emotion regulation (bad) --> coping (e.g. mindfulness or CBT) --> less procrastination
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> What's the song of the procrastinator: "I don't want to, I don't feel like it," and usually there's the chorus of: "I'll feel more like it tomorrow."
That's a very playful way to phrase a characterization: what's the song of. I'm stealing it ;-)
“ > Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert”
That makes sense for some procrastination, but other procrastination is laziness.
Mopping the floor, taking out the garbage, mowing the lawn types of procrastination... those are under your own purview and don’t involve big emotions or decisions...
So I think it explains some kinds of procrastination but not all.
I have no desire to perform any manual labor task that can easily be automated, it seems such a pointless waste of time. Time better spent procrastinating.
One of the best things I've ever learned was to recognize that voice when it says "I can do that later" and instead decide to do it right now. The payoff is huge!
My hack is that I'll start doing a thing while wondering if I should do it. Instead of standing around thinking about whether you should do dishes, do a bit while you think about it. And usually then it's easier to just finish.
It might not be laziness if the difficult emotions would have to be confronted by the mopping the floor kind of procrastination. Or, worse, if realising you need to mow the lawn makes you realise your entire yard is a mess and probably a shame to your community and you feel worse because of it - so you suppress and procrastinate.
When you procrastinate on mopping the floor or mowing the lawn, you're making a choice to live with dirtier floors or longer grass in exchange for more time to spend on other things. Some of that work actually goes away forever when you procrastinate. It's not like you mow the grass twice to make up for missing a week!
Perhaps the difficult emotion that 'lazy' people are avoiding is admitting to themselves that they're ok making that trade-off.
> Perhaps the difficult emotion that 'lazy' people are avoiding is admitting to themselves that they're ok making that trade-off.
I don't think it's that simple. During low periods, I let plates/wrappers/leftovers pile in the dishwasher, in the sink, on the sides, and in trash bags. The result is that when I need to eat, I clean a single dish, make room (more piling), and make a trivial meal.
The pending cleaning grows, yet I avoid doing it, live in filth and avoid cooking.
I'd be better putting a trash bag in, putting the wrappers/food in the bin, and using my dishwasher to batch clean, rather than JIT clean by hand. But I don't.
The worst thing is when you put something off, like a project at work, and then it gets cancelled. That's the type of positive reinforcement that leads to even more procrastiantion. :-)
> The first week after getting an assignment is called 'The Wally Period.' Never do work during the Wally period because most tasks become unnecessary within seven days.
It's not about just doing the dishes, it's about the sum of all the other chores and things you have to do. It's overwhelming in its entirety, not the individual tasks.
When they look at the washing up a procrastinator doesn't just see the washing up, they also see that they have to do a laundry, fix the cupboard creak, do a full clean of the cupboards, clean under the fridge, wash the floors, dust the cobwebs, fix the dripping tap, take out the recycling, decide what to do with those old jars, etc., etc.
Even if they do eventually manage to do a flurry of chores, and usually feel great, it's not a habit to do it again. It's not a scheduled minor, automatic, task. Your brain deals with habits much easier than things you have to consciously do.
So it inadvertently builds up, and BAM, as if from nowhere, there's a massive pile of washing up with a whole load of OTHER tasks mentally attached to it again.
You see it as easy and lazinness, but we don't. The irony is that living like this is actually a lot harder, you're having to ultimately put more work in for often worse results.
I don’t mean it as an attack. I’m affected by the above too. Sometimes it’s because you look too far down the road as you allude to. But that could be part of an “excuse” mechanism.
Breaking things down into more discrete unconnected units allows addressing neater (less messy) problems/chores.
In myself I do notice over complicating things as an excuse to put them off and waste time. But as others suggest, sometimes you just have to power through and get things done.
And in most cases it’s not a hard or difficult work. The hard part is committing to doing it. Once you actually start it’s mostly a breeze.
Ah, ok, I've removed the first paragraph as I was being too defensive and it didn't really add anything.
I've been personally struggling with this for decades, I've found solutions that work for months, or even sometimes years and had long periods of effective productivity. But they all seem to eventually get forgotten and then don't work the 2nd time round.
It's very frustrating.
It's funny as I can easily work hard for other people and clients, etc.
My wife is like you, she sees everything she has to do as a huge "lump" of work and gets overwhelmed and distracted trying to make progress on everything at once. She's also ADHD which means she very easily gets distracted by something, which then leads to hyperfocus on that seemingly unproductive thing.
I see the kitchen and I think "this is going to make my back and legs hurt so much, I'm going to rest a bit before tackling it." Then I get distracted with reddit or HN or whatever, and suddenly it's the next morning and I have to work again.
> When they look at the washing up a procrastinator doesn't just see the washing up, they also see that they have to do a laundry, fix the cupboard creak, do a full clean of the cupboards, clean under the fridge, wash the floors, dust the cobwebs, fix the dripping tap, take out the recycling, decide what to do with those old jars, etc., etc
This reminds me: is there a word to describe a related phenomenon, that I find incredibly frustrating? It goes as follows: say I want to take a one minute break to fetch myself some coffee. I go to the kitchen, find the dishwasher running and no clean cup, so I have to clean one myself. I do that, then discover I have to refill the water and the beans in the coffee machine. I make the coffee, and the machine flashes red. The dredgewater bin is full. I need to pour it out and clean it. I get dirty and coffee-smelly, so I want to wash my hands. Doing that, I use the last bit of soap in the dispenser, so now I have to fetch the 5L jug and carefully refill it. By this time, what started as a one-minute break turned into 10 minutes of chores, and I'm already anxious about getting back to work.
Some form of the story above happens to me pretty much every other day. Is there a name for this kind of unexpected recursive expansion of chores?
I don't know but I call it "the stack". If the stack gets big enough, it can get overwhelming.
Maybe it would make sense to have a todo list organized like a hierarchical bullet point list for things like these... where you don't have to store the whole dependency graph in your head. I find that that's often why I don't get the actual task intended complete; because in the process of emptying the stack, I forget what got me there in the first place.
I suspect the phenomenon is different for each person. Myself, I have little problem procrastinating household chores--they feel easy and not particularly stressful. For whatever reason, it hits me hardest for tasks that I "like" to do, like programming. It's quite paradoxical.
It's certainly true for me that procrastination is essentially avoiding a form of anxiety. But I don't think there's some deeper, larger problem. It feels more like "choking", just a fairly specific learned, maladaptive response. At some times in my life, I've pushed it into the background and become more productive, but it always seems to creep back.
Drinking seems to reliably reduce it, but I can't very well program lit all day.
