I have read countless number of blogs, watched a lot of videos on solving this problem, tried different methods and failed. Is this a sign of depression or ADHD?
It feels nice to read it or watch it but unless we decide to change, it's not going to happen and decision fatigue is the main cause of this. Making fewer decisions will help.
I like to call it "The Curse of Decision Making" which is upon us.
Length of watch/read laters ∝ Magnitude of Procrastination.
They help for a week or two and then I'm back to where I started. I'm starting therapy next week with one of the main goals try to solve this because it's been too many years already. It's getting worse and it is starting to generate a lot of distress. I would recommend trying that, there is a point where one can only do and control so much, if you tried many approaches it's time to look for external help.
I think this is a common experience. For me it isn't depression but sub-conscious anxiety (which lead to depression, there is feedback).
Everything conspires together to create a cycle of procrastination fear, anxiety, depression, boredom, any vague feeling of discomfort, any distraction.
My route to getting going is to pick the smallest easiest thing I'm procrastinating and just do it. Then use the kick of success to do a harder one.
Hm, very little to go off here. If you can see problem with your behavior, and it sounds like you can't fix it, you should seek out real help.
A post on hacker news doesn't seem the place for it. There are probably better support groups/forums to ask in.
There are probably many questions to answer that would help you determine what it is. A few that come to mind:
* Is this new or have you always struggled with procrastination?
* Do you have (or have you had) other symptoms of ADHD?
* How was/is school?
* Do you have some subjects you thrive in and some you fail at, and nothing between?
* Have you started a new job or role at work?
* Do you like it?
* Any other major life events? Fired, kid on the way, death in the family, my friend on discord stopped talking to me.
* Does the procrastination apply to almost everything?
* Are you doing something really hard, succeeding at that and can't make yourself do other hard things?
* Are you saturating your brain scrolling on the internet and it doesn't have room for anything else?
There are precisely two realizations that helped me beat procrastination, but I know that these won't be helpful in every situation:
- Totally keep motivation out of the equation. Depend fully on routine. Give yourself time to think before you commit to something. Totally reject it if you don't deem it worthy of doing. Once you make the decision, carve out slots in your calendar/text file for that task only. If it's something long term, make a habit of it, and do it even if you don't want to.
- Reading two chapters of a book is better than reading no chapters of a book. You are two chapters' knowledge worth wiser than yourself when you didn't start the book. Implementing two features in the your side project app leaves you more competent than when you didn't start at all. Realize this. Don't think about finishing, end results at all. Just start.
These don't guarantee you finish something. But these ensures that you start. Not finishing things is another problem, but that's not what the OP has asked.
I have tons of anti-procrastination and organizational tips URLs bookmarked, some of which have been consumed.
I’m still a master procrastinator and my age starts with a 5. I probably won’t be late for my funeral, but only because someone else will be in charge of that.
For me, it was the realization that all my needs are met so my brain doesn’t want to push more. You need discipline at this point. Read david goggins or jocko.
What are OP's own thoughts on the nature of their procrastination after watching and reading articles, blogs and videos?
Did they address any of the identified reasons, and if so, in which way?
Personally, I think the core of my own procrastinating is a misguided sense of perfectionism.
I want the tasks that I'm working on to be simultaneously easy, stimulating and myself to deliver perfect work. If any of these dimensions is missing or unlikely, I will procrastinate without end.
I've arrived at a point where I've come to accept complete failure on almost all endeavours and feeling like a permanent loser, I won't even try any more.
So far I found it impossible to become okay with delivering imperfect work, since, at work or in private life, I'm objectively being judged on the quality of it and my reputation hinges on it as well.
Hillary Rettig wrote a book called _The Lifelong Activist_ that addresses procrastination (among other issues). She claims that procrastination comes from perfectionism and that giving up on getting things perfect will end your procrastination.
I'm not sure this is 100% true for all people but I found it to be a helpful way to think about things. The book is worth reading overall, and I think a lot of the advice in it would apply to anyone who wants to be able to spend a large portion of their life on focused work, whether that's activism, running a company, parenting, etc.
Do a test for sleep apnea. I didn't realize I had apnea but my dad and brother had it, so I did a sleep test. Turns out I had severe apnea.
