Ask HN: Struggling with Productivity and Procrastination

Assuming you don't have a health issue (you should get that checked), perhaps you think you want to do all those things but you don't really want to.

I've made the mistake of thinking that "I can do it later" many times before. It's worse when you have to play catch up with yourself. It's equally as important to have the right motivation, "Why do I need/have to do this?". If you're financially stable but not goal-oriented, that can cause issues too.

It's also good to have goals/projects that yield results, because it creates a feedback loop where you aren't just throwing mud at a wall and seeing what sticks.

I've found that writing/development are two distinct areas where it is very easy to procrastinate. And there really isn't a secret recipe to fix it other than switching off that voice in your mind and doing what needs to be done. Anecdotally, you might find yourself having too much free time on your hands when you start doing stuff rather than thinking about it.

Revise your goals. It seems you don't actually want to do those things, you just want to want to do them. It's a big distinction.

Start with one project you actually want to do. Today, not tomorrow, work on it for an hour. If you spend that hour actually doing it and not just staring at Reddit, then you’ve won for today. Do it again tomorrow. It doesn’t matter if the project takes your three years at that rate. Keep it up and you will eventually get somewhere you are proud of.

Add another project if you successfully make a habit of working on this one every day.

Another key: do not beat yourself up if you miss a day. Just start again the next day. “Streaks” are for apps. Just go back to work.

When you’re not doing things you want (to want) to do, what are you doing instead?

E.g. are you doing things that still require longer stretches of attention/focus, or several short stretches of attention/focus?

(I’m not a doctor or even remotely an expert on the subject, but I do have a son with ADHD.)

It turns out that after full days of work average brain isn't suited to do highly productive work.

At the end of the notebook layout a template for several types of day: working, weekend, social, resting/recovering, etc.

The template should be in ~30min units. Reserve a maximum of 3.5hours for deep work; reserve .5hr every morning for creating a daily plan; reserve .5hr in the afternoon for personal admin.

Then, every morning, fill each page with a plan for that day.

This is all you need to do. And to ensure you don't procrastinate doing this, realise: the plan is not an obligation. You are never required to do anything you write down.

The only reason you do this is so you arent blind to what you do and do not want to do. It's security, so you can enjoy you day knowing you've chosen it.

It's fascinating to me how many people think having ADHD means you can't be a top performer at a top school. Getting things done at the last minute all the time because of procrastination is a trap people who do not know how to manage their ADHD fall into. I can't say for sure if you have it or not, but your school performance is not a good metric to discount the possibility.

Be honest with yourself: do you really want to do those things? Or do you want them to be done? I suspect it’s the latter, and you don’t actually want to do what you say you want to do. A lot of people in my experience conflate “wanting something done” with “wanting to do something”. Understanding that may help you understand why you’re having a hard time completing the tasks you want to.

Either way, before you can complete a task you need to have a reason to complete it; what makes you want to do it? Maybe you want to read more to improve your knowledge about a field, or maybe you want to study more to better understand the material you’re learning. That motivation will be your guiding light when you don’t presently want to do something, but your higher goal is to do it. And that time will come. Everyone has days where they lack motivation, and having a good reason for doing something will enable you to have the discipline to do it anyway.

Next, set yourself up for small wins. If your goal is “I want to focus on my studying for eight hours”, then you’ve set yourself up for failure. Start smaller, with something that you know it is impossible for you to fail at. Start by studying for fifteen minutes, or ten, or five; whatever you know you can do successfully. Accomplishing that goal, no matter how tiny, will be a success that you can build upon. Next time, try to study for longer - push your comfort zone a bit. If studying for fifteen minutes was hard to focus, maybe try sixteen. Progress at a rate that you believe you can progress at. And that’s key - if you start challenging yourself with tasks that you don’t believe you can do, you won’t be able to do them. Build up your confidence in yourself, and your habits.

The other tip I have is to set yourself up for success. Reflect on why you typically lose focus. Is it your phone? Maybe leave your phone somewhere else when you study. Is it a loud or distracting environment? Find a separate environment that’s better suited to the task. Do you lose focus because you get hungry? Bring snacks. Whatever the obstacles in your way are, identify them, and then come up with specific ways to target those problems.