To me, mopping the floor reminds me of all those times I said to myself "I'll clean the apartment top to bottom today" and I tried hard, but by the end of the day it was still far from perfect. Then 3 days later it was dirty again. I failed and I was a loser.
I'm not really looking forward to reliving that.
You can have strong, negative emotions in any area of your life.
Just want to say that if someone here truly has tried to overcome procrastination, but still fails, try to get screened for ADD/ADHD.
Even though it's a condition that is also quite over diagnosed, it's simultaneously a condition that's underdiagnosed IMO - it really depends on where you're looking / sampling. A lot of kids fly under the radar, because they don't show any obvious signs, even more so those with ADD / non-hyperactive.
ADD doesn’t really exist anymore. The way they classify it nowadays is by assigning a score to each of the three main “pillars” of ADHD: Hyperactivity, Attention, and Impulsivity, and if one of these is especially dominant, they classify you into that category (eg. ADHD-Primarily Inattentive - which is the replacement for ADD).
Good point, Tracker!
I didn’t find out I had ADHD until after college. Now I see all the normal adolescent problems like sleeplessness, impulsivity, stress, lack of direction are amplified by ADHD. I don’t know how I graduated, haha I guess by ramming into the same walls until breaking through.
It also gets progressively worse, adult AD(spectrum) can be life ruining. I wish it was more recognized and I wish it was easier to get medication/treatment. The side effects are nothing compared to half a life wasted.
Yes, it's quite sad. For a lot of adults, their lives don't really start until they've been diagnosed, and gotten on some treatment - usually a medication that works for them. Lots of these people have tried and failed school, tried and failed jobs, etc.
But then the bricks fall in their place, and they can try to redo all that. Unfortunately, by that time, a lot of doors have been closed - especially if you want to work in tech or professional industries.
Now, I'm not trying to scare posters, but it's much better to get that stuff figured out before you've gone too long to make lasting damage, both to your own health, and to your professional life.
Absolutely. The years in my life between when my daughter was ~ 7-11 I don't really remember at all, it's still quite painful to not really remember those years.
I was alive, but not really living. I could not get the simplest things done, only things that were fun or immediately rewarding, at times barely that.
It reminded me of what people referred to as depression, but without much of anything that could actually be called depression, not without doing injustice to anyone who have ever suffered an actual depression.
Trust me, if I could’ve gotten on medication sooner, my life would be clearly better today.
Don’t let the years go by, moderate consumption of stimulants can be really beneficial for someone with ADHD, and you don’t realise this until you’ve tried.
Also there is a thin line between procrastination and brutal prioritization. I often feel that procrastination ping and think to myself, is this really the next most important thing for me to do? Often times it is not, and once in a while it is. A lot of my work is creative in nature and forcing the creative process when you’re blocked is not always a good use of time. There is a balance between deadline, now and the time it comes to you with a force that screams to leave your body. The trick is understanding yourself and being honest, am I putting this off because it’s too fuzzy, not clear what the next step is etc? or is it just brutal prioritization?
Also note that I’ve changed roles quite a bit in my life and when I delete the final TODO list I look back at the things I did not get done. It’s as informative to review your accomplishments as it is your failures, but also what you never got around to doing. Often that last category will make me laugh “look at all those stupid things I thought were important”... rm -f TODO
And as I tell people all the time, the day after you die there will be more email in your inbox. If you focus on emptying your inbox your life will be empty when you leave. But your inbox will still be filling up.
> A lot of my work is creative in nature and forcing the creative process when you’re blocked is not always a good use of time.
Yeah I gotta agree with this. Sometimes it's like you are trying to walk through a wall and it's just not working. Our subconscious tells us "this is not working, try something else". Now the dysfunctional reaction is to pass time waiting for the wall to collapse under its own weight. And the "correct" solution is to search for a door. But the tricky thingy is we may not realize on a conscious level that the wall is even there or that the wall is the reason we are passing time.
> Here's the magic — the next time you face a task that your whole body is screaming, "I don't want to, I don't feel like it," ask yourself: what's the next action? What's the next action I'd need to take to make some progress? Don't break the whole task down. That will be sure to overwhelm you. I think if most of us broke our whole task down, we'd realize that life's too short, you can never get it all done. Instead just say, "What's the next action?" and keep that action as small and as concrete as possible.
I'm actually handling this area in my life right now, and I decided I'd use my intuition rather than my intellect to handle it (and analyze with my intellect if my intuition came up with something interesting).
It did.
Here is my idea: be playful about the tasks your procrastinate on. Don't cater to your intellect, cater to your emotions.
I have 2 examples with flexibility training and lifting weights.
Flexibility training: ask yourself questions that stir up curiosity, such as
"how does this feel?"
"what do I like about it?"
"what do I dislike about it?"
"will I think similar ideas the next day if I answer these questions (spoiler alert: I personally don't)"
And then focus relentlessly on the fun (if you have some of it) and really indulge in it. I've likened flexibility training to a lot of things I find fun.
--- Example 2 ---
Strength training: ask yourself questions that stir up curiosity and fun! Such as
"How does it feel fun?"
"How does the pain feel fun?"
"What is it that I don't like about it? Why?"
"Are there moments when there's a part of the activity that I dislike or like and it flips to the other side, why?"
In practice: I mostly ask "how does it feel fun?" and shamelessly focus on it.
--- Some theory ---
I'd want to ask the professor if he considered playfulness and curiosity as potential moderators or mediators that could enhance motivation to procrastinate less.
I believe that playfulness and curiosity are related to the competency and autonomy aspect of self-determination theory, so to me it makes sense that those aspects heighten motivation in general and therefore reduce motivation.
Another idea: talk with people about your workouts that you've done (then you also bring in the "relatedness" part of self-determination theory).
The claim seems to be: (i) if you are economically independent, procrastination is an indication that the postponed task is not worth doing after all; (ii) if you are forced to do it for money, procrastination is just a natural reaction to being forced to do something one doesn't want to do, namely not doing it for as long as possible.
Agreed. External factors aside (e.g. ADHD) to me procrastination is a good indicator of whether what I'm working on is meaningful or not.
Quoting some other post I've read on HN:
> Remember that you are going to die. Time flies, have you noticed? Is that status symbol that you are pursuing really that important? Is it ever going to make you happy?
> There is more wisdom in one of your cells than in all self-help and management books combined. Maybe you can't focus for a good reason? What could that reason be?
> Remember the last time you felt glad to be alive? Was it related to being productive?
You seem to imply that, if one is free and just follows one's immediate impulses, one automatically ends up doing something worthwhile and non-bullshit. But there are lots of free men (economically independent men) who give their lives to bullshit; so that can't be quite right.