I suffered from massive procrastination and focus problems in the couple years leading up to the test. Once I got a CPAP machine to sleep better, it made a profound change in my life. Mental acuity, productivity, mood, everything was far better. Sleep is no joke. For about a month, my dreams were crazy long epic sagas as my brain caught up on REM sleep it had been deprived of for years. My bosses at the time mentioned I was like a different person altogether. Got great performance reviews.
So, just my tale on how I beat procrastination. Probably not what you expected.
Yeah it's a thing. But the alternative was to continue on the road to darkness. At least if you get a test done, you can understand what the problem might be, or might not be.
I had light sleep apnea problems, it really saps the life out of you.
In my case it was probably a consequence of other problems (stress, schedule, very broadly varying work and sleep hours).
Daily physical activity and more balanced alimentation, maybe the ensuing weight loss, and sleeping with open windows, in different positions, and on softer mattresses regardless of temperature helped. I haven't run tests for a long time but it helped.
The doctor first tried me out on a CPAP machine during a sleep study, but I couldn't tolerate it.
Eventually he made me an oral appliance (mostly acrylic) [0] that works great. It just keeps my jaw a little forward while I sleep. It also fixes my teeth-grinding problem.
I will always advocate for testing for and treating sleep apnea. Awareness has improved a lot but it was wildly undiagnosed 10ish years ago[1]
I use a different treatment, a medical grade mouthpiece basically. I needed to get wisdom teeth removed for it to align properly. Part of my daily hygiene routine now is keeping this thing clean
If I could go back in time, I would still get it as soon as possible because it gives me life and I would honestly ____ myself if I had to go back to living with untreated sleep apnea.
It's not even a 100% fix for me. I may try cpap again.
And my case was technically mild, waking up 6 times per hour during the night via choking on sleep.
It's non-negotiable to treat it imo. Having any treatment available at all is a miracle.
There's lots of causes for tiredness, so it may not be apnea, but if it is you should treat it.
If you’re concerned that you have anxiety / depression / adhd, talk with a trained clinician. And yes they can be the cause of intractable procrastination. Talk with a dr.
"Feeling Good" is about Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, and will teach you some practical ways to get yourself out of a bad mood (depression, anger, self-criticism, etc). Procrastination is a logical response to how you are feeling about some task, for example, you are feeling anxious about failing a test, so you play video games because it feels better to play video games than to feel anxious. This book will help you get past the anxiety, so you can focus on the studying. If you only read one of these books, I would recommend this one.
"The Now Habit" offers you some practical advice on how to beat procrastination and schedule your time so you don't feel like all you do is work, work, work.
"Getting Things Done" has a lot of practical advice about how to keep track of what you've got going on in your life so that you can get all your stuff done.
And yes, if you think you are depressed or have undiagnosed ADHD, go see a doctor and/or therapist.
Procrastination may be a symptom of a lot of things - anxiety, ADHD, etc. Nobody on HN is going to be able to diagnose you, though - you should probably talk to someone who can actually diagnose you and possibly prescribe treatment if your experiences with procrastination are having a negative impact on your life.
Do you procrastinate about everything? Specific things? If you're just procrastinating about specific things there might be reasons that won't be solved by videos or whatnot. e.g. - like, do you turn things in last-minute at work because you get a lot of negative feedback? People develop defense strategies to avoid or at least defer painful experiences.
Or you could be suffering from a strong case of "I find zero meaning in doing these things." Coping strategies and medications are unlikely to help here.
If you really suspect that you have ADHD, depression, anxiety or something else - talk to a professional. (Mental health professional, not just any professional...) If you do have one (or more) of those things, you probably have problems aside from procrastination that may be helped by getting treatment.
This so much, procrastination can have so many causes and is quite probably more of a symptom, just look at the other comment mentioning sleep apena and cpap... totally different from someone who has ADHD or even being at a point in life where useless crap just is hard to motivate.
My therapist helped me first acknowledge that it would be a long process to overcome procrastination and to stop being too harsh on myself. Then, I tried to do the smallest possible step that I was capable of doing towards the task I was procrastinating on. This could be as tiny as just sitting at my desk for a few seconds. The next day I would sit for a little longer. Then I would just open the file I was supposed to work on, etc. That's where the therapist was very helpful to me, she helped me overcome the guilt of doing something so ridiculously insignificant and be satisfied with it, while at the same time treating the deeper roots of the problem.
