Maybe your posts would be more appreciated if you posted them with your personal account and didn't write totally write them like ads. Oh, and if they were more relevant to what's being posted. I don't procrastinate because of clickbait.
I'm afraid that you'll get this account restricted if you continue like this. You're also tarnishing your brand.
Edit: Another notorious project-poster is burtonator, which I also find mildly annoying, but whenever he posts about his project at least it's actually tangentially related to what is being discussed. He's a good bit less over the line than you are, in my opinion.
The brain is very good at self-sabotaging when it can't figure out what or how to deal with certain situations though. The best thing to do is figure out why you're procrastinating before trying to fix it.
Paradoxically, I think just acknowledging procrastination as an example of a bad thing, but not the most important one, might work well.
I say this because anxiety around needing to do something important is one possible cause of procrastination in the first place, and yet there is nothing more anxiety-inducing than telling yourself that by procrastinating, you're failing to do the most important things first. Whereas instead, if you only go so far as to make a mental note of it when you catch yourself procrastinating, you'll give yourself a moment to reflect without giving yourself anxiety that perpetuates further procrastination.
Also, you may have a subconscious reason for not doing something. Procrastinating could simply just be your brain's way of letting a better idea about how to do it percolate. That said, forming habits of doing certain unproductive things could be a pointless loss of productivity. Like if you have a habit of checking social media several times a day you might try blocking yourself from that and see how much productivity you've gained. And after all, there are better ways of procrastinating than by checking social media, like going for walks, trying new healthy recipes if you cook, or even cleaning (I actually don't know how many times I've thought of a good solution while cleaning), etc.
Once you've done that, you can think about it in terms of optimizing time spent working vs. time spent in leisure, and acknowledge that the "good" forms of procrastinating are an important form of leisure, which, if you've optimized the ratio well, boost your productivity by restoring mental energy and increasing creativity. Technically this includes sleep as well. :-)
This has been a problem since long before smartphones or even computers. Socializing, gardening, etc. Anything including literally self harming seems to be done by someone somewhere in this world to postpone work.
I had to find a way to deal with procrastination a few years ago and the most important thkng I learned was to banish perfectionism and admit that good results are more likely to emerge from repeated iterations than from carefully acting out a perfect plan made the first day you heard about the project.
I find that a lot of my procrastination comes from the anxiety of the thing I want to start doing not being completed. Literally, because I am worrying that the thing I want to work on is not already completed, I procrastinate from doing it. This is obviously counter productive and creates a feedback loop.
Something I'm bad at but seems to work is to have a conversation with myself that sort of comforts me about the anxiety and says "hey, what does this todo list look like? does it really matter that everything won't be completed today? You've spent years on this project so why would it be done today? Okay now go and address this one thing you have to do."
I'm usually very scared of "breaking" something and if there's nothing there to break in the first place, why would I create something that will potentially break at some point.
I'm getting better at knowing that this is my issue though and just think to myself "If I break it, I can go back a few steps or just fix the problem as it comes".
That can be another productivity killer. You inherit some app to maintain/modify, and you're afraid to touch it. So you essentially fork the code, start making small tweaks to reassure yourself that you're not breaking anything and it's all good. But at some point you have to take a bigger bite and it's still scary.
I see the same on a micro-scale. I have a task that will take an hour of concentrated effort - I'm afraid to start because I know I'll be interrupted.
But it accumulates.
Wow, that one really hit home. I knew I rarely get work done when there's upcoming events on my calendar, but I think _fear of being interrupted_ is the real source of procrastination there.
Another source for me is things that I want my "ideal self" to do, but I don't enjoy in reality. Like finishing a project. Once you have enough those on list you feel constantly bad and start using procrastination as an easy escape. It has been good to just terminate projects that don't really excite me anymore. When the "I'm feeling bad about not doing x" disappears, the amount of procrastination seems to shrink also.
Oh god x1000 this. I need to write something really complex, and I have grasp of few components. But not so sure how those would interconnect, and how exactly all should work.
I am anxious and discouraged when working on it and often fallback on safety of procrastination.
This is exacerbated by the fact that I like to have a holistic view and understanding of something before implementing something. And I can't do that here :/
As a variation on this, I've discovered over the years that "resistance" to working on a task sometimes comes from a clash between a conscious thought that the task should be easy and an unconscious realization that it's actually not going to be easy at all.
It's sort of the internal version of having a manager present you with a task and telling you up front that it will be "easy". That's enough to elicit a silent, knowing groan from most of us.
The good news is that often once I accept that a task is really quite complex and will take a long time, the resistance fades, and it becomes easier to start working on.
This is my next thing I want to trial. Complete block on anything non work related on the laptop. Complete block on anything that doesn't further my values on the phone. But then have an iPad for mucking around and consuming junk content. The idea that it's not easily accessible since the iPad won't be with me at work and it won't be in my pocket being constantly accessible.
I used to have Twitter (my main source of distraction) on my phone and iPad, now I don't have it on any device and it's helped tremendously.
On my computer, I block all distracting sites with the extension I built until noon, then I have 20 minutes for mostly Twitter, then all blocked until 4PM, another 20 min break, and then blocked until 8PM. 8PM-midnight, I do whatever I want. I've found this a fair agreement with myself that I have no reason to break. It created a rhythm for me.
So perhaps if a complete block is too big a stretch, you can give yourself a couple well-defined "fun breaks".
Because the action of checking the feeds or whatever is so ingrained, it's effortless and, more importantly, thoughtless. Even though that extra step is tiny, it can often be just enough of a jolt to make you notice the habit and decide more consciously whether to indulge it this time. After becoming conscious of it more and more, you can choose to break it. Although, in my experience, it's easy for it to come creeping back, too. Once you've destroyed the reflexive nature of it, setting some rules around it can be helpful. And again, even though those rules are just simple, easily-overcome agreements with yourself, they can be enough.
I often put my phone on DND and only allow calls , that really helps. From morning 9 to 6 and everytime I am on my bed. Removing social media apps also helps. I wont say its 100% effective but I see drastic reduction in my screen time.
> Procrastination is actually my mind trying to tell me something that I’m not attuned enough to realise in the first place.
Yeah, procrastination is a teacher. There's a reason why you or I procrastinate. Sometimes it takes only a couple minutes to figure out.
Regarding the fear part, I find re-framing it to be useful.
Fearing failure?
Well, if you haven't started yet, you're already failing.
What will you learn, even if you fail?
Fearing endless work?
Do you enjoy the process? If not, could you make it more enjoyable?
Fearing judgement or putting something imperfect into the world?
1) We're all imperfect.
2) You can create, try, and fail in private. You don't have to show your first bad attempt to anyone. You can work on it until it's good enough and then show it to someone else.
And about that "break it down" advice, yes it does help, but I prefer to think about it as clarifying.
Clarify the work, identify the unresolved issue, hazy details, decisions not made. What am I ignoring? What's unclear? What's giving me anxiety? Any of those questions help.
Hope that helps a bit.
And as you say in the article that you're looking for more tools for defeating procrastination, I feel obliged to point you to the collection of anti-procrastination tools I've built at deprocrastination.co.