I read the article while procrastinating on a work task I should be doing. I think the author nails it. When I just get started on a task, picking the simplest thing to do first without much planning, then I naturally get into a flow where small sub-tasks present themselves as I go.
If instead I start planning out all that is left to do, I quickly become demotivated and overwhelmed not knowing where to start. A sort of "analysis-paralysis".
The big problem for me is that even if I get into a productive flow its much to easy to run into a blocker that pulls me out into paralysis again (could be a family interruption, a harder sub-task, etc).
People wouldnt procrastinate if there wasn't some evolutionary advantage...
Personally, I have found that if I get on with certain tasks in a team environment with too much vigor, I start to get other team members feeling left out or feeling their input isn't adding value. Keep doing it and the team will fall apart. Sitting around and being lazy for a bit helps keep the team together and has more forward progress overall.
It's amazing the number of things which have been top priority for some time which them drop off the list never to be heard from again, or at least modified beyond recognition.
It is probably a poor defence of procrastination but it certainly does occasionally pay to put something on the back burner for a while to see if it actually needs doing.
I've experienced that on the other side; I ended up procrastinating a lot because any effort I did would already be done by someone else, and faster or with more insight, or the work I did would be done over by someone else in half the time. It also didn't help that the work and technology weren't giving me much satisfaction.
I'm the sole developer on a new project now, it's giving me a lot more satisfaction. I do run into procrastination and analysis paralysis though.
> People wouldnt procrastinate if there wasn't some evolutionary advantage...
That's probably not a reasonable assumption. Evolution doesn't work so fast. Procrastination might simply be an indication that we're not living under liveable conditions. Why do octopuses eat their own limbs under some conditions? Does it give them an evolutionary advantage?
Not sure how authentic it is, but here [1] is an explanation:
> It is believed that it is caused by a virus/bacteria which can manage to take hold on a stressed octopus. The biting is said to be due to irritation and biting alleviates the affected area. An octopus can lose an arm without harm and regrow it. By biting it off, the octopus loses the infected arm and hopefully a healthy one regrows, but in captive situations, probably caused by bad water quality, the infection can't be shaken off.
On an evolutionary timescale, we've pretty much always been hunter gatherers... Sitting around being lazy with our friends, picking stuff up off the ground and eating it, occasionally running some animal in to the ground...
The activities that people tend to procrastinate didn't exist until very recently...
Similar angle, I leave so many things to the last minute but tend to deliver on time. If it was harmful to me to leave things to the last minute, I would have more incentive not to do it, but it's never been consequential. Alternatively, delivering early has rarely been profitable or positive.
This article gives great advice, but there's also the other end that I personally struggle with, namely: where's the reward?
I noticed that it's especially hard for me to bring things to the state of "100% done", because the emotional reward for that is so much smaller than getting to the first 70%.
I tried shifting my thinking about this by treating that 70% as an actual 50% (given the time spent), but it feels like a half-measure.
My dad used to work at Sainsbury's (big UK supermarket chain). One day the CEO (Lord Sainsbury I think he said it was) popped over to his desk.
"<Dad's name>, you do great work. I know I can always count on you."
"But... You spend so much effort on details that don't end up being important. The first 80% of your work takes as long as the last 20%."
"The thing is, that first 80% is more usually good enough for what we need. Why don't you try and hit 80% and then wait and see if we need that last 20% next time? It might save you some time."
Caveat - I may have made the name up. But it quite often works in practice.
No, he asked him to do 80% of what he would normally do (something like 95%) because the last 20% usually takes the same amount of the effort.
Development example: cover 80% of the possible file types an application might need to ingest. If users start asking for one of the 20% of filetypes then you can add said filetype later on.
Mowing the lawn: it's fine to skip the absolute edges of the lawn. You can come back with a strimmer later on to tidy up.
I use the moniker "CEO Richard Johnson" for such stories.
Anyway I'm so painfully aware of the 80/20 rule that during college I came up with the concept of "lifetime success rate" as in - "the end result of any endeavor done with the maximum effort one could apply".
Mine is at around 83%[0], which makes getting to 90% of anything a nightmare.
[0] This was my result of the final high school exam in Physics - a subject I almost failed a year before and managed to learn from scratch with the guidance of the best tutor I ever had.
Whenever I do something. I assume that it's going to be a business failure. That helps me to avoid procrastination which could otherwise arise out of a fear of failure.
Business success is not within my own control so everything I do needs to have a "fallback purpose".
Everything I do is at once a business opportunity, a learning experience and a technical stepping stone which I can re-use for future projects.
All of my work builds on top of my previous work and I constantly combine it with other people's work. This strategy is failure-proof and it stops procrastination. I've been doing it for almost 10 years. It does get a bit closer to business success every time.
You have to set yourself up for success and sometimes that requires redefining success.
Is this just to shard yourself from perfectionistic impulses? As in you allow yourselves to do a "subpar" job, and in thinking that way, it relieves you from the stress that you need to hit a certain bar?
As I understand it, you approach your work as if it were a prototype to be discarded soon. That actually makes sense if you have a natural tendency to fret about quality.
One of my open source projects became quite popular so I wouldn't say that my approach reduces my degree of perfectionism or hurts my projects' chances of adoption; if anything, it has the opposite effect. It provides me unlimited time which allows me to think really hard about every decision I make - It gives me the freedom to always choose the most long term solution. I'm not trying to get lucky catching the next big wave and timing it just right. Not looking for a lucky break. I'm trying to work towards a reliable result in the long term and I'm getting closer every year.
Not caring too much about the economic results behind the work is absolutely critical for this approach to work at all. If I broke down or considered giving up every time I experienced an economic disappointment or my project didn't get any attention, I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as far as I did today.
It took me 10 years before I could monetize my project such that I could work on it full time. It was literally a decade of almost no income at all and almost nobody taking my work seriously. Then suddenly one day in the 10th year I started earning good passive income from that project.
If I was even slightly focused on financial results or even popularity score, I would have given up on year 2.
Thank you for sharing this perspective, it really resonated with me. I've always struggled with procrastination at a moderate level, but the last 6 months or so have been especially bad.
I had worked my heart out on a project that the business decided not to pursue. It killed me, all my time was wasted, business was fucking up, would have to re-do all this work in subpar tools etc. As I got moved onto a new project, it has been insanely hard to get motivated to work on it.
Just assuming that it will be a business failure again... it relieves a lot of pressure off me. And you are right - at this scale I have almost no say on whether the business decides to run with it or not, so why worry about it?
