Procrastination keep coming up here, and elsewhere, and I keep thinking:
Look, I regularly work 10 hour days five days a week and a 6 hour Saturday. If something needs to ship, I'm here till it ships. I voluntarily agreed to all this, and keep agreeing to it.
If I get home and sit in front of a screen and read HN and watch old Star Trek episodes, who cares?
I could be doing more? My only regret is I wished I'd worked more?
Very astute comment about external motivation versus internal motivation. The fact that someone else is depending on me will spur me to push through a task, particularly if it is for someone close to me (e.g. my daughter). However, in a small percentage of cases for work clients, I can experience mental resistance, almost like a internal rebellion, that will cause me to procrastinate. Happens even if the client is very nice and I like them, which makes me feel all the more guilty. Luckily, it is not the norm, or I would be out of a job pretty quickly.
I mean I guess it's only procrastination if you are actively avoiding a task that you deem important and are constantly entering a loop of regret and remorse for delaying the task or work associated with it.
Like homework or chores or in my case small steps to study for an exam I have to pass in order to keep my job.
That's not procrastination, procrastination is when you avoid completing a task even though it doesn't benefit you to avoid completing it. For example, if a feature is supposed to ship in 3 weeks and you spend all 3 weeks "researching" libraries and on the last day you write some really bad code with no tests, that's procrastination. If you had just spent all 3 weeks writing the code and iterating on it using the tools you know you would have completed the task but you avoided completing the task for ____ psychological reason. A better name for procrastination is "task avoidance."
There's a more in-depth coverage of this in the book "Still Procrastinating" by Joseph R Ferrari (the top researcher on procrastination).
I have found this to be true. One big cause of procrastination is a to escape from mental discomfort. Part of the way to get through that is to build tolerance to discomfort using CBT/stoicism tequeniques.
But also finding ways to release discomfort-causing thoughts help too.
Apt timing. I was just revisiting a voice not from after Christmas vacation where I noticed the same thing in myself.
I "take vacation" all the time, in that I'm fucking off from some kind of work for a couple days straight. Why do some feel different than others? Because of whether I feel like I'm "allowed" to be doing it.
The core healing property of a vacation, at least for me, seems to be a vacation from the shame of feeling like I'm misallocating my time, rather than a vacation from any particular task. This also explains why deep work can feel so nourishing despite being very unlike what we'd normally think of as "vacation".
Glad to see this topic get some play on HN. Really curious about other people's experiences and solutions here.
I'm curious about why the filename for the PDF is "Pretend-Paper.pdf"? I double-checked and it is published in the peer-reviewed journal, "Personality and Individual Differences".
Aside: I'm also curious about whether statements/questions like, "I'm curious about..." require a question mark after them.
> I'm curious about why the filename for the PDF is "Pretend-Paper.pdf"?
I've googled the paper and the authors, and I've scoured the UTexas Law site, and turned up nothing. So, my best guess: perhaps it's wordplay: pretend < Latin pre- "before" + tendo "I stretch out; I reach for; I pitch; I offer" vs. foregive (now a homophone of forgive but originally having a slightly different meaning[1]). Thus "pretend paper" ≡ "foregive paper" ~ "forgive paper". It's a stretch, but it's all I can come up with...
[1]: fore- having a sense of "forward; before" whereas for-, being related to the "fro" in "to and fro", originally having a since of "away from". Now that "for" and "fore" are homophones, the two are conflated, but not for the first time in history: there were once three prefixes, which would've been fore-, for-, and fro- today had the latter two not already merged before the Anglo-Saxons even began writing. They corresponded to Latin pre-, per-, and pro-, respectively. Now there's one prefix, variously spelled, with various senses, however sometimes the senses are distinguished in writing by one spelling or another.
> Aside: I'm also curious about whether statements/questions like, "I'm curious about..." require a question mark after them.
I meant to answer this, too, but I was being summoned and hit that reply button without thinking.
The answer is a little complicated, because orthographic rules are ultimately arbitrary. I've opted for detail to explain and support my answer, but you can skip to the last paragraph if you don't care for such things ;)
English orthography is subject to many de facto standards. A couple that are well-recognized are British vs. American spelling conventions, but even those are merely de facto rather than formally standardized by some regulatory institution as has been done for some other languages. And that's just spelling.
Punctuation is even more variable. Punctuation rules are usually given in "style guides", which are then variously adopted by publishers as official house style. In the US alone, I counted 11 different style guides popular enough to have nicknames. Eleven. However, I doubt they differ markedly in their punctuation rules, because publications seem to be fairly consistent.
The only one I have an actual copy of is the MLA Handbook (6th edition). It pedantically argues that the only permissible place for a question mark is the very end of an interrogative sentence (§3.2.11).