I think I've successfully managed to "beat" procrastination by adopting the pomodoro technique. I've shipped software for years now.
What I've come to realise however is that the brain/body can only do so much work in a day. I can program for a few hours a day (on a good day) and then it becomes increasingly more effort to do more coding. Sometimes, depending on the task, I'll be able to switch to another task. However, my point in all of this is, if you have a serious procrastination problem -- find a way to overcome it, but also recognise that your brain/body only has so much "fuel" each day, and you need to decide what to put it towards (e.g. work, hobbies, exercise, study, family, etc).
I've come to a different conclusion. I used to think it was a "fuel" problem until I realised that if I moved onto some other non work related task that I was interested in, which could include programming, all of a sudden fuel wasn't an issue. For me it came down to motivation and interest with "mental fuel" rarely being the deciding factor. I manage to conjure up fuel when I'm sufficiently motivated by a problem. Obviously this might not be the case for everyone and I have hunch it is related to ADD behaviour I exhibit (self diagnosed).
Tricking my brain into investing into the outcome of work I am not interested in takes up most of my time now trying to get over procrastination. And of course I have a deadline today and I'm writing this message on HN... but like any good developer that needs some pressure to work I've got the plates all spinning for now.
pomodoro also works for me, I've had weeks of doing almost nothing, after I started simple 25 min bits with pauses, for some reason it can go on forever.
I find that there are so many that you have to just use one for a while and see if you like it (kind of meta, that).
The biggest differentiators are the UI, configurability (of times, alarms, etc.), and for me, oddly, the ability to have/not have a "ticking" sound while it's going. I like it to keep me motivated, others hate it and prefer music. Sometimes I use both.
I use https://github.com/michaelvillar/timer-app and TextEdit to write my pomodoros for every day.
Take 5 minute breaks, and a big 15-30 minute break, pomodoros of size 25-30 minutes (25 mins get prolonged a little if I need to stop in a wrong moment, usually just write a note what I was doing and force myself to take a pause). I end up doing ~12 pomodoros a day.
I don't like long stretches of work, it might be just me but I end up obsessing over unnecessary details the longer I concentrate on some problems, if I take a forced pause and then continue, I seem to use less time for the same amount of work.
Having had some success with Pomodoro, I'll say that it's dangerous to spend your break (really only 5-10 mins) surfing the web or checking your phone.
What happens in my experience, is that you come across a video you really want to watch, or come across a comment that you absolutely must respond to; perhaps that's what happening to me right now!
Before you know it, you've spent 30 mins away from work, and completely lost the momentum and concentration that was accumulating via the pomodoro. Now you have to use more mental energy to get back to that state.
I'm not EU/US based. Work finished 4 hours ago. I don't have social media. I don't watch TV. I've walked the dog, I made dinner and ate. I took literally 10 mins to see what was on HN and this was the first link. I'm going to jump into bed and read a book in about an hour.
I used to think that eventually you should reach a flow with whatever you're doing and for this, taking a break after a pomodoro seems not effective ...
The guy who first published the technique documented that it is effective (where effective means 'more productive'), and countless others have replicated his finding that they, too, found pomodoro to be effective. Don't let your own speculation overrule actual evidence. That's what start procrastination.
There is an alternative method called Flowtime: https://zapier.com/blog/flowtime-technique/ where you focus on a task until you feel you need a break (I think it is still crucial that you don't let yourself get distracted during this).
Another alternative is to treat the 25m as a minimum time in Pomodoro: if you are tired or have reached a natural break point for your task then stop. If you're in the flow continue.
You may want to enforce a maximum amount of time for health reasons (e.g. to get up from your chain every now and then).
"Another alternative is to treat the 25m as a minimum time in Pomodoro: if you are tired or have reached a natural break point for your task then stop. If you're in the flow continue."
This. The pomodoro technique has helped me greatly, but the time limit is really just about motivation to get started (in my case). It helps by allowing me to tell myself: "You can do this... you can do anything for 35 minutes (the time limit I prefer)."
However, it is very often the case that once the timer expires, I just turn off the alarm and remain focused on my work. Sometimes my session lasts up to an hour or more. And of course, at other times, I finish the task I wanted to work on before the timer expires because the level of focus/flow I was able to achieve enabled me to finish the task more quickly than I thought.
My story is just one, of course, but I highly recommend at least trying the pomodoro method or some variation of it, just to see if you have similar success.
Sometimes I have to make sure I am not switching tasks during breaks, even to something like reading the news. Get up, step away from computer, refill cup of water, bathroom break, etc, but not switching to something that would actually redirect your brain elsewhere and break the flow. Ideally it makes it more sustainable.
I've found the 25 minute timer to have multiple benefits:
1. If I'm struggling to start, telling myself I only need to spend 25 minutes on it gets me started
2. I can pretty easily hold myself back from checking slack/email or context-switching when the block is 25 minutes - I can always peek at messages after to make sure nothing important happened.
3. It gives me a target - frequently there is something concrete I think I can _complete_ in 25 minutes, and that gives me motivation to push to get it done by then. If it goes a little over, that's fine
4. Because these periods of 25 minutes are really intense, I can't do them back-to-back all day. I have found switching to an interesting YouTube video for 5 minutes during a break (and trying to completely rest the brain during this time) re-energizes me more quickly, and lets me do more pomodoros without needing to stop for a while
I don't really find mental fuel to be a thing[1]. In fact, I find the opposite. The more discipline I instill, the more discipline I have. Each block of discipline makes the next that much easier. That includes discipline over procrastination.
[1] Of course there is general fatigue, but this is different from only being able to focus on something for a couple of hours/day or not being able to start something at all.
The way I look at it, you can push past your ordinary daily soft limit in this area, but there will be a cost, and the more you disrupt your routine in pursuit of your goals, the higher that cost will be-- past a certain point (likely different for everyone), you will get diminishing returns & risk of a breakdown goes up.
The balance to strike here, I think, is to give your mind & body a chance to recuperate before you get too close to that breaking point. Or phrased another way, look at 'pushing yourself into a second wind' as a critical tool for certain situations, but one to be used sparingly (preferably when you have some open calendar spots ahead).
As someone else mentioned, that study has come under fire. It's also one I never agreed with because for me personally it wasn't true. I have always found things like discipline and willpower to be more about inertia than anything else.
If I wake up and start playing a video game or eating crap, that inertia carries through the day. The reverse is also true, if I get up, workout, and start being productive that will carry through the whole day. Once I realized this about myself I adjusted my whole schedule around. Instead of after work workouts, I moved them to the morning. Instead of staying up late, I get up earlier and naturally go to bed earlier. So instead of wake up and chill and ease into my day, I wake up and go. And, that go carries through the entire day.
Good insights. I've also noticed a cap on my productive output, but I find that it's elastic. I've been putting time into learning to analyze my self-state and predict what kind of day it's going to be. I've gotten good results by choosing to work on productive days and choosing not to work when my reserves are low.