I know the feeling. I think this is one of the major challenges of working for a big company, there is no sense of ownership over the project and you usually can't reuse that code for your own purposes later.
I highly recommend working for an open source company if possible. I find it motivating to think that some people I've never met from a future generation could pick up ideas from my work and continue the mission.
Procrastination is an act. The pop-psychological theory that assumes that everyone procrastinates for the same reason is as ridiculous as theory that would assume everyone is violent for the same reason.
What about one person procrastinating without any difficult emotions just cause she is lazy and other people procrastinating for variety of reasons from difficult to simple.
For me the biggest help has been David D. Burns (the author of feeling good) technique called the TIC-TOC technique(1).
It's basically like a Pros and Cons list but targeted to cure procrastination but identifying the cognitive distortions in the TICs (or task-interfering cognitions). It has been so helpful for me that I ended up writing a small web-app for myself to do this whenever I don't feel like doing anything!
It's not just this TIC-TOC thing but I've kinda converted all his CBT exercises like Cost Benefit Analysis, Daily mood log, Acceptance paradox, tec into my web app.
Small disclaimer: I made this site only for myself so it is buggy and unpolished as hell. Get's the work done for me though, but ymmv.
i found that at least in relation to tech and software engineering, procrastination happens when you need to do mundane work, or worse - work on code you know is ultimately meaningless. another factor is stress, which is usually generated by management via deadlines or constant harassing to get things done (tm). it's basically oppression, it's just hard to see or admit because you're being reasonably compensated, and not doing hard labor. but it's oppression nonetheless.
free yourself, before you have a nervous breakdown or get fully domesticated by the system.
My solution is similar (breaking down the problem), the cause is - at least partially - different.
If I am procrastinating in software development or research it is
(1) for complexity reasons,
(2) for foreseeable vast grunt work I have already done and solved in the past.
Example (1): I have to choose between at least two fundamental different ways to get ahead in writing software. I know that implications come late, wasted time can be a lot. I will often pause until it comes to me.
Example (2): Writing a new library in Julia, when I covered the topic in Python or C++ years ago, but cannot directly reuse it, the whole thing intensifies when it has already been done in several incarnations. Becomes more and more difficult ("been there, done that") with age, especially if the occasion is determined from outside. The same applies to research which requires a larger amount of knowledge from the past that needs to be reactivated.
(2) could be attributed to negative emotions (boredom, and yes, even laziness), but (1) is different, more a search for an optimal strategy prior to the start, because the cost for doing otherwise could be prohibitive. It is simply unwillingness in decision-making (too early).
I'm familiar with your (1) and I think it fits extremely well with the negative emotion explanation.
At least for me, making a difficult decision that might have far-reaching consequences can be very uncomfortable if I don't have all the information. And it can be very easy to procrastinate because I tell myself that more information might be available in the future (even when that is clearly not true).
So, it's not so much that I search for an optimal strategy and more that I know there isn't one and I don't want to bite the bullet yet and make a decision.
My brain latches onto the few examples where it did pay off, though. "Imagine if I would've started earlier - all that work I did would've been completely wasted."
In reality, that work probably wouldn't have been completely wasted, and even then, I certainly wouldn't be any further behind on the project if I'd done it instead of slacking off.
Those resonate with me as well. For (1), it seems to strike for tasks that I feel "should" be simple, but in fact simply are not. Accepting that seems to help.
For (2), I do indeed loathe retracing some task that's similar to something I've done in the past. One thing that sometimes helps is to find a way to put a new spin on it. Maybe use an unfamiliar language or data structure. Or optimize for something different. Or push 'git' to the max while working on it.
Well, the difficult emotion is often some form of fear. Fear of failing, of making a mistake, in some cases, of making the problem worse. All of these fears are in a fundamental sense legitimate, but the direct solution is, insofar as it is possible, to prepare and practice.
The alternative is to tackle something even harder that includes the thing you want to make as a special case. This is a recent discovery of mine. The pressure of accomplishing the bigger, harder thing can often drive you to simply knock out the smaller thing to get it out of the way, and that's often good enough.
There's an apocryphal story in rabbinical lore about a farmer who's frustrated that his home is so noisy that he can't sleep. The Rabbi sympathizes and tells the farmer to invite another animal into his home night after night. The farmer gets more frantic, angry even that this "solution" isn't working. Then the rabbi tells the farmer to remove all the animals, and the farmer, now in peace and quiet, could fall soundly asleep. The solution above is the same: you don't eliminate the fear, you replace it with a greater fear such that the original fear doesn't seem to matter!
After reading that article a while back, I started making longer to-do lists. I found that it's hard for me to do a task on a three item to-do list. But if my list has 20 items, it's somehow easier to pick an item from the middle of the list and bang it out.
Amazing that after a distinguished career as a respected philosopy professor at Stanford, Perry's greatest contribution to humanity may be that humorous article on procrastiantion.
Procrastination for me has nothing to do with fear of failing or making a mistake and is almost entirely about avoiding mental effort. It's akin to avoiding physical exercise.
Ha, I know that story from the Julia Donaldson kids book (and song) "A Squash and a Squeeze" [1]. So true too. We don't appreciate how good things are, or how much we are capable of, until they get a lot worse.
> The pressure of accomplishing the bigger, harder thing can often drive you to simply knock out the smaller thing to get it out of the way, and that's often good enough.
That's a really interesting observation, and I recently experienced it I think.
I am installing a new ECU in my car in order to tune it myself, something I'm really looking forward to but is honestly quite daunting and possibly expensive to fail at. The entire time the tuning has been on my mind, I've been learning and doing dozens of little things while installing the ECU. Things I'd normally be a bit worried about. Soldering, wiring, drilling and tapping. I've learned a bunch of new things along the way, none of them tuning. Now I'm at the point where I need to do the tuning and I'm so invigorated by the process of getting here that I feel much more prepared to do it.
>'Just get started'? If I could just get started then I wouldn't have a procrastination problem." I thought: fair enough.
This never worked for me. I write one sentence or do the small task and then I go off and do something else. Perhaps it's due to my (bad) habit of context-switching but either way I've never benefited much from this approach despite often trying it.
I am exactly the same, though ADHD medication has helped tremendously in this respect. Terrible context switching, not lack of attention, is the bane of my existence.
You're absolutely right! I've personally only just been diagnosed, well into my thirties, and am on month 3 of trying to get my medication correct, compounded with fun things like pandemic lockdown. It's a ride.
At university a councilor (or similar) said they believe I have ADHD but it was near the end of a school year so nothing came out of it.