Worrying about procrastination makes it worse. The energy you get from procrastination is what you want to learn to harness. Use it to get other things done. Eventually the original task looks appealing. But don’t worry about! Let your interests be drawn in different directions.
Just don’t watch tv or play games, or if you do, new ones—and enjoy it fully.
No it really didn't help much. There are a number of reasons. A tip or a hack cannot solve what is essentially an emotion regulation problem. You probably don't procrastinate on all tasks. For example you can probably read reddit or play games all day. But you dread even starting some tasks. It might be due to multiple reason: past failures, critical feedbacks etc. You will need to introspect and solve that complicated emotion.
Of course, if you notice a broad pattern in every part of your life please consider professional help.
Procrastination can be bad if pathological, but it's a great heuristic in the absence of information (close to optimal).
I think people over think it, causing excessive anxiety to themselves.
Why is it a good evolved strategy? Because of uncertainty:
If something is due at some deadline in the future, the further we're from that deadline, the larger the chance that whatever the task is won't be necessary. So waiting for it to become more certain and do something else makes sense in terms of reducing effort (energy expenditure).
Don't try to solve for it, just focus on getting the right things done and learn to let go of things that really don't matter.
I would recommend reading "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity".
It helped me a lot being successful at that point of my career where I had more things to do than time to do them (spoiler alert: you just don't do some shit, it really doesn't matter).
Sounds good except it doesn’t apply in the worse cases, which are the ones where there zero uncertainty that the task will have severe negative consequences if not done on time. Meaning, hard deadlines for mandatory projects, at work, school or life.
I respect your take, because generalizing advice is always impossible and at some surface level I agree.
I’d investigate more on the poor emotional management and regulation that leads to procrastination, I think there, there is always room for self improvement that applies to other areas of life.
Yeah, if there are pathological conditions (e.g. depression) my advise doesn't really apply.
What I see is a push to make procrastination look like a character flaw and trying to sell "solutions" to it. Even to the point of using ADHD medication to increase focus, training courses, etc.
This causes a lot of anxiety and pressure to perform in otherwise healthy individuals.
As if procrastination is THE reason you don't succeed (and why daddy doesn't love you), and if you could just fix it, all your dreams will become true.
Success is (in my experience) more about luck and prioritization.
Luck because there are a lot of things you don't control, and prioritization because most things don't really matter, and learning to focus your energy in the ones that do, will take you a long way.
60 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadIt feels nice to read it or watch it but unless we decide to change, it's not going to happen and decision fatigue is the main cause of this. Making fewer decisions will help.
I like to call it "The Curse of Decision Making" which is upon us.
Length of watch/read laters ∝ Magnitude of Procrastination.
Sounds like procrastination.
My route to getting going is to pick the smallest easiest thing I'm procrastinating and just do it. Then use the kick of success to do a harder one.
A post on hacker news doesn't seem the place for it. There are probably better support groups/forums to ask in.
There are probably many questions to answer that would help you determine what it is. A few that come to mind:
- Totally keep motivation out of the equation. Depend fully on routine. Give yourself time to think before you commit to something. Totally reject it if you don't deem it worthy of doing. Once you make the decision, carve out slots in your calendar/text file for that task only. If it's something long term, make a habit of it, and do it even if you don't want to.
- Reading two chapters of a book is better than reading no chapters of a book. You are two chapters' knowledge worth wiser than yourself when you didn't start the book. Implementing two features in the your side project app leaves you more competent than when you didn't start at all. Realize this. Don't think about finishing, end results at all. Just start.
These don't guarantee you finish something. But these ensures that you start. Not finishing things is another problem, but that's not what the OP has asked.
Nothing wrong with having "brush teeth" as a daily task in Todoist or whatever flavour of todo app you click with! :)
The "Due" app on iOS is particularly nice for these sort of routine tasks - it'll keep notifying you every x minutes until you tell it you've done it
I am ignorant of these things. Please let me know.
I’m still a master procrastinator and my age starts with a 5. I probably won’t be late for my funeral, but only because someone else will be in charge of that.
Did they address any of the identified reasons, and if so, in which way?
Personally, I think the core of my own procrastinating is a misguided sense of perfectionism.
