actually enjoying this? why am I doing it?" - I give myself relatively wide latitude to continue "wasting" time if I'm actually enjoying what I'm doing, because sooner or later I'm "done", and if I was actually myself I often feel energised enough to get much more done afterwards.
But the moment I'm not enjoying myself, I'll start probing into why I feel that way.
Some of it certainly fits under "avoidance", but that's also a very broad category and not very useful without exploring the more specific reasons I'm avoiding things.
Sometimes it's because it's too much to bite over, so I instead "procrastinate" by deciding to break down my todo list into smaller chunks. Often that will break the deadlock by identifying small-enough tasks that I'll be happy to get out of the way (I guess that fits into your "micro-todos").
Sometimes it's just not a fun task, and I'm pushing it ahead of me because I know my self-imposed deadline is not real and is just waiting until I really have to do it. In which case I'll try to reorganise things and do something else instead and just accept my tendency to do things right before a deadline when I know how long it'll take.
Sometimes I'm just too tired, in which case I either go rest or try to pick activities I can do while tired (benefit of working from home: if I'm mentally worn out, there's always housework to get out of the way which doesn't require much thinking).
Sometimes I "trick" myself into it by setting a schedule of 30-60 minutes of different sets of tasks. So I'll commit to "only" doing 30 minutes of what I need to get done, then maybe an hour of something lower priority that I actually enjoy, then another hour of my urgent tasks. Sometimes I'll find when I've just tricked myself into starting, I'll keep going longer than scheduled, if so I'll let it happen, but if not I'll strictly adhere to the limit on the more enjoyable tasks and keep track of whether or not I start lagging behind my schedule.
Sometimes the things I've decided logically I "should" be doing just don't emotionally feel like a good way to spend my time. E.g. I might have decided I "should" be planning some new project because I think it's important, but emotionally I might be drained and need downtime, and dragging my heels is a way of not having to acknowledge I have too much on my plate.
For things like Reddit, I find a major factor is the inbox. If someone replies, and I read their reply chances are I'll compulsively reply. This is easier to avoid with HN. With Reddit, what helped immensely was when I recognised what I was doing, and every now and again go "ok, enough" and click the inbox and physically look away until I've gone back to the main page to get the unread messages safely out of the way without having them draw me in again. Making it less intensive by cutting off heated arguments that way makes it much easier for me to break away and do something else.
The cause isn't part of the definition. Procrastination is simply the delaying of something, whatever the reason for doing do. One can procrastinate due to wanting to do something else. It doesn't have to be from an aversion.
Incorrect. The dictionary definition of procrastination is To put off doing something, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness or To postpone or delay needlessly. Literally meaning, from Latin, putting off until tomorrow. I procrastinate way too much, but because I get bored, distracted and I'm lazy. None of which is a discomfort, fear or anxiety.
That is the attitude I found to be holding myself back in a dark past. What turned the page for me was reading "Invictus" from Henley, who was a man that was absolutely beaten and battered by life, and still refused to give up:
Own your shit.https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-practice/201303/6...
Spoiler, I got 'lack of value' and for some reason I bet it's gonna be a winner, at least when it comes to the HN userbase
PS: how many user does BAAS have, and: is it automated?
Sorry, we can't seem to find what the problem is."
Well, that makes two of us.
Sorry, we can't seem to find what the problem is."
Breaking out of this by realizing that "perfect" is not the goal, and setting more attainable sub-goals for myself is key, but hard.