For what is worth, I've tried most common adhd meds on my own and while they definitely they also ruin my sleep so I am not convinced that going through the hassle of getting an official diagnosis will help all that much.
I agree, it’s definitely a difficult balance to strike.
I found that even small amounts of stimulant medication does help even if it’s not super obvious in the moment, and the upside is that it doesn’t interfere with sleep too much, but I try hard not to make a habit out of it. Sleep, above all else, is the best predictor of my mood / productivity / physical health.
I try not to take anything after about noon, though. This is especially true about caffeine, for me. I might get a crash in the late afternoon, but it’s a price worth paying for a good night’s sleep.
The latter. I’ve heard someone explain it this way before, and I think it neatly sums up my own experience: “your brain is like a TV, except there’s 30 channels on at once, and someone else has the remote” (paraphrasing).
If I can just get into “The Zone” things do work out, and I’m finally able to direct my attention towards a single task. Taking Ritalin greatly increases the probability of this occurring, and so does, amazingly, cannabis.
In general, I have trouble both starting, and then consistently doing a task for any reasonable amount of time. I’ll start watching a movie, then 30 minutes in go for a walk, then come home and cook dinner, then forget about it and go back to watching the movie, then remember the dinner and start eating, then... and on an on.
I’ve been told it doesn’t look that bad from the outside, but it gives me great anxiety that I can’t consistently finish anything I start :(
I’ve been reading “Deep Work“ which talks about the negatives of context switching. I wonder what could be done in cases like yours to avoid needless context switching. Do you have any feeling as to how or why it happens? Eg do you get bored of tasks easily or something else?
For me it depends strongly on the task whether 'just get started' works or not. With menial tasks like emptying the dishwasher I only have to convince myself to do the minimum possible amount of progress and I will usually keep doing until I'm done. I might even get inspired to do some related task afterwards. But if it is something boring but purely cognitive, like say data entry, I start, congratulate myself for making progress and promptly switch to something more fun.
Even in those cases it doesn't work for me. I actually try this with the dishwasher all the time and end up emptying a few dishes at a time. Laundry is more time-sensitive though so with that one I often do do it in one swoop when I start.
I tried to ditch as much context switching from my workstation as possible, it has helped in those low-hanging fruit distractions like switching windows and finding yourself on reddit/HN. To the point where I have done my best to eliminate the mouse, because it would often trigger habits that caused me to context switch.
"Alt-tab" was a trigger to forget what I was doing, even if I was alt-tabbing to something I needed. I would alt-tab, instantly forget what I wanted to do, then start something else. Any window switch would trigger procrastination habits too.
So now my code, terminal, file manager, database etc are all in one tool in front of me all the time, and if I am at my workstation, that is what I'm doing. Most of the time.
It helps for me because starting neutralizes all the exaggerated ideas I had built up in my mind about how horrible it was going to be. When I start on a task, it usually turns out to be only mildly annoying rather than pure misery.
However, I think there is a huge trap with the just get started trick. Often, what is driving you to get started is guilt. If your only promise to yourself is that you will start, then starting alleviates the guilt. And then the motivation disappears.
One possible way around that is to commit to a little bit more. Instead of committing to just getting started, commit to doing a small but significant piece of the work.
Another idea is to just be aware that, if you do the bare minimum that counts as getting started, you're not really applying the method in good faith. Essentially you're just wasting your time by trying to game the system that you yourself created.
I’ve found that if it feels like crap, so to speak, you’re doing it right! We’re not SUPPOSED to be content all the time, and that’s okay.
Next time you feel bad emotions when you’re starting something, think, this is an indicator that I’m doing it right.
After a while, the feeling is not as intense, it becomes a habit, then after you have had it as a habit you should use that uncomfortable feeling to guide your next move. Usually the thing you don’t want to do (the thing you are lazy about) is the right thing to do!
Wishing everyone an awesome day :)
Time boxing is the best treatment I've found. A project may feel overwelming, but usually I can bring myself to bite off one tomato (25 minutes) of it. I can generally make a noticeable amount of progress in that time, and more importantly, clarify the next actions whose ambiguities have been leading me to procrastinate.
In one such session I actually completed a project I had put off for years
Three years ago a friend and I were looking at different divisions of time -- in one of our Eastern Philosophy books there was a mention of splitting the day into 60 segments. We were puzzled. If there are 60 snaps in a day, how many minutes are in each snap? The answer is delightfully simple: 24 minutes per snap. (60 minutes an hour with 24 hours or 24 minutes a snap with 60 snaps). We have started using the 24-minute mark as a more flexible form of time measurement and of "see you soon" -- see you in a couple of snaps.
I use a similar trick, but focused on that last part where you search for ambiguities. I will spend 10 minutes just understanding the scope better, and not doing any work. It lets me start without actually starting, and then I'm usually much more comfortable getting to work once I've cleared some things up.
Same here. I tend to do work in super efficient batches. I've completed two months worth of small tasks in under an hour sometimes.
My default is to put everything off and do it in a batch right before (or after) it's due. But the past few years I've focused on doing batches way ahead of time. Less stressful and much more satisfying. Getting into Project Management certainly helped with that!
> We believed that it was poor time management and that if we just worked a bit harder and had more self-discipline, we could do the job
It's frustrating that the "experts" still see things this way. As if it's some moral defect that people are too lazy to overcome.
Can't stop procrastinating? "Just work a little harder and get started already"
Depressed? "Just cheer up and get over it."
Addicted to drugs? "Just look at the negative consequences and stop using them"
I guess I could see this article as a step in the right direction, but it's still frustrating to see how the casual stigmatization of behavioral health and its symptoms continues to linger.
323 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadI love this tagline! I think this is as accurate as one can get about why we procrastinate, in one sentence.
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> What research has indicated across a wide variety of studies is that it is an emotion regulation situation.
So CBT, meditation and similar things might help. I'd like to see studies on that.
Hypothesis:
emotion regulation (bad) --> coping (none-existent) --> procrastination
emotion regulation (bad) --> coping (e.g. mindfulness or CBT) --> less procrastination
---
> What's the song of the procrastinator: "I don't want to, I don't feel like it," and usually there's the chorus of: "I'll feel more like it tomorrow."
That's a very playful way to phrase a characterization: what's the song of. I'm stealing it ;-)
Reminds me of one of my favorite books from childhood, Goose Goofs Off.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/967059.Goose_Goofs_Of...
That makes sense for some procrastination, but other procrastination is laziness.
Mopping the floor, taking out the garbage, mowing the lawn types of procrastination... those are under your own purview and don’t involve big emotions or decisions...
So I think it explains some kinds of procrastination but not all.