I have to switch between various machines so I use my phone. Then I find any app to be overkill and limiting at the same time. I recommend using a timer and your phone's timer will do. Set timers for 25mins, 5 mins and 15mins and go!
They are magnetic, start the countdown at the given time (like 25 min and they remember it), the beeper is very soft and you can't procrastinate exploring hundreds of features.
Listened to "Daily Ritual: How artists work" recently and the most common pattern seemed to be, work intensely for 2-4 hours in the morning, most people being finished by 1-2 in the afternoon, then go out for a long walk before doing light admin stuff in the mid-late afternoon.
It's also been my observation that this is how I actually want to work. I feel ready and able to tackle anything first thing in the morning, but past 1 o clock nothing I produce will be that much good and my productivity will be a shadow of what it was in the morning.
I work freelance so that's how I work nowadays, it feels like it comes naturally in a way that no other method I've ever tried does including pomodoro.
I feel the same, just with the times flipped around. For me the morning is great for small random/admin type tasks. Even reading a research paper or spending some time learning about something I need to do/use.
In the afternoon is when I can concentrate for 2-4 hours and do some intense work. Take a break after that, and iron out anything small before calling it a day.
Weird! I'm nearly the same - I can sit in front of my machine for most of the day, completely unproductive, and then in the late afternoon it's like there's a switch in my brain and suddenly I can work without any distractions at all. What really botheres me is that I finish nearly every day thinking "I'm just going to do exactly what I've been doing now, but first thing in the morning, and then have the afternoon and evening free", and it almost never happens. I just can't find the right focus/frame of mind until after lunch. It's extremely rare that it happens.
>I think each one have to find where those 2-4 hours lies.
True, and I don't think it has anything to do with a personal biological<->time of day connection. The time of day that works for you is probably related to the contexts of what happen before and after in your day. The events which lead you into one mindset or another. So you could change your day to change what time of day it is, as well. You aren't "stuck."
I seem to have a pathological inability to get much done before midday/afternoon/evening/night (depending on severity)
I wonder if this is a belief I'm self-reinforcing by identifying as an "evening coder". I mean, I doubt there's a physiological reason for this. It's probably a matter of this being a habit of a lifetime that I've never fought back against hard enough.
There were certainly artists in that book who could only work in the evening or at night, it's just the most common pattern seemed to be the one I described which also happens to work for me.
That being said there were times in my life where I would only get productive at 11pm till 2-4 in the morning.
I wonder if there's an age component. I read that same book and I remember (maybe erroneously) that the artists who worked best in the morning were older, whereas the artists who worked better at night were younger and oftentimes addicted to stimulants.
That more or less describes my working patterns over time, too, including the addicted to stimulants part. When I was young, my most productive time of day was after everybody fell asleep. Now, it's before everybody wakes up.
> It's probably a matter of this being a habit of a lifetime that I've never fought back against hard enough.
You could try what worked for me:
Make a list of 2-5 healthy habits or routines that don't naturally fit into your current rhythms. Things like being an early riser, going to the gym in the morning, finishing all of your work before 5PM, and so on.
Then, pick 2-week periods to try them out, one at a time. For example, I always thought I was a night owl and and had delayed sleep phase syndrome until I made a deliberate effort to go to bed at 9PM every night for 2 weeks straight. The first few days were painful, but it's easy to push through when you're only looking at 2 weeks maximum. After those 2 weeks, I realized I'm a much happier, healthier, and more productive person if I go to bed at 9PM and wake up at 5AM, but it doesn't happen naturally.
Alternatively, you may discover that a routine doesn't work for you, but you're not losing much by trying it out for 2 weeks.
On average, you have about 4000-4500 weeks in a life time. It's worth taking some of those weeks to run easy experiments that could pay dividends for years to come.
I’ve had success doing somewhat the opposite. I usually am not fully awake until 9/10 am, even when I wake up at 7:30/8. So I do my light admin stuff in the morning, eat lunch (I eat lunch at 11:30 usually), go on a walk or do something not work, and then do 2-4 hours of intensive work.
> but past 1 o clock nothing I produce will be that much good and my productivity will be a shadow of what it was in the morning.
This used to be me until 4 years or so ago when I started skipping breakfast.
I love breakfast, but not because I feel hungry in the morning so once I discovered this I started skipping breakfast.
I'm fully convinced however that a good number of people would become more productive if they did eat breakfast.
FTR: I often wake up extremely early (often before 04 for days in a row) and can hardly get anything except extremely simple work done after 2100 (even back when I used to sleep more normal hours.)
> but also recognise that your brain/body only has so much "fuel" each day ...
My experience is similar to yours, and I would also add that that "fuel" grows if you maintain the effort throughout the days/weeks. But some of the days you'll have more fuel, others less, just to the best you can (I struggle a lot to keep that balance, not easy at all..)
I successfully used the pomodoro method during my PhD. I just couldn't bring myself to do the really boring stuff like the nth iteration of corrections on a section of writing. I developed some features for emacs so I could have my pomodoro timer right there at all times. It also means I have logs of exactly what I worked on and for how long.
But by far my most productive times are when the problem is clear and I feel compelled to solve it. I've always thought that I'd be overall a much more useful person if I could hack my brain to be compelled to do what needs to be done rather than whatever random thing has taken my interest.
I know that i can develop much longer then i'm actually doing.
The biggest issue for me with procrastination is not pushing every single thing until i really have to do it but that my idea of myself feels that i can do more than i'm doing.
I spend plenty of hours coding from 16-6 when i was 16 and learning php. I have plenty of experiences where i did not just stop.
The most visible to me is it with something new like a new job or task: First few weeks in a new job is great. I do a lot, i'm quite productive.
And the other thing is: If i really only can do 2-4h real development and then i need a break, i definitly don't need a break of 20h. So how to get back to it without that 20h break?
The Pomodoro technique has been hugely valuable to me over the years. So much so that I recently built a web app for it that doubles as a work log with social accountability:
For me, productivity killers are PRs. This ruins my flow so much. Side projects I can code forever, but at work being stuck having to wait for reviews and trying to juggle what I can do without having to wait for the first review kills me.
> On my iPhone I move every single application into a folder named “.”. I then move that onto the second screen. My phone dock has four apps: Phone, Headspace, Things and SMS:
Yawn. When I read these minimalism tips I always wonder if people giving this advice ever had a real job or if their job is actually giving people minimalism advice. Good luck trying to justify being the only one without Skype/Slack/Gmail
Sure, and yet... why is anyone ever late to anything? Let alone why are some people persistently late, in circumstances where that matters, and they know it's an issue?
Rationally that makes no sense so dismissing techniques for resolving it that also don't make rational sense on that basis seems wrong.
Not sure what you are trying to say here. Do you mean "because we don't know why people are getting late so dismissing a solution which I know doesn't work seems wrong" ? But you do being the reply with "sure" so was that an agreement ?
If you know that it doesn't work for you then obviously that's simply a fact.
I thought you were making a more general statement that this doesn't work because it doesn't make sense (anyone using it would just adjust their timings).