I argue, though, that such statements as yours are however semantically interrogative: they use the indicative mood, but most readers will pragmatically infer that they are requests for information. What yields answers? Questions. What do you do when you want answers? Ask questions. Then is anything said in hope of an answer akin to a question? For all intents and purposes, I'd say so.
Punctuation is just a tool that we use to help us communicate more effectively by writing. And that's not just my opinion—the MLA Handbook agrees (§3.2.1):
The primary purpose of punctuation is to ensure the clarity and readability of writing. Punctuation clarifies sentence structure, separating some words and grouping others. It adds meaning to written words and guides the understanding of readers as they move through sentences.
Let's look at your sentence, then:
> I'm curious about why the filename for the PDF is "Pretend-Paper.pdf"?
Here's how I perceive that question mark. It acts as a sort of prompt for an answer. Were we speaking in person, there would likely be prosodic or nonverbal cues to perform the same role: perhaps a particular tone of voice, a pause, a facial expression, a gesture, …. Spoken, it would be obvious that you were expecting an answer. Written, I think perhaps most people would be inclined to pick up on it regardless, but in case they don't, the question mark clarifies it. In any case, the question mark encodes whatever prosodic or nonverbal cue(s) you might've said—it adds meaning that the words alone do not really carry. Seems to me that it satisfies the primary purpose of punctuation according to the MLA. As for me, I'd call it a good use of the tool.
If question marks were to be reserved only for phrases in the interrogative mood, they'd be pretty useless. Such phrases are already obviously questions—at least in English. Does that add any meaning. Does that guide the understanding. No, it adds only redundancy. That can be useful, sure. But it's not the primary purpose, now, is it.
So, no. The question mark is not required there. But it isn't wrong to put one there, either. Notwithstanding, if you're ever writing something to submit to a publisher who requests that submissions adhere to some style guide—follow the style guide, even if it's nonsense. Argue about it later, with your editor ;)
There's a startup that lets you pair up with another user to keep each other accountable via video chat. I used it a few times and was pretty productive.
I've had my fair share of run-ins with procrastination, this premise has worked for me back when I considered procrastination to be 'wrong' (forgiving yourself implies you did something wrong) and so forgiving yourself absolves you of the guilt you feel. I tend to now approach procrastination as something I need to do and let myself indulge for a while, then chose to stop. My theory being; now that its ok to do, its easier to stop because I'm not caught up in the guilt spiral.
A vague analogy might be: you can stop yourself breathing at will, you've likely never felt guilty for taking a breath. Now imagine feeling guilty for breathing because you thought it was wrong, you'd likely continue whilst you were caught up feeling guilty about it and that would build with each new breath.
> Halfway between the first and second midterm, participants were asked, ‘‘Do you think your procrastinating affected how well you did on this exam?” on a three-point scale, where 0 = not at all and 3 = definitely. Interestingly, although procrastination is a self-regulatory failure and thus, by definition, is a transgression against the self, 14 participants did not believe this to be so, answering ‘‘not at all” on this item. Consequently, we eliminated these participants leaving a final sample of 119 participants (70 female, 49 male) whose age ranged from 17 to 56 years (M = 20.50, SD = 5.17).
How is this elimination justified? This seems entirely unsound.
It's by Dr. Tim Pychyl, a professor of psychology who in this video goes in to research on why people procrastinate and gives helpful suggestions on how to procrastinate less. It's an hour-long presentation, and is chock full of worthwhile content, unlike a ton of other videos out there which are full of fluff and basic suggestions everyone's heard a million times. Highly recommended.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 87.1 ms ] threadLook, I regularly work 10 hour days five days a week and a 6 hour Saturday. If something needs to ship, I'm here till it ships. I voluntarily agreed to all this, and keep agreeing to it.
If I get home and sit in front of a screen and read HN and watch old Star Trek episodes, who cares?
I could be doing more? My only regret is I wished I'd worked more?
Many of us have goals around personal projects and errands that we keep putting off since the due dates are arbitrary.
Working a six day week certainly makes for less available time to get other things done.
Like homework or chores or in my case small steps to study for an exam I have to pass in order to keep my job.
Very YMMV?
There's a more in-depth coverage of this in the book "Still Procrastinating" by Joseph R Ferrari (the top researcher on procrastination).
But also finding ways to release discomfort-causing thoughts help too.
The mental health revolution can't come soon enough for me.
I'd be interested in hearing how yours differs, because my personal experience was that therapy without the human element was borderline useless.
I "take vacation" all the time, in that I'm fucking off from some kind of work for a couple days straight. Why do some feel different than others? Because of whether I feel like I'm "allowed" to be doing it.
The core healing property of a vacation, at least for me, seems to be a vacation from the shame of feeling like I'm misallocating my time, rather than a vacation from any particular task. This also explains why deep work can feel so nourishing despite being very unlike what we'd normally think of as "vacation".