Perhaps the difficult emotion that 'lazy' people are avoiding is admitting to themselves that they're ok making that trade-off.
I don't think it's that simple. During low periods, I let plates/wrappers/leftovers pile in the dishwasher, in the sink, on the sides, and in trash bags. The result is that when I need to eat, I clean a single dish, make room (more piling), and make a trivial meal.
The pending cleaning grows, yet I avoid doing it, live in filth and avoid cooking.
I'd be better putting a trash bag in, putting the wrappers/food in the bin, and using my dishwasher to batch clean, rather than JIT clean by hand. But I don't.
That's a problem, not a conscious trade off.
https://dilbert.com/strip/2002-02-27
When they look at the washing up a procrastinator doesn't just see the washing up, they also see that they have to do a laundry, fix the cupboard creak, do a full clean of the cupboards, clean under the fridge, wash the floors, dust the cobwebs, fix the dripping tap, take out the recycling, decide what to do with those old jars, etc., etc.
Even if they do eventually manage to do a flurry of chores, and usually feel great, it's not a habit to do it again. It's not a scheduled minor, automatic, task. Your brain deals with habits much easier than things you have to consciously do.
So it inadvertently builds up, and BAM, as if from nowhere, there's a massive pile of washing up with a whole load of OTHER tasks mentally attached to it again.
You see it as easy and lazinness, but we don't. The irony is that living like this is actually a lot harder, you're having to ultimately put more work in for often worse results.
Breaking things down into more discrete unconnected units allows addressing neater (less messy) problems/chores.
In myself I do notice over complicating things as an excuse to put them off and waste time. But as others suggest, sometimes you just have to power through and get things done.
And in most cases it’s not a hard or difficult work. The hard part is committing to doing it. Once you actually start it’s mostly a breeze.
I've been personally struggling with this for decades, I've found solutions that work for months, or even sometimes years and had long periods of effective productivity. But they all seem to eventually get forgotten and then don't work the 2nd time round.
It's very frustrating.
It's funny as I can easily work hard for other people and clients, etc.
I see the kitchen and I think "this is going to make my back and legs hurt so much, I'm going to rest a bit before tackling it." Then I get distracted with reddit or HN or whatever, and suddenly it's the next morning and I have to work again.
This reminds me: is there a word to describe a related phenomenon, that I find incredibly frustrating? It goes as follows: say I want to take a one minute break to fetch myself some coffee. I go to the kitchen, find the dishwasher running and no clean cup, so I have to clean one myself. I do that, then discover I have to refill the water and the beans in the coffee machine. I make the coffee, and the machine flashes red. The dredgewater bin is full. I need to pour it out and clean it. I get dirty and coffee-smelly, so I want to wash my hands. Doing that, I use the last bit of soap in the dispenser, so now I have to fetch the 5L jug and carefully refill it. By this time, what started as a one-minute break turned into 10 minutes of chores, and I'm already anxious about getting back to work.
Some form of the story above happens to me pretty much every other day. Is there a name for this kind of unexpected recursive expansion of chores?
Maybe it would make sense to have a todo list organized like a hierarchical bullet point list for things like these... where you don't have to store the whole dependency graph in your head. I find that that's often why I don't get the actual task intended complete; because in the process of emptying the stack, I forget what got me there in the first place.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/YakShavingDefinedIllGetThatDo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fnfeuoh4s8
It's certainly true for me that procrastination is essentially avoiding a form of anxiety. But I don't think there's some deeper, larger problem. It feels more like "choking", just a fairly specific learned, maladaptive response. At some times in my life, I've pushed it into the background and become more productive, but it always seems to creep back.
Drinking seems to reliably reduce it, but I can't very well program lit all day.
Please be careful when dismissing something you don't understand as laziness.
I'm not really looking forward to reliving that.
You can have strong, negative emotions in any area of your life.
Even though it's a condition that is also quite over diagnosed, it's simultaneously a condition that's underdiagnosed IMO - it really depends on where you're looking / sampling. A lot of kids fly under the radar, because they don't show any obvious signs, even more so those with ADD / non-hyperactive.
But then the bricks fall in their place, and they can try to redo all that. Unfortunately, by that time, a lot of doors have been closed - especially if you want to work in tech or professional industries.
Now, I'm not trying to scare posters, but it's much better to get that stuff figured out before you've gone too long to make lasting damage, both to your own health, and to your professional life.
I was alive, but not really living. I could not get the simplest things done, only things that were fun or immediately rewarding, at times barely that. It reminded me of what people referred to as depression, but without much of anything that could actually be called depression, not without doing injustice to anyone who have ever suffered an actual depression.
Don’t let the years go by, moderate consumption of stimulants can be really beneficial for someone with ADHD, and you don’t realise this until you’ve tried.
No harm in talking to a professional about it.
Also note that I’ve changed roles quite a bit in my life and when I delete the final TODO list I look back at the things I did not get done. It’s as informative to review your accomplishments as it is your failures, but also what you never got around to doing. Often that last category will make me laugh “look at all those stupid things I thought were important”... rm -f TODO
And as I tell people all the time, the day after you die there will be more email in your inbox. If you focus on emptying your inbox your life will be empty when you leave. But your inbox will still be filling up.
Yeah I gotta agree with this. Sometimes it's like you are trying to walk through a wall and it's just not working. Our subconscious tells us "this is not working, try something else". Now the dysfunctional reaction is to pass time waiting for the wall to collapse under its own weight. And the "correct" solution is to search for a door. But the tricky thingy is we may not realize on a conscious level that the wall is even there or that the wall is the reason we are passing time.
I'm actually handling this area in my life right now, and I decided I'd use my intuition rather than my intellect to handle it (and analyze with my intellect if my intuition came up with something interesting).
It did.
Here is my idea: be playful about the tasks your procrastinate on. Don't cater to your intellect, cater to your emotions.
I have 2 examples with flexibility training and lifting weights.
Flexibility training: ask yourself questions that stir up curiosity, such as
"how does this feel?"
"what do I like about it?"
"what do I dislike about it?"
"will I think similar ideas the next day if I answer these questions (spoiler alert: I personally don't)"
And then focus relentlessly on the fun (if you have some of it) and really indulge in it. I've likened flexibility training to a lot of things I find fun.
--- Example 2 ---
Strength training: ask yourself questions that stir up curiosity and fun! Such as
"How does it feel fun?"
"How does the pain feel fun?"
"What is it that I don't like about it? Why?"
"Are there moments when there's a part of the activity that I dislike or like and it flips to the other side, why?"
In practice: I mostly ask "how does it feel fun?" and shamelessly focus on it.