The maximum you can work in any given day is 24 hours. If you're like most people, half the day goes into all sorts of maintenance activities, such as sleep, food, hygiene, and so on.

At best, you get 12 hours a day of effective time.

No matter how hard you work, there's going to be ceilings on your individual productivity. There are going to be hard limits to what you personally can do.

Thus, focus on improving your capacity to collaborate, to learn from and work with others. It is not a neat answer, but if you can cooperate and coordinate better, you'll get more done. Learn to give/take, honour agreements, communicate, build teams, run meetings, etc. These will do more for how much you can get done than your own hard work.

Also, learning high productivity thinking skills is valuable: mathematics, philosophy, reasoning skills, learning from history, etc.

It seems like you are well intentioned and there are great tips in this thread and around the web. But it’s perfectly reasonable that if you suffer from a condition or disorder that you may need extents support to execute some of these plans. I know several children and adults who have been diagnosed with ADHD or various sensory deficit disorders who struggle with focus based tasks.

On a more technical note since this is HN. I have a friend with ADHD who says she is “time blind” and often loses track of time, even with a watch. I’m building her a smart wristband that vibrates the time every hour. She believes it will help to train her to keep better track of time. We shall see.

* Virtual focus/co-working rooms: https://www.focusmate.com, https://www.flow.club/, https://guzey.com/co-working/

* ADHD: https://add.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/adhd-questionnair..., Book: Taking Charge of Adult ADHD, https://cerebral.com/ and https://www.donefirst.com/

* Book: Refuse to Choose!: Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies

* You only consider yourself a procrastinator because you have high/different/maybe unrealistic expectations for yourself. It’s not that you’re not productive…you’re doing well in school and doing what you need to do. Maybe other students are even jealous or your ability to pull everything together at the last second whereas they have to grind for weeks/days before to achieve similar results. Consider the benefits of your style. Anyways, you’re asking this question because you want *more*. It’s good to want to improve and yearn for more, but you need to understand you’re asking how to be exceptional and that doesn’t happen without exceptional effort and sacrifices. Are you actually willing to do what it takes to be exceptional? How’re you going to summon the willpower? How’ve you structured your lifestyle to support that? You can’t “just do it” or you would’ve. You’re missing some bigger picture.

* You have a “chaotic” working style. Embrace it. It’s served you well. Fighting this is going to just result in some cognitive dissonance and you getting in your own way. Tools aren’t going to change you. You can take adderall (basically meth lol) to rewire yourself IF you are failing to function, but it’s not worth it imo in the long term / you’re doing fine.

* Once you stop fighting your own nature, you need to stop thinking about time management and start thinking about energy management. What are you putting your energy into? You have a finite amount of it. It’s not that you can’t read more / study more…it’s that those are probably way more draining on you. You won’t be able to do them unless you clear out a whole day, half of which is mentally preparing yourself to finally take the plunge. You don’t do it because your internal prioritization system does not view this as worth it. You want to do things that are hard for you…but you don’t want to actually go through the hardship. That’s normal and self-preserving. Besides…what if it’s a gigantic waste of time? Waiting till the last minute is also really a way to derive certainty and a sense of safety that your work is going towards something that’ll matter.

* Regarding prioritization. You do things when they need to be done. So you aren’t lazy. The fact that you’re doing them last minute means that your internal prioritization formula doesn’t really value being done early. In fact, maybe you perform better with super high pressure and have realized that doing things last minute is how you’re most efficient. It’s that simple. The only way to change is not to introduce structure in the form or tools that tries to subvert how you prioritize things…instead you need to figure out how to get value out of not doing things last minute so you change your own internal prioritization framework. For me, this has been realizing that every great thing that I achieved in my life or work has happened with daily incremental effort. Instead of rushing towards a finish line, I prioritize the grind itself.

