Ask HN: Has remote work made you procrastinate more?
Over the last two years, I have been working remotely, and I am finding myself stuck in the same place and unable to kick-start my life. I always feel overwhelmed, and basically, I don't have the energy and excitement to do the things I should do in life.
Have you or anyone you knew encountered this challenge during this pandemic? How did they recover or win over procrastination?
85 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadWho says you should do them?
As a result I have more high value deep work days where I can get difficult things done.
The biggest thing is being able to proactively manage my own burnout without a manager physically breathing down my neck.
I have found that maintaining a daily routine is an effective way of dealing with procrastination. I still get those moments of thinking I should be wasting my time rather than doing something productive but knowing that it is only an hour until lunch, or 2 hours 'till nap time helps me push thorugh the tedium.
I have also found that anything that requires creative thinking is best done early in the morning and simple mechanical stuff late in the afternoon.
My easiest rule to adhere to, and my one concession to my procrastinating alter ego, is that from 12 noon until 2pm I can do what the hell I like.
Note that this varies from person to person. I have the opposite polarity to you: it takes me a few hours in the morning to get out of the mechanical crap stage, and I hit my coding flow in the latter half or two-thirds of my workday.
The important thing is for each of us to figure out what works individually and plan around that. I am fortunately able to have most of my meetings in the morning, for example, where they don't interrupt my creative time.
OTOH when you procrastinate at home you end up working late to make up for it.
This is the exact opposite of procrastination.
There are a lot of extra stressors that are involved in surviving through a pandemic, and honestly maybe your goal of not just surviving, but thriving, is unreasonable. Maybe just getting through it so you can kick-start your life on the other side is just fine!
For example, if you were in an accident and had to undergo extensive physical therapy, you'd be a lot more understanding with yourself if you weren't also running marathons at the same time.
Be kind to yourself, OP. This shit is hard and you're doing an important job just getting to the other side of it.
I’d say no, not quite over.
I will disagree with it. I may have agreed the first year but not the second. The pandemic doesn't excuse anything anymore.
I was thinking the same as the top-level comment you responded to - before the pandemic I was already quite bad at making time for adventure, exercise, seeing my friends etc. I was new in the workforce and putting all my mental energy into my job. IMO the lockdowns and WFH has been great for my work life but not so much for any other facet of it.
It's going to take me a good while to get used to getting out more, being active, scheduling things to do with friends...
Many people are dealing with profound levels of grief and loss. It may not "excuse" anything, but it's necessary context. Be kind.
* My main activity most days involving physical presence with a group of peers.
* Conversations with coworkers not running through the fog of Zoom. Not ending most days shattered by Zoom fatigue.
* Real reasons to be away from the apartment, not just to exercise and buy things.
The “other side” has been kicked out from under me by the remote work partisans. I don’t see any path to having a life like that again while still being a software engineer. If present compensation packages hold then maybe I will be able to retire and pick up a low-paying but in-person career in 7-10 years. As long as I don’t go starting a family… if I do that then I’m pretty well locked into Zoom and nothing else all day every day forever.
Now that we get some stationary lessons, it's going better, and I've got some contact with my peers.
When you get demotivated and start procrastinating look back at what you did to remind yourself what you can do.
Oh and write lists. Lists are cool. Don’t procrastinate by spending ten hours reading HN trying to find some list software though; just use whatever you have on your phone already (I just use reminders on iOS). Don’t use some outliner software on a PC because you need that on you all day every day.
Whenever I start my day, I try to finish some of the complex tasks right away, thinking the rest of my todos are easier. Then I would find myself spending time on other things distracting myself from being overwhelmed, and ended up achieving nothing or incomplete work
But I transitioned into it from a one year sabbatical in 2014.
The job I had before was full-time employment in an open office. I never procrastinated more in my life.
Currently, I'm self-employed and work from home. Now, I simply work explicitly less and take time off more often, so the procrastination turned to something more enjoyable.
I see this a lot in many colleagues - everyone is just really tired, fed up, fighting to keep things on a level and just exist.
It’s a weird concept, as (from a personal perspective) pre-pandemic, working from home was always a pleasanter, stress-reducing choice. So I don’t think it’s purely related to the location - but there’s definitely something happening on a large scale related to how we’ve been working and existing over the past couple of years now.
Anyway, I wonder if this is what you’re describing? And if it is, then the ‘procrastination’ you describe maybe isn’t actually procrastination, but a natural (protective?) secondary reaction to something else going on in the background.
And if so, the correct response is probably to recognise and accept it, not beat yourself up for not being productive, and instead figure out what you need to do to recover and heal.
I know what I did is maybe not an option for a lot of people (thank god for the German social net and healthcare system), but I feel many could really benefit from therapy and focusing on their mental health for a while.
I am hoping to do the same over the next few months. I haven't started looking, and I am quite horrified to do so, but my back is up against the wall at this point, and I have no where left to hide.
If I stay at my current job, my life will be a constant spiral downwards, and if I leave but cannot find another job, then my life will still be a constant spiral downwards, so I have nothing to lose in my search.
- WFH means normally working alone in physical terms, normally we have aside a physical local social life, during covid scenario that part was much cut and as a result people WFH are also lone people (well, except for family members);
- WFH in the classic sense, with a properly organized work is a thing, people normally working in an office that have been forced to work at home arranging a place with craptops (and perhaps no external monitor(s), real keyboard, good desk etc) forced to use crappy VDIs and overloaded + badly used communications is another totally different beast.
In general WFH, with a good home, a dedicated room for the working part with anything needed there, a good surrounding area etc is a thing, living in small flat in dense cities, with no good home setup, incertitude about how much such model will remain and how in general so incertitude about mid and long term investments, like leaving the city and flat for a house in a good place with the risk of being forced back, even worst hybrid work with the need of moving gears from home to office and back etc does not help at all.
A good, well cooked steak, is good; a potentially equally good steak, badly cooked, badly cooked can be just a shoe sole. Things pushed rapidly typically have issues, even when potentially they are extraordinary good and life changing for good. That's is. Pushing a good thing sometimes is needed because people tend to be reactionary, just think about the history of potatoes in Europe where at first no one want them fearing they are bad, poisonous etc and only after a massive campaign of military goes through the countryside dropping potatoes around showing how easy they grow, then coming back collecting them and eating them remaining perfectly alive, satisfied and healthy change the game. In the meantime some get seriously ill for having eaten potatoes left exposed at sunlight tough. People need a tool, an incentive but also time to understand it before profiting.
A normal physical local social life is dramatically smaller in quantity than the working day. Meeting friends for meals or weekend activities does not really make up for being alone 9-5 Monday-Friday. And it is pretty hard to activate people on weeknights after 5-7 hours of Zoom.
It will take time, of course, but that's the good target we can tray to reach, in the end basing social life around work is not that good for many reasons, specially when you do not like much a colleague but have to work with him/her etc.
In the office I would end up browsing social media to distract myself while at home there is lots of things to do from listening to loud music to just walking around, doing the dishes, stretching, going for a brisk walk and so on. It is way better.
This also helps with my creativity as sometimes the best ideas come when I do house work. The best way to solve a problem is sometimes not found starring at a screen but when you allow yourself to relax.
One more important thing: I thrive in the environment were important things are written down. In my world it eliminates the power of "popular" people and cliques who work via "charming" and "politics".
On the other hand, when I'm in the office, I'm a bit depressed and feel like a powerless slave, just can't wait to be free. Fortunately my companies has an elastic WFH policy but I'm not sure how long it will hold.
I got a new job around 6 months ago, and now I feel more productive than ever because it's interesting and fulfilling.