--- Some theory ---
I'd want to ask the professor if he considered playfulness and curiosity as potential moderators or mediators that could enhance motivation to procrastinate less.
I believe that playfulness and curiosity are related to the competency and autonomy aspect of self-determination theory, so to me it makes sense that those aspects heighten motivation in general and therefore reduce motivation.
Another idea: talk with people about your workouts that you've done (then you also bring in the "relatedness" part of self-determination theory).
How does this get into the article without basic fact-checking? He was a professor at CMU.
The piece also referred to his "final lecture," when it wasn't; the lecture was a part of series titled "Last Lectures" (note the capitalization).
Quoting some other post I've read on HN:
> Remember that you are going to die. Time flies, have you noticed? Is that status symbol that you are pursuing really that important? Is it ever going to make you happy?
> There is more wisdom in one of your cells than in all self-help and management books combined. Maybe you can't focus for a good reason? What could that reason be?
> Remember the last time you felt glad to be alive? Was it related to being productive?
If instead I start planning out all that is left to do, I quickly become demotivated and overwhelmed not knowing where to start. A sort of "analysis-paralysis".
The big problem for me is that even if I get into a productive flow its much to easy to run into a blocker that pulls me out into paralysis again (could be a family interruption, a harder sub-task, etc).
With teams or family it feels like a question of regenerating Energy in Others whose tanks are drained or not that large in the first place.
Personally, I have found that if I get on with certain tasks in a team environment with too much vigor, I start to get other team members feeling left out or feeling their input isn't adding value. Keep doing it and the team will fall apart. Sitting around and being lazy for a bit helps keep the team together and has more forward progress overall.
It is probably a poor defence of procrastination but it certainly does occasionally pay to put something on the back burner for a while to see if it actually needs doing.
I'm the sole developer on a new project now, it's giving me a lot more satisfaction. I do run into procrastination and analysis paralysis though.
That's probably not a reasonable assumption. Evolution doesn't work so fast. Procrastination might simply be an indication that we're not living under liveable conditions. Why do octopuses eat their own limbs under some conditions? Does it give them an evolutionary advantage?
> It is believed that it is caused by a virus/bacteria which can manage to take hold on a stressed octopus. The biting is said to be due to irritation and biting alleviates the affected area. An octopus can lose an arm without harm and regrow it. By biting it off, the octopus loses the infected arm and hopefully a healthy one regrows, but in captive situations, probably caused by bad water quality, the infection can't be shaken off.
[1] https://tonmo.com/articles/do-octopuses-commit-suicide.47/
The activities that people tend to procrastinate didn't exist until very recently...
The awful truth is that "doing nothing" or at least "waiting a bit" is quite often the right thing to do from a survival perspective.
I noticed that it's especially hard for me to bring things to the state of "100% done", because the emotional reward for that is so much smaller than getting to the first 70%.
I tried shifting my thinking about this by treating that 70% as an actual 50% (given the time spent), but it feels like a half-measure.
Story time:
My dad used to work at Sainsbury's (big UK supermarket chain). One day the CEO (Lord Sainsbury I think he said it was) popped over to his desk.
"<Dad's name>, you do great work. I know I can always count on you."
"But... You spend so much effort on details that don't end up being important. The first 80% of your work takes as long as the last 20%."
"The thing is, that first 80% is more usually good enough for what we need. Why don't you try and hit 80% and then wait and see if we need that last 20% next time? It might save you some time."
Caveat - I may have made the name up. But it quite often works in practice.
Development example: cover 80% of the possible file types an application might need to ingest. If users start asking for one of the 20% of filetypes then you can add said filetype later on.
Mowing the lawn: it's fine to skip the absolute edges of the lawn. You can come back with a strimmer later on to tidy up.
Anyway I'm so painfully aware of the 80/20 rule that during college I came up with the concept of "lifetime success rate" as in - "the end result of any endeavor done with the maximum effort one could apply".
Mine is at around 83%[0], which makes getting to 90% of anything a nightmare.
[0] This was my result of the final high school exam in Physics - a subject I almost failed a year before and managed to learn from scratch with the guidance of the best tutor I ever had.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sainsbury,_Baron_Sainsbu...
Everything I do is at once a business opportunity, a learning experience and a technical stepping stone which I can re-use for future projects. All of my work builds on top of my previous work and I constantly combine it with other people's work. This strategy is failure-proof and it stops procrastination. I've been doing it for almost 10 years. It does get a bit closer to business success every time. You have to set yourself up for success and sometimes that requires redefining success.
As I understand it, you approach your work as if it were a prototype to be discarded soon. That actually makes sense if you have a natural tendency to fret about quality.
Not caring too much about the economic results behind the work is absolutely critical for this approach to work at all. If I broke down or considered giving up every time I experienced an economic disappointment or my project didn't get any attention, I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as far as I did today.
It took me 10 years before I could monetize my project such that I could work on it full time. It was literally a decade of almost no income at all and almost nobody taking my work seriously. Then suddenly one day in the 10th year I started earning good passive income from that project. If I was even slightly focused on financial results or even popularity score, I would have given up on year 2.
I had worked my heart out on a project that the business decided not to pursue. It killed me, all my time was wasted, business was fucking up, would have to re-do all this work in subpar tools etc. As I got moved onto a new project, it has been insanely hard to get motivated to work on it.
Just assuming that it will be a business failure again... it relieves a lot of pressure off me. And you are right - at this scale I have almost no say on whether the business decides to run with it or not, so why worry about it?
I highly recommend working for an open source company if possible. I find it motivating to think that some people I've never met from a future generation could pick up ideas from my work and continue the mission.
What about one person procrastinating without any difficult emotions just cause she is lazy and other people procrastinating for variety of reasons from difficult to simple.
It's basically like a Pros and Cons list but targeted to cure procrastination but identifying the cognitive distortions in the TICs (or task-interfering cognitions). It has been so helpful for me that I ended up writing a small web-app for myself to do this whenever I don't feel like doing anything!
(1) http://www.elizakingsford.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/TIC...
It's not just this TIC-TOC thing but I've kinda converted all his CBT exercises like Cost Benefit Analysis, Daily mood log, Acceptance paradox, tec into my web app.
Small disclaimer: I made this site only for myself so it is buggy and unpolished as hell. Get's the work done for me though, but ymmv.
free yourself, before you have a nervous breakdown or get fully domesticated by the system.
If I am procrastinating in software development or research it is
(1) for complexity reasons, (2) for foreseeable vast grunt work I have already done and solved in the past.