In my opinion, the #1 reason why people are often late is because being early sucks, so they prefer to underestimate the time it will take to be there and all the (not so) unforeseen problems that may make them arrive late.
I hate very much to be late, so I leave early and prepare a way to spend time if I arrive too early, like bringing a book to read or a podcast to listen to.
they are late because being on time is inherently inefficient and detrimental to maximal value extraction from the lives of individuals and humanity as a whole.
if you code then easiest analogy i can think of is that people tend to optimise for a certain wait time on average rather than always have cpu time available exactly when you need it.this is like - everyone should shoot to be at a meeting / event within a certain time frame that reflect the length of time this event is going to block them out for, how far it deviates from their planned activities and how much noticed they had.
If everyone is sometimes late then many more important things will get done much faster as people didn't just drop what they were doing to be on time.
rather than get upset by lateness I try to just never ask for people to be anywhere any given time..and if i am asking them then i think about how much extra time it takes out of their life to do it exactly when i asked (not 5 mins after or before - as both cause problems).
I also factor into these considerations that time is an abstract concept - so humans will never really give a hoot what it has to say, outcomes matter. i have never met an "always on time" person that doesn't spend way to much pointless time checking the time and thinking about the time... much like the ridiculous lengths you have to go to when programming to stop processing something at the correct time (e.g. truly deterministic control systems or games with a strong commitment to never drop a frame but carry out tasks that take way more than a frame to do)
I occasionally miss a train or a flight and that is deliberate because I optimise for minimal unproductive time waiting. The train/plane will leave without me if I am not there.
However if people are persistently late to multi-attendee meetings it increases total wait time over all the attendees which is not optimal for the group.
The more people are present and the less possible it is to start without them, the more wait time is being introduced by any person's lateness. Of course, there are far too many meetings with far too many people but that is a separate problem.
If someone just needs to chat with me at some point online or at my desk if in the office, we will usually agree a vague time slot as that is a 2 sided problem only and I can work on other things until they arrive. If they ask me to meet in a particular place where I cannot work while in a wait-state, I expect them to be on time.
You need to set it ahead, not behind. ;) Otherwise you'll be even more late.
I'm sure it doesn't work for everyone, but I've been doing this for years, and it does help me. Yes, of course you always know that it's ahead, but it takes a moment for that fact to register, and that moment can be just long enough to incite action.
(For those who have read Thinking Fast and Slow, I think this is sort of a "hack" of System 1.) Basically I'm leveraging the reactive part of my mind to help me achieve the result that the more strategic part wants.
It's moving the apps out of sight, not uninstalling them. I've done this, and found that if I just idly pick up my phone I have to consciously decide what I'm going to waste time on, and often that bit of friction is enough to make using the phone less rewarding.
I've also set the new tab page in my browsers to be blank and found that useful in the same way.
I'm happy that it works for you, but If I started to lock my phone in a safe and throw away the key, next thing I'd learn to pick the safe every five minnutes.
Yeah it’s interesting because usually these sorts of things (like editing my hosts file) don’t work for me because I get annoyed by the restriction when I legitimately need to access something and undo it.
I guess in this case it’s a small amount of friction not a complete block that works for me.
Yawn. When I read such low-effort comments, I wonder if the people writing them ever read the article or if their job is just to spout off uninformed opinions.
Your employer shouldn't expect you to be available on your phone via Skype/Slack. Gmail I guess it's ok, as long as it is the employee's choice when to check it or not.
In my case the very urgent messages which needed to be done right at that moment (or at the first moment when I got the chance to be in front of a computer screen) have been sent either through SMS or via direct social app messaging (we're a small shop, we all know each other). I've had only a handful of such messages in 10 years of us working together.
I was scared of this kind of thing.. but when i have done it its actually way less harmful than expected.
i am just honest with people and say i have not read their email or whatever, they tend not to mind that much.. as long as the things i say i will do get done.
IMHO most need for constant communication is just tight coupling manifest in business logic i.e. bad design that needs addressing.
When you can also follow up accusations of slacking with wasted clock cycle discussions its also handy (e.g. i tend to use toggl excessively if i think there is any chance of questioning my motives.. then i can switch to the always connected version of me they are asking for and show just how much time it wastes)
I am already fully booked for side projects, but one I've been wanting to tackle is to write a plugin for my IDE that just watches for signs of activity and temporarily sets the Do Not Disturb settings for up to some time limit.
But just getting a pomodoro app that also manipulates DND would probably be a lot simpler.
I think that's it too. It's another thing that is considered odd/not normal when it is probably a perfectly valid condition/feeling that needs to be handled kindly.
I have come to see it as having a parallel in extrovert/introvert - for many introverts interacting with people is just fine, but it cannot be a marathon - we have to recharge after that. Interaction is very brain energy consuming in such scenarios.
Similarly, procrastination is something similar on a different time scale. I can be intensively 'productive' for a long time (2-3 days or so), but then I have to do nothing or, in some rare cases, something else that does not involve, I am guessing, that part of the brain. Rinse repeat.
I would encourage everyone who struggles with procrastination to try CBT techniques as described in "Feeling Good" by Dr. Burns. These address the psychological reasons for procrastination directly.
One of the biggest tools that I employ, is a fairly rigid schedule.
I work @home, these days (like everyone, but I've been at it longer).
I get up at 5AM, even though I don't need to.
I do my morning exercise, even though I don't need to.
I start my workday at around 6:30AM, and try to wrap it up by 5 (seven days a week -my GitHub page is solid green).
I plan to do unpleasant, boring things when I set up my projects; for example, configuration management, refactoring, testing, release coordination, and...yuck...documentation.
And then...I do it!
Shipping (as opposed to writing) software has a lot of boring, repetitive, pedantic stuff.
I have to be careful not to fall into the automation trap, where I see automation (especially release automation) as a "silver bullet" cure for boredom.
A key insight that helped me beat procrastination is to recognise when your brain is trying to procrastinate. We all experience lulls in productivity and instinctively open that social or news website link - when you do this you need to actively tell yourself that your brain is getting distracted.
This comes from a study (which I can't find, but I think it was featured on the BBC not too long ago) - procrastination impulses come and go in waves - when you know how to effectively tackle the wave, you can return to the calm seas of productivity.
I am also a procrastinator! Keeping distractions away, especially the phone, is the most important to me as well, although I don't go to the extremes the author does!
I found that the bigger and more open ended the task is, the quicker I fizzle out and get distracted. The key for me is to get to some quicker reward point. For example I am currently working on an electronic toy project, and my current goal is to only test the music generation. Anything bigger gets hard to focus!
I've found that when I procrastinate it's due to the fact when I start a new project I can work on it for days until I realize, why am I doing X when I can do Y? and in this case X could be using a good o'l rest api instead of graphql or a completely new way of fetching data.
Then I stop working because I did realize I can use something else that will be smarter and more efficient in the long run, So then my mind goes: OK! lets start working on that, and there the endless cycle begins.
Because when I start working on the thing that will make the first thing better I also realize a day or two in, that this is stupid and I need to get back to the original thing but I can't do it because X is not as efficient as Y would have been. Then I try to think of something else for Y.