I want the tasks that I'm working on to be simultaneously easy, stimulating and myself to deliver perfect work. If any of these dimensions is missing or unlikely, I will procrastinate without end. I've arrived at a point where I've come to accept complete failure on almost all endeavours and feeling like a permanent loser, I won't even try any more.
So far I found it impossible to become okay with delivering imperfect work, since, at work or in private life, I'm objectively being judged on the quality of it and my reputation hinges on it as well.
I'm not sure this is 100% true for all people but I found it to be a helpful way to think about things. The book is worth reading overall, and I think a lot of the advice in it would apply to anyone who wants to be able to spend a large portion of their life on focused work, whether that's activism, running a company, parenting, etc.
Possible starter point : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33633512
I suffered from massive procrastination and focus problems in the couple years leading up to the test. Once I got a CPAP machine to sleep better, it made a profound change in my life. Mental acuity, productivity, mood, everything was far better. Sleep is no joke. For about a month, my dreams were crazy long epic sagas as my brain caught up on REM sleep it had been deprived of for years. My bosses at the time mentioned I was like a different person altogether. Got great performance reviews.
So, just my tale on how I beat procrastination. Probably not what you expected.
Daily physical activity and more balanced alimentation, maybe the ensuing weight loss, and sleeping with open windows, in different positions, and on softer mattresses regardless of temperature helped. I haven't run tests for a long time but it helped.
I have (treated) obstructive sleep apnea.
The doctor first tried me out on a CPAP machine during a sleep study, but I couldn't tolerate it.
Eventually he made me an oral appliance (mostly acrylic) [0] that works great. It just keeps my jaw a little forward while I sleep. It also fixes my teeth-grinding problem.
[0] I think this one: https://oralappliances.com/oral-appliance/sleep-well-applian...
I use a different treatment, a medical grade mouthpiece basically. I needed to get wisdom teeth removed for it to align properly. Part of my daily hygiene routine now is keeping this thing clean
If I could go back in time, I would still get it as soon as possible because it gives me life and I would honestly ____ myself if I had to go back to living with untreated sleep apnea.
It's not even a 100% fix for me. I may try cpap again.
And my case was technically mild, waking up 6 times per hour during the night via choking on sleep.
It's non-negotiable to treat it imo. Having any treatment available at all is a miracle.
There's lots of causes for tiredness, so it may not be apnea, but if it is you should treat it.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19186102/
- "Feeling Good" by David D. Burns
- "The Now Habit" by Neil Fiore
- "Getting Things Done" by David Allen
"Feeling Good" is about Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, and will teach you some practical ways to get yourself out of a bad mood (depression, anger, self-criticism, etc). Procrastination is a logical response to how you are feeling about some task, for example, you are feeling anxious about failing a test, so you play video games because it feels better to play video games than to feel anxious. This book will help you get past the anxiety, so you can focus on the studying. If you only read one of these books, I would recommend this one.
"The Now Habit" offers you some practical advice on how to beat procrastination and schedule your time so you don't feel like all you do is work, work, work.
"Getting Things Done" has a lot of practical advice about how to keep track of what you've got going on in your life so that you can get all your stuff done.
And yes, if you think you are depressed or have undiagnosed ADHD, go see a doctor and/or therapist.
Hope some of this helps.
edit: formatting
Do you procrastinate about everything? Specific things? If you're just procrastinating about specific things there might be reasons that won't be solved by videos or whatnot. e.g. - like, do you turn things in last-minute at work because you get a lot of negative feedback? People develop defense strategies to avoid or at least defer painful experiences.
Or you could be suffering from a strong case of "I find zero meaning in doing these things." Coping strategies and medications are unlikely to help here.
If you really suspect that you have ADHD, depression, anxiety or something else - talk to a professional. (Mental health professional, not just any professional...) If you do have one (or more) of those things, you probably have problems aside from procrastination that may be helped by getting treatment.
The second one in parallel as a physical problem as not getting good sleep, nutrient deficiencies, lack of exercise etc.
Both are interconnected.
My therapist helped me first acknowledge that it would be a long process to overcome procrastination and to stop being too harsh on myself. Then, I tried to do the smallest possible step that I was capable of doing towards the task I was procrastinating on. This could be as tiny as just sitting at my desk for a few seconds. The next day I would sit for a little longer. Then I would just open the file I was supposed to work on, etc. That's where the therapist was very helpful to me, she helped me overcome the guilt of