Example (1): I have to choose between at least two fundamental different ways to get ahead in writing software. I know that implications come late, wasted time can be a lot. I will often pause until it comes to me.
Example (2): Writing a new library in Julia, when I covered the topic in Python or C++ years ago, but cannot directly reuse it, the whole thing intensifies when it has already been done in several incarnations. Becomes more and more difficult ("been there, done that") with age, especially if the occasion is determined from outside. The same applies to research which requires a larger amount of knowledge from the past that needs to be reactivated.
(2) could be attributed to negative emotions (boredom, and yes, even laziness), but (1) is different, more a search for an optimal strategy prior to the start, because the cost for doing otherwise could be prohibitive. It is simply unwillingness in decision-making (too early).
At least for me, making a difficult decision that might have far-reaching consequences can be very uncomfortable if I don't have all the information. And it can be very easy to procrastinate because I tell myself that more information might be available in the future (even when that is clearly not true).
So, it's not so much that I search for an optimal strategy and more that I know there isn't one and I don't want to bite the bullet yet and make a decision.
In reality, that work probably wouldn't have been completely wasted, and even then, I certainly wouldn't be any further behind on the project if I'd done it instead of slacking off.
For (2), I do indeed loathe retracing some task that's similar to something I've done in the past. One thing that sometimes helps is to find a way to put a new spin on it. Maybe use an unfamiliar language or data structure. Or optimize for something different. Or push 'git' to the max while working on it.
The alternative is to tackle something even harder that includes the thing you want to make as a special case. This is a recent discovery of mine. The pressure of accomplishing the bigger, harder thing can often drive you to simply knock out the smaller thing to get it out of the way, and that's often good enough.
There's an apocryphal story in rabbinical lore about a farmer who's frustrated that his home is so noisy that he can't sleep. The Rabbi sympathizes and tells the farmer to invite another animal into his home night after night. The farmer gets more frantic, angry even that this "solution" isn't working. Then the rabbi tells the farmer to remove all the animals, and the farmer, now in peace and quiet, could fall soundly asleep. The solution above is the same: you don't eliminate the fear, you replace it with a greater fear such that the original fear doesn't seem to matter!
Recognize that procrastination based on avoidance of difficult emotions is likely as unique as each individual's emotions.
I'm glad you found a solution for yourself, but please do remember how unique each person in the world is.
This is the main operating principle of http://www.structuredprocrastination.com
[1]: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/julia-donaldson/a-squas....
That's a really interesting observation, and I recently experienced it I think.
I am installing a new ECU in my car in order to tune it myself, something I'm really looking forward to but is honestly quite daunting and possibly expensive to fail at. The entire time the tuning has been on my mind, I've been learning and doing dozens of little things while installing the ECU. Things I'd normally be a bit worried about. Soldering, wiring, drilling and tapping. I've learned a bunch of new things along the way, none of them tuning. Now I'm at the point where I need to do the tuning and I'm so invigorated by the process of getting here that I feel much more prepared to do it.
This never worked for me. I write one sentence or do the small task and then I go off and do something else. Perhaps it's due to my (bad) habit of context-switching but either way I've never benefited much from this approach despite often trying it.
Have you ever had a test?
At university a councilor (or similar) said they believe I have ADHD but it was near the end of a school year so nothing came out of it.
For what is worth, I've tried most common adhd meds on my own and while they definitely they also ruin my sleep so I am not convinced that going through the hassle of getting an official diagnosis will help all that much.
I found that even small amounts of stimulant medication does help even if it’s not super obvious in the moment, and the upside is that it doesn’t interfere with sleep too much, but I try hard not to make a habit out of it. Sleep, above all else, is the best predictor of my mood / productivity / physical health.
I try not to take anything after about noon, though. This is especially true about caffeine, for me. I might get a crash in the late afternoon, but it’s a price worth paying for a good night’s sleep.
I was suddenly able to focus on a task in a way that I wasn't able before. It was such an epiphany to experience what other people call focus.
That made me also notice that I'm really good at context switching. It's what I naturally do. It also makes me good at breadth first approaches.
Which makes me ask: Are you lamenting terrible context switching or the amount of context switching that you experience?
If I can just get into “The Zone” things do work out, and I’m finally able to direct my attention towards a single task. Taking Ritalin greatly increases the probability of this occurring, and so does, amazingly, cannabis.
In general, I have trouble both starting, and then consistently doing a task for any reasonable amount of time. I’ll start watching a movie, then 30 minutes in go for a walk, then come home and cook dinner, then forget about it and go back to watching the movie, then remember the dinner and start eating, then... and on an on.
I’ve been told it doesn’t look that bad from the outside, but it gives me great anxiety that I can’t consistently finish anything I start :(
"Alt-tab" was a trigger to forget what I was doing, even if I was alt-tabbing to something I needed. I would alt-tab, instantly forget what I wanted to do, then start something else. Any window switch would trigger procrastination habits too.
So now my code, terminal, file manager, database etc are all in one tool in front of me all the time, and if I am at my workstation, that is what I'm doing. Most of the time.
However, I think there is a huge trap with the just get started trick. Often, what is driving you to get started is guilt. If your only promise to yourself is that you will start, then starting alleviates the guilt. And then the motivation disappears.
One possible way around that is to commit to a little bit more. Instead of committing to just getting started, commit to doing a small but significant piece of the work.
Another idea is to just be aware that, if you do the bare minimum that counts as getting started, you're not really applying the method in good faith. Essentially you're just wasting your time by trying to game the system that you yourself created.
I had to think twice about whether or not I'd be bothered to write this comment.
It’s strong enough that I’d prefer most levels of pain to being bored.
Adderal took that pain away. (I am diagnosed ADHD)
I no longer “avoid” stuff that I used to in the past. Even when I’m off adderal. Focus is not as good, but I don’t have that fear of pain anymore.
I use audiobooks when I have housework to do. An interesting story makes a big difference
In one such session I actually completed a project I had put off for years
My default is to put everything off and do it in a batch right before (or after) it's due. But the past few years I've focused on doing batches way ahead of time. Less stressful and much more satisfying. Getting into Project Management certainly helped with that!
Isn't this the idea behind Getting Things Done in a nutshell?
(1) What's the desired outcome?
(2) What's the next action?
It's frustrating that the "experts" still see things this way. As if it's some moral defect that people are too lazy to overcome.
Can't stop procrastinating? "Just work a little harder and get started already"
Depressed? "Just cheer up and get over it."
Addicted to drugs? "Just look at the negative consequences and stop using them"
I guess I could see this article as a step in the right direction, but it's still frustrating to see how the casual stigmatization of behavioral health and its symptoms continues to linger.