So in a sense I'm stuck in a cycle where I try to improve and get my self to write less code before the project even has taken off in a meaningful way.
It's just like in devops when people try to scale something before you have the users... which doesn't even make sense. And I'm guilty of that as well.
What boosted my productivity was thinking about and realizing that procrastination is a choice you make.
Anything you do, you choose to do so. Even the things that seem like you have no choice. You do.
You dont HAVE to eat. The consequence is that at some point your body doesnt get what it needs but you have the power to choose to not to eat.
You dont have to work on your project. But each choice has a consequence nonetheless.
So in short. What worked for me is realizing that EVERYTHING is a choice. You have to think back from the consequence and then choose what happens if you do something now vs you do something later
I use #2 (blocking distractions by editing the /etc/hosts) and it does work. Mostly because it's already a reflex strategy to go on these websites. Stuck on a problem? Check Hacker News or Reddit for a short-term dopamine trigger.
But just adding the 127.0.0.1 to the 3-5 most frequented websites is enough to stop me from reading them. It's like now I have to consciously decide: "Do you REALLY want to check this website?"
It would be similar to Netflix not jumping to the next episode during a binge watch, but rather pushing you to their homepage after an episode.
"Stuck on a problem? Check Hacker News or Reddit for a short-term dopamine trigger"
This sucks and it is absolutely true, but to me it's more about boredom, you know that monkey job you absolutely need to do but is terribly boring to the sleep inducing level?
That immediately makes me search for some other thing to focys, fighting it is very hard, I don't smoke but I think this is the closest that comes to my mind when I feel the "rush".
Also, when I was assigned to a new project where I get to work on a modern tech stack and create a proof of concept, I was able to got 6-10 hours of high productivity (sort of like a honeymoon phase with new tech) for several days.
But then I got re-assigned to a project with a tech stack that I really don't like e.g. a "hot reload" would take 5-10 seconds and it would trigger every time I save a file + the project structure doesn't make sense - but people who worked on it have since left the project + I'm not learning anything useful. I've tried focusing on the tech challenges, but my tasks are mostly to fix bugs. Refactoring is not wanted, since the idea is to ship a less buggy version as soon as possible.
Fortunately I'm a contract freelancer, once this project ends in 2 months, I won't extend and will look for a new company.
What has somewhat worked for me is Focusmate. You make a video call to a stranger, and you both commit to 50 minutes of work. I guess you could do that with a workmate or a friend, if you dare be honest in needing that kind of basic childlish psychological support. Actually, I have almost picked a habit of doing the same commitment alone, which is nice. :-)
Even that does not work, if you are tired, exhausted, depressed, sad, angry, desperate and lost. Fix that first.
Another cruel tip is to put all your procrastination prone Web accounts behind complex login controls (passwords behind 2 factor authentication Lastpass with paranoid settings), and purge your cookies often.
In a similar vein: put your guilty pleasure accounts in a browser that you hate, log yourself out of there. Make fake accounts on your primary browser, so that whenever you have the urge to log in or are accidentally logged in, you find nothing there.
I do this for Facebook. I'm considering to do it for YouTube.
Here's what worked for me in lockdown (I had issues working at home) : aim to do minimum 6 pomodoros a day, where each pomodoro is 55 minutes long. When measuring time I try to focus on a single task that's not related to admin work (answering emails etc.) I figured that 6 hours of productive work is not far off from what most people probably get done in an office environment anyway.
> One of the biggest things that can get you drawn into procrastinating is to go into a crazy website checking loop where you loop through Twitter, Hackernews, Reddit, BBC, etc in the hope for a new bit of information that probably has no real relevance to your life.
As someone personally familiar with this phenomenon (for example, I remember smiling at https://xkcd.com/477/ when it was posted in 2008, nearly 12 years ago), and as someone too familiar with procrastination in general, here's one insight I had recently, and an old insight:
> The irony, of course, is that the books are totally useless unless you take their advice. If you just keep reading them, thinking “that’s so insightful! that changes everything,” but never actually doing anything different, then pretty quickly the feeling will wear off and you’ll start searching for another book to fill the void. Chris Macleod calls this “epiphany addiction”: “Each time they feel like they’ve stumbled on some life changing discovery, feel energized for a bit without going on to achieve any real world changes, and then return to their default […]. They always end up back at the drawing board of trying to think their way out of their problem, and it’s not long before they come up with the latest pseudo earth shattering insight.”
2. Beware of searching for one true method by which you will finally “defeat” procrastination. I remember this excitement when some trick used to work, and the urge to write a post like this (BTW, congrats on writing and finishing this post — I never got around to writing something so “finished”), having found “the answer”. But eventually some trick that used to make you productive may stop helping so much. (Because there are other unaddressed root issues, which seem to find a “workaround”: this is the "procrastination as wily adversary" metaphor, as in War of Art etc.) Ultimately, it seems we need a complementary set of approaches, both external (like Steps 1 to 3 in this blog post: changing your habits), and internal (being more aware of your feelings and drives, etc). Procrastination (for many) seems to be discomfort-avoidance, where the discomfort can be some combination of fear, anxiety, distaste, dread, uncertainty, ambiguity, conflict with (some of) one's values, etc. It helps to become more aware about the nature of your discomfort, and get to the root of it. But ultimately you can't think your way out of the procrastination problem. Things like mindfulness, talking to a therapist, good exercise,… all help; just don't pin your hopes too strongly on one of them, to the exclusion of other approaches. (I had given up blocking websites as it had stopped working for me, but after reading this post I just added a major time-waster to my /etc/hosts file, thank you.)
The goal is to get to a state where you don't feel out of control of your own mind, where you can decide to do something and just do it — but it can be a process to get there. Good luck to you, me, and all of us. “You can't think your way into right action, but you can act your way into right thinking.”
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadI'm afraid that you'll get this account restricted if you continue like this. You're also tarnishing your brand.
Edit: Another notorious project-poster is burtonator, which I also find mildly annoying, but whenever he posts about his project at least it's actually tangentially related to what is being discussed. He's a good bit less over the line than you are, in my opinion.
I say this because anxiety around needing to do something important is one possible cause of procrastination in the first place, and yet there is nothing more anxiety-inducing than telling yourself that by procrastinating, you're failing to do the most important things first. Whereas instead, if you only go so far as to make a mental note of it when you catch yourself procrastinating, you'll give yourself a moment to reflect without giving yourself anxiety that perpetuates further procrastination.
Also, you may have a subconscious reason for not doing something. Procrastinating could simply just be your brain's way of letting a better idea about how to do it percolate. That said, forming habits of doing certain unproductive things could be a pointless loss of productivity. Like if you have a habit of checking social media several times a day you might try blocking yourself from that and see how much productivity you've gained. And after all, there are better ways of procrastinating than by checking social media, like going for walks, trying new healthy recipes if you cook, or even cleaning (I actually don't know how many times I've thought of a good solution while cleaning), etc.