* You need to rest. That time you spend browsing for sure is in part due to maybe poor self control or being sucked into a dopamine cycle. I also think it’s likely that you’re not honest with yourself on needing recovery time. Your body and mind will just stop cooperating with you when they’re depleted, and then you blame yourself for not being good enough. Instead focus on sleep, nutrition, etc to boost your energy reserves, and focus on energy management. I actually recommend against explicitly taking “break” days for reasons I don’t feel like explaining, but just ...

Procrastination is a psychological issue. You won’t solve it with a “To Do” list.

Highlights of the book that worked for me:

1. Forgive yourself for past procrastination

2. Goal setting and task breakdown - break larger tasks into smaller chunks

3. Identify the unpleasant feelings and thoughts associated with a task causing you to procrastinate

4. Realize you won’t feel more like doing it later (the procrastinator’s lie)

5. Just get started

#5 is the most powerful for me. We often have feelings that a task will be more difficult and more unpleasant than it really is. Just getting started corrects that.

Another potential avenue is diet, quit all sugar including fruit. A small percentage of the population reacts particularly badly to non lactose sugars and you may be one of them.

I think a common cause of ADHD is undiagnosed hEDS, especially if you’re in tech. The usual tests for hEDS has a extremely high false negative rate so it’s way more prevalent than commonly beloved, I think a mild form occurs at a rate of around 2% within European populations. As medical research has improved the accepted prevalence has gone from 1/50K to 1/15K to 1/500 and I think there is still an additional order of magnitude to go when able to test for the mild forms. These 2% are prone to dopamine dysregulation / burnout / ME/CFS and Long Covid. You don’t have to be particularly hypermobile to have hEDS, and in men especially the mild forms can be barely perceptible and symptoms usually show up in other ways.

- Adjust your expectations. It's possible that you have less productive capacity than others. To try and be as productive as they are may actually be little else than self punishment. Consider a smaller daily goal such as "I will get at least one thing done today."

- Consider going to bed earlier, waking up earlier, and getting to work ASAP. I used to sleep later and only start working at 9am, like most people, until I noticed that I was insanely productive the days I got up early and just started work right after showering. Now I get up at 6am and crank out work for at least 4 hours. There's a few things at play here. Firstly, there's nobody around during these hours to distract me. Secondly, I believe both the elevated hormones upon first waking up really help with focus and general alertness. Am I the most productive employee in the world? Not really, but I'm still way more productive when I just get right to work. Although this suggestion may seem like a non-answer in regards to procrastination, I find that I'm far more likely to address something I need to do during that window of time.

- Try taking cold showers. They have neurological effects that are beneficial for ADHD, notably elevated dopamine.

- Get a diagnosis to figure out if you really have ADHD or if you are just overworking yourself. If you actually have ADHD, medication can help a lot. This is based on my experience. I wish I got on medication a lot sooner.

- If you do things like play music or podcasts while you work, avoid doing so for a while and see what happens. Or if you really want something on in the background, make it something like smooth jazz or piano on low volume. Oddly enough, I realized my work is just better if either I'm playing something gentle in the background or just listening to nothing at all.

I wish that great fits of productivity was just a byproduct of waking up every day. I envy people that seem to be able to do that. But for me, that simply wasn’t the case.

It’s become cliche, but I’ve greatly benefited from the tactics espoused by Cal Newport in his book “Deep Work” and in his podcast. I now plan my days (regardless of whether it goes according to plan), have startup and shutdown rituals, keep a list of values and goals…all that.

I also just finished reading “Atomic Habits” which wasn’t particularly insightful but provided great reinforcement of what I already knew.

At no point has a magic switch flipped and it’s been a slog at times, but I’m getting better. Like weight loss, improvement didn’t happen overnight. It’s not steady or consistent. Some weeks and months I might even regress and require a refocus or reset. But, over time, my focus, productivity, motivation, and actualization have definitely improved.

Coupled with a few behavior changes around health and fitness (exercise, better diet, daily sunlight, going to bed early and getting up early, and a focus on getting quality sleep), I’m as productive professionally as I’ve ever been. And I think I still have a lot of improvement left to make.

I lament that I didn’t realize all this back when I was in college. In every facet of my life I was capable of so much more than I did.

It just helps me focus and life becomes more like a game with actual rewards.