Glad to see this topic get some play on HN. Really curious about other people's experiences and solutions here.
Aside: I'm also curious about whether statements/questions like, "I'm curious about..." require a question mark after them.
I've googled the paper and the authors, and I've scoured the UTexas Law site, and turned up nothing. So, my best guess: perhaps it's wordplay: pretend < Latin pre- "before" + tendo "I stretch out; I reach for; I pitch; I offer" vs. foregive (now a homophone of forgive but originally having a slightly different meaning[1]). Thus "pretend paper" ≡ "foregive paper" ~ "forgive paper". It's a stretch, but it's all I can come up with...
[1]: fore- having a sense of "forward; before" whereas for-, being related to the "fro" in "to and fro", originally having a since of "away from". Now that "for" and "fore" are homophones, the two are conflated, but not for the first time in history: there were once three prefixes, which would've been fore-, for-, and fro- today had the latter two not already merged before the Anglo-Saxons even began writing. They corresponded to Latin pre-, per-, and pro-, respectively. Now there's one prefix, variously spelled, with various senses, however sometimes the senses are distinguished in writing by one spelling or another.
I meant to answer this, too, but I was being summoned and hit that reply button without thinking.
The answer is a little complicated, because orthographic rules are ultimately arbitrary. I've opted for detail to explain and support my answer, but you can skip to the last paragraph if you don't care for such things ;)
English orthography is subject to many de facto standards. A couple that are well-recognized are British vs. American spelling conventions, but even those are merely de facto rather than formally standardized by some regulatory institution as has been done for some other languages. And that's just spelling.
Punctuation is even more variable. Punctuation rules are usually given in "style guides", which are then variously adopted by publishers as official house style. In the US alone, I counted 11 different style guides popular enough to have nicknames. Eleven. However, I doubt they differ markedly in their punctuation rules, because publications seem to be fairly consistent.
The only one I have an actual copy of is the MLA Handbook (6th edition). It pedantically argues that the only permissible place for a question mark is the very end of an interrogative sentence (§3.2.11).
I argue, though, that such statements as yours are however semantically interrogative: they use the indicative mood, but most readers will pragmatically infer that they are requests for information. What yields answers? Questions. What do you do when you want answers? Ask questions. Then is anything said in hope of an answer akin to a question? For all intents and purposes, I'd say so.
Punctuation is just a tool that we use to help us communicate more effectively by writing. And that's not just my opinion—the MLA Handbook agrees (§3.2.1):
The primary purpose of punctuation is to ensure the clarity and readability of writing. Punctuation clarifies sentence structure, separating some words and grouping others. It adds meaning to written words and guides the understanding of readers as they move through sentences.
Let's look at your sentence, then:
> I'm curious about why the filename for the PDF is "Pretend-Paper.pdf"?
Here's how I perceive that question mark. It acts as a sort of prompt for an answer. Were we speaking in person, there would likely be prosodic or nonverbal cues to perform the same role: perhaps a particular tone of voice, a pause, a facial expression, a gesture, …. Spoken, it would be obvious that you were expecting an answer. Written, I think perhaps most people would be inclined to pick up on it regardless, but in case they don't, the question mark clarifies it. In any case, the question mark encodes whatever prosodic or nonverbal cue(s) you might've said—it adds meaning that the words alone do not really carry. Seems to me that it satisfies the primary purpose of punctuation according to the MLA. As for me, I'd call it a good use of the tool.
If question marks were to be reserved only for phrases in the interrogative mood, they'd be pretty useless. Such phrases are already obviously questions—at least in English. Does that add any meaning. Does that guide the understanding. No, it adds only redundancy. That can be useful, sure. But it's not the primary purpose, now, is it.
So, no. The question mark is not required there. But it isn't wrong to put one there, either. Notwithstanding, if you're ever writing something to submit to a publisher who requests that submissions adhere to some style guide—follow the style guide, even if it's nonsense. Argue about it later, with your editor ;)
I even tested this theory by hiring a virtual assistant to do just that and it worked for me. But with all things said, YMMV.
https://www.focusmate.com/
A vague analogy might be: you can stop yourself breathing at will, you've likely never felt guilty for taking a breath. Now imagine feeling guilty for breathing because you thought it was wrong, you'd likely continue whilst you were caught up feeling guilty about it and that would build with each new breath.
How is this elimination justified? This seems entirely unsound.
http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhFQA998WiA
It's by Dr. Tim Pychyl, a professor of psychology who in this video goes in to research on why people procrastinate and gives helpful suggestions on how to procrastinate less. It's an hour-long presentation, and is chock full of worthwhile content, unlike a ton of other videos out there which are full of fluff and basic suggestions everyone's heard a million times. Highly recommended.