Once you've done that, you can think about it in terms of optimizing time spent working vs. time spent in leisure, and acknowledge that the "good" forms of procrastinating are an important form of leisure, which, if you've optimized the ratio well, boost your productivity by restoring mental energy and increasing creativity. Technically this includes sleep as well. :-)
I had to find a way to deal with procrastination a few years ago and the most important thkng I learned was to banish perfectionism and admit that good results are more likely to emerge from repeated iterations than from carefully acting out a perfect plan made the first day you heard about the project.
Something I'm bad at but seems to work is to have a conversation with myself that sort of comforts me about the anxiety and says "hey, what does this todo list look like? does it really matter that everything won't be completed today? You've spent years on this project so why would it be done today? Okay now go and address this one thing you have to do."
I'm getting better at knowing that this is my issue though and just think to myself "If I break it, I can go back a few steps or just fix the problem as it comes".
I am anxious and discouraged when working on it and often fallback on safety of procrastination.
This is exacerbated by the fact that I like to have a holistic view and understanding of something before implementing something. And I can't do that here :/
It's sort of the internal version of having a manager present you with a task and telling you up front that it will be "easy". That's enough to elicit a silent, knowing groan from most of us.
The good news is that often once I accept that a task is really quite complex and will take a long time, the resistance fades, and it becomes easier to start working on.
1) Laptop is for work only ( every thing else is blocked )
2) Mobile is for social media and procrastination ( I switch off internet while working. )
On my computer, I block all distracting sites with the extension I built until noon, then I have 20 minutes for mostly Twitter, then all blocked until 4PM, another 20 min break, and then blocked until 8PM. 8PM-midnight, I do whatever I want. I've found this a fair agreement with myself that I have no reason to break. It created a rhythm for me.
So perhaps if a complete block is too big a stretch, you can give yourself a couple well-defined "fun breaks".
On your work phone, remove all distractions.
Fore Firefox, the "impulse blocker" add-on can be helpful.
Yeah, procrastination is a teacher. There's a reason why you or I procrastinate. Sometimes it takes only a couple minutes to figure out.
Regarding the fear part, I find re-framing it to be useful.
Fearing failure? Well, if you haven't started yet, you're already failing. What will you learn, even if you fail?
Fearing endless work? Do you enjoy the process? If not, could you make it more enjoyable?
Fearing judgement or putting something imperfect into the world? 1) We're all imperfect. 2) You can create, try, and fail in private. You don't have to show your first bad attempt to anyone. You can work on it until it's good enough and then show it to someone else.
And about that "break it down" advice, yes it does help, but I prefer to think about it as clarifying.
Clarify the work, identify the unresolved issue, hazy details, decisions not made. What am I ignoring? What's unclear? What's giving me anxiety? Any of those questions help.
Hope that helps a bit.
And as you say in the article that you're looking for more tools for defeating procrastination, I feel obliged to point you to the collection of anti-procrastination tools I've built at deprocrastination.co.
What I've come to realise however is that the brain/body can only do so much work in a day. I can program for a few hours a day (on a good day) and then it becomes increasingly more effort to do more coding. Sometimes, depending on the task, I'll be able to switch to another task. However, my point in all of this is, if you have a serious procrastination problem -- find a way to overcome it, but also recognise that your brain/body only has so much "fuel" each day, and you need to decide what to put it towards (e.g. work, hobbies, exercise, study, family, etc).
Tricking my brain into investing into the outcome of work I am not interested in takes up most of my time now trying to get over procrastination. And of course I have a deadline today and I'm writing this message on HN... but like any good developer that needs some pressure to work I've got the plates all spinning for now.
The biggest differentiators are the UI, configurability (of times, alarms, etc.), and for me, oddly, the ability to have/not have a "ticking" sound while it's going. I like it to keep me motivated, others hate it and prefer music. Sometimes I use both.
I don't like long stretches of work, it might be just me but I end up obsessing over unnecessary details the longer I concentrate on some problems, if I take a forced pause and then continue, I seem to use less time for the same amount of work.
Says one of the first commenters. Are you sure what you are doing here now is not procrastination?
What happens in my experience, is that you come across a video you really want to watch, or come across a comment that you absolutely must respond to; perhaps that's what happening to me right now!
Before you know it, you've spent 30 mins away from work, and completely lost the momentum and concentration that was accumulating via the pomodoro. Now you have to use more mental energy to get back to that state.
There are six steps in the original technique:
1. Decide on the task to be done.
2. Set the pomodoro timer (traditionally to 25 minutes).
3. Work on the task.
4. End work when the timer rings and put a checkmark on a piece of paper.
5. If you have fewer than four checkmarks, take a short break (3–5 minutes), then go to step 2.
6. After four pomodoros, take a longer break (15–30 minutes), reset your checkmark count to zero, then go to step 1.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
Another alternative is to treat the 25m as a minimum time in Pomodoro: if you are tired or have reached a natural break point for your task then stop. If you're in the flow continue.
You may want to enforce a maximum amount of time for health reasons (e.g. to get up from your chain every now and then).
This. The pomodoro technique has helped me greatly, but the time limit is really just about motivation to get started (in my case). It helps by allowing me to tell myself: "You can do this... you can do anything for 35 minutes (the time limit I prefer)."
However, it is very often the case that once the timer expires, I just turn off the alarm and remain focused on my work. Sometimes my session lasts up to an hour or more. And of course, at other times, I finish the task I wanted to work on before the timer expires because the level of focus/flow I was able to achieve enabled me to finish the task more quickly than I thought.
My story is just one, of course, but I highly recommend at least trying the pomodoro method or some variation of it, just to see if you have similar success.
1. If I'm struggling to start, telling myself I only need to spend 25 minutes on it gets me started
2. I can pretty easily hold myself back from checking slack/email or context-switching when the block is 25 minutes - I can always peek at messages after to make sure nothing important happened.
3. It gives me a target - frequently there is something concrete I think I can _complete_ in 25 minutes, and that gives me motivation to push to get it done by then. If it goes a little over, that's fine
4. Because these periods of 25 minutes are really intense, I can't do them back-to-back all day. I have found switching to an interesting YouTube video for 5 minutes during a break (and trying to completely rest the brain during this time) re-energizes me more quickly, and lets me do more pomodoros without needing to stop for a while
[1] Of course there is general fatigue, but this is different from only being able to focus on something for a couple of hours/day or not being able to start something at all.
The balance to strike here, I think, is to give your mind & body a chance to recuperate before you get too close to that breaking point. Or phrased another way, look at 'pushing yourself into a second wind' as a critical tool for certain situations, but one to be used sparingly (preferably when you have some open calendar spots ahead).
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-way-you-think-about-w...
If I wake up and start playing a video game or eating crap, that inertia carries through the day. The reverse is also true, if I get up, workout, and start being productive that will carry through the whole day. Once I realized this about myself I adjusted my whole schedule around. Instead of after work workouts, I moved them to the morning. Instead of staying up late, I get up earlier and naturally go to bed earlier. So instead of wake up and chill and ease into my day, I wake up and go. And, that go carries through the entire day.
They are magnetic, start the countdown at the given time (like 25 min and they remember it), the beeper is very soft and you can't procrastinate exploring hundreds of features.
It's also been my observation that this is how I actually want to work. I feel ready and able to tackle anything first thing in the morning, but past 1 o clock nothing I produce will be that much good and my productivity will be a shadow of what it was in the morning.
I work freelance so that's how I work nowadays, it feels like it comes naturally in a way that no other method I've ever tried does including pomodoro.
In the afternoon is when I can concentrate for 2-4 hours and do some intense work. Take a break after that, and iron out anything small before calling it a day.
For me they start between 5pm and 6pm.
I can spend the day in front of my screen doing (almost) nothing or admin stuff. And then it kicks on and I’m (a lot more) productive.
The problem is that it’s around the time I have to take care of the kids when my wife can’t...
True, and I don't think it has anything to do with a personal biological<->time of day connection. The time of day that works for you is probably related to the contexts of what happen before and after in your day. The events which lead you into one mindset or another. So you could change your day to change what time of day it is, as well. You aren't "stuck."
I seem to have a pathological inability to get much done before midday/afternoon/evening/night (depending on severity)
I wonder if this is a belief I'm self-reinforcing by identifying as an "evening coder". I mean, I doubt there's a physiological reason for this. It's probably a matter of this being a habit of a lifetime that I've never fought back against hard enough.
That more or less describes my working patterns over time, too, including the addicted to stimulants part. When I was young, my most productive time of day was after everybody fell asleep. Now, it's before everybody wakes up.
You could try what worked for me:
Make a list of 2-5 healthy habits or routines that don't naturally fit into your current rhythms. Things like being an early riser, going to the gym in the morning, finishing all of your work before 5PM, and so on.
Then, pick 2-week periods to try them out, one at a time. For example, I always thought I was a night owl and and had delayed sleep phase syndrome until I made a deliberate effort to go to bed at 9PM every night for 2 weeks straight. The first few days were painful, but it's easy to push through when you're only looking at 2 weeks maximum. After those 2 weeks, I realized I'm a much happier, healthier, and more productive person if I go to bed at 9PM and wake up at 5AM, but it doesn't happen naturally.
Alternatively, you may discover that a routine doesn't work for you, but you're not losing much by trying it out for 2 weeks.
On average, you have about 4000-4500 weeks in a life time. It's worth taking some of those weeks to run easy experiments that could pay dividends for years to come.
This used to be me until 4 years or so ago when I started skipping breakfast.
I love breakfast, but not because I feel hungry in the morning so once I discovered this I started skipping breakfast.
I'm fully convinced however that a good number of people would become more productive if they did eat breakfast.
FTR: I often wake up extremely early (often before 04 for days in a row) and can hardly get anything except extremely simple work done after 2100 (even back when I used to sleep more normal hours.)
My experience is similar to yours, and I would also add that that "fuel" grows if you maintain the effort throughout the days/weeks. But some of the days you'll have more fuel, others less, just to the best you can (I struggle a lot to keep that balance, not easy at all..)
But by far my most productive times are when the problem is clear and I feel compelled to solve it. I've always thought that I'd be overall a much more useful person if I could hack my brain to be compelled to do what needs to be done rather than whatever random thing has taken my interest.
I know that i can develop much longer then i'm actually doing.
The biggest issue for me with procrastination is not pushing every single thing until i really have to do it but that my idea of myself feels that i can do more than i'm doing.
I spend plenty of hours coding from 16-6 when i was 16 and learning php. I have plenty of experiences where i did not just stop.
The most visible to me is it with something new like a new job or task: First few weeks in a new job is great. I do a lot, i'm quite productive.
And the other thing is: If i really only can do 2-4h real development and then i need a break, i definitly don't need a break of 20h. So how to get back to it without that 20h break?
https://timmytimer.com
-RescueTime (keeps tracking of all windows, websites, programs during the work hours)
-ManicTime (free and Open Source but lacks good reporting as in RescueTime, on other hand it does work 100% offline)
Yawn. When I read these minimalism tips I always wonder if people giving this advice ever had a real job or if their job is actually giving people minimalism advice. Good luck trying to justify being the only one without Skype/Slack/Gmail
Rationally that makes no sense so dismissing techniques for resolving it that also don't make rational sense on that basis seems wrong.
I thought you were making a more general statement that this doesn't work because it doesn't make sense (anyone using it would just adjust their timings).
I hate very much to be late, so I leave early and prepare a way to spend time if I arrive too early, like bringing a book to read or a podcast to listen to.
if you code then easiest analogy i can think of is that people tend to optimise for a certain wait time on average rather than always have cpu time available exactly when you need it.this is like - everyone should shoot to be at a meeting / event within a certain time frame that reflect the length of time this event is going to block them out for, how far it deviates from their planned activities and how much noticed they had.
If everyone is sometimes late then many more important things will get done much faster as people didn't just drop what they were doing to be on time.
rather than get upset by lateness I try to just never ask for people to be anywhere any given time..and if i am asking them then i think about how much extra time it takes out of their life to do it exactly when i asked (not 5 mins after or before - as both cause problems).
I also factor into these considerations that time is an abstract concept - so humans will never really give a hoot what it has to say, outcomes matter. i have never met an "always on time" person that doesn't spend way to much pointless time checking the time and thinking about the time... much like the ridiculous lengths you have to go to when programming to stop processing something at the correct time (e.g. truly deterministic control systems or games with a strong commitment to never drop a frame but carry out tasks that take way more than a frame to do)
I occasionally miss a train or a flight and that is deliberate because I optimise for minimal unproductive time waiting. The train/plane will leave without me if I am not there.
However if people are persistently late to multi-attendee meetings it increases total wait time over all the attendees which is not optimal for the group.
The more people are present and the less possible it is to start without them, the more wait time is being introduced by any person's lateness. Of course, there are far too many meetings with far too many people but that is a separate problem.
If someone just needs to chat with me at some point online or at my desk if in the office, we will usually agree a vague time slot as that is a 2 sided problem only and I can work on other things until they arrive. If they ask me to meet in a particular place where I cannot work while in a wait-state, I expect them to be on time.
I'm sure it doesn't work for everyone, but I've been doing this for years, and it does help me. Yes, of course you always know that it's ahead, but it takes a moment for that fact to register, and that moment can be just long enough to incite action.
(For those who have read Thinking Fast and Slow, I think this is sort of a "hack" of System 1.) Basically I'm leveraging the reactive part of my mind to help me achieve the result that the more strategic part wants.
Yeah I actually realized that mistake some 30 mins after posting that I think but then left it like just wondering who will notice that :p
I've also set the new tab page in my browsers to be blank and found that useful in the same way.
I guess in this case it’s a small amount of friction not a complete block that works for me.
If you don't need anti-procrastination advice why did you read (skim?) the article and why are you commenting here?
In my case the very urgent messages which needed to be done right at that moment (or at the first moment when I got the chance to be in front of a computer screen) have been sent either through SMS or via direct social app messaging (we're a small shop, we all know each other). I've had only a handful of such messages in 10 years of us working together.
i am just honest with people and say i have not read their email or whatever, they tend not to mind that much.. as long as the things i say i will do get done.
IMHO most need for constant communication is just tight coupling manifest in business logic i.e. bad design that needs addressing.
When you can also follow up accusations of slacking with wasted clock cycle discussions its also handy (e.g. i tend to use toggl excessively if i think there is any chance of questioning my motives.. then i can switch to the always connected version of me they are asking for and show just how much time it wastes)
But just getting a pomodoro app that also manipulates DND would probably be a lot simpler.
I mostly embraced it. As long as I'm procrastinating good things by doing other good things, it works pretty well.
It also helps to do things you like.
I'm still on my smartphone 90% of the day and sleeping until 12 every day, btw.
I have come to see it as having a parallel in extrovert/introvert - for many introverts interacting with people is just fine, but it cannot be a marathon - we have to recharge after that. Interaction is very brain energy consuming in such scenarios.
Similarly, procrastination is something similar on a different time scale. I can be intensively 'productive' for a long time (2-3 days or so), but then I have to do nothing or, in some rare cases, something else that does not involve, I am guessing, that part of the brain. Rinse repeat.
One of the biggest tools that I employ, is a fairly rigid schedule.
I work @home, these days (like everyone, but I've been at it longer).
I get up at 5AM, even though I don't need to.
I do my morning exercise, even though I don't need to.
I start my workday at around 6:30AM, and try to wrap it up by 5 (seven days a week -my GitHub page is solid green).
I plan to do unpleasant, boring things when I set up my projects; for example, configuration management, refactoring, testing, release coordination, and...yuck...documentation.
And then...I do it!
Shipping (as opposed to writing) software has a lot of boring, repetitive, pedantic stuff.
I have to be careful not to fall into the automation trap, where I see automation (especially release automation) as a "silver bullet" cure for boredom.
But that's just me. YMMV.
This comes from a study (which I can't find, but I think it was featured on the BBC not too long ago) - procrastination impulses come and go in waves - when you know how to effectively tackle the wave, you can return to the calm seas of productivity.
I found that the bigger and more open ended the task is, the quicker I fizzle out and get distracted. The key for me is to get to some quicker reward point. For example I am currently working on an electronic toy project, and my current goal is to only test the music generation. Anything bigger gets hard to focus!
Then I stop working because I did realize I can use something else that will be smarter and more efficient in the long run, So then my mind goes: OK! lets start working on that, and there the endless cycle begins. Because when I start working on the thing that will make the first thing better I also realize a day or two in, that this is stupid and I need to get back to the original thing but I can't do it because X is not as efficient as Y would have been. Then I try to think of something else for Y. So in a sense I'm stuck in a cycle where I try to improve and get my self to write less code before the project even has taken off in a meaningful way. It's just like in devops when people try to scale something before you have the users... which doesn't even make sense. And I'm guilty of that as well.
Anything you do, you choose to do so. Even the things that seem like you have no choice. You do.
You dont HAVE to eat. The consequence is that at some point your body doesnt get what it needs but you have the power to choose to not to eat.
You dont have to work on your project. But each choice has a consequence nonetheless.
So in short. What worked for me is realizing that EVERYTHING is a choice. You have to think back from the consequence and then choose what happens if you do something now vs you do something later
Use a laptop to browse stackexchange. Set email to sync every hour, unless your job is to answer emails as they come. Checking once an hour is enough.
But just adding the 127.0.0.1 to the 3-5 most frequented websites is enough to stop me from reading them. It's like now I have to consciously decide: "Do you REALLY want to check this website?"
It would be similar to Netflix not jumping to the next episode during a binge watch, but rather pushing you to their homepage after an episode.
You "break the default" in a way.
This sucks and it is absolutely true, but to me it's more about boredom, you know that monkey job you absolutely need to do but is terribly boring to the sleep inducing level?
That immediately makes me search for some other thing to focys, fighting it is very hard, I don't smoke but I think this is the closest that comes to my mind when I feel the "rush".
Also, when I was assigned to a new project where I get to work on a modern tech stack and create a proof of concept, I was able to got 6-10 hours of high productivity (sort of like a honeymoon phase with new tech) for several days.
But then I got re-assigned to a project with a tech stack that I really don't like e.g. a "hot reload" would take 5-10 seconds and it would trigger every time I save a file + the project structure doesn't make sense - but people who worked on it have since left the project + I'm not learning anything useful. I've tried focusing on the tech challenges, but my tasks are mostly to fix bugs. Refactoring is not wanted, since the idea is to ship a less buggy version as soon as possible.
Fortunately I'm a contract freelancer, once this project ends in 2 months, I won't extend and will look for a new company.
Even that does not work, if you are tired, exhausted, depressed, sad, angry, desperate and lost. Fix that first.
I do this for Facebook. I'm considering to do it for YouTube.
As someone personally familiar with this phenomenon (for example, I remember smiling at https://xkcd.com/477/ when it was posted in 2008, nearly 12 years ago), and as someone too familiar with procrastination in general, here's one insight I had recently, and an old insight:
1. Firstly, “epiphany addiction” — I encountered it on the blog of Aaron Swartz (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/anders):
> The irony, of course, is that the books are totally useless unless you take their advice. If you just keep reading them, thinking “that’s so insightful! that changes everything,” but never actually doing anything different, then pretty quickly the feeling will wear off and you’ll start searching for another book to fill the void. Chris Macleod calls this “epiphany addiction”: “Each time they feel like they’ve stumbled on some life changing discovery, feel energized for a bit without going on to achieve any real world changes, and then return to their default […]. They always end up back at the drawing board of trying to think their way out of their problem, and it’s not long before they come up with the latest pseudo earth shattering insight.”
2. Beware of searching for one true method by which you will finally “defeat” procrastination. I remember this excitement when some trick used to work, and the urge to write a post like this (BTW, congrats on writing and finishing this post — I never got around to writing something so “finished”), having found “the answer”. But eventually some trick that used to make you productive may stop helping so much. (Because there are other unaddressed root issues, which seem to find a “workaround”: this is the "procrastination as wily adversary" metaphor, as in War of Art etc.) Ultimately, it seems we need a complementary set of approaches, both external (like Steps 1 to 3 in this blog post: changing your habits), and internal (being more aware of your feelings and drives, etc). Procrastination (for many) seems to be discomfort-avoidance, where the discomfort can be some combination of fear, anxiety, distaste, dread, uncertainty, ambiguity, conflict with (some of) one's values, etc. It helps to become more aware about the nature of your discomfort, and get to the root of it. But ultimately you can't think your way out of the procrastination problem. Things like mindfulness, talking to a therapist, good exercise,… all help; just don't pin your hopes too strongly on one of them, to the exclusion of other approaches. (I had given up blocking websites as it had stopped working for me, but after reading this post I just added a major time-waster to my /etc/hosts file, thank you.)
The goal is to get to a state where you don't feel out of control of your own mind, where you can decide to do something and just do it — but it can be a process to get there. Good luck to you, me, and all of us. “You can't think your way into right action, but you can act your way into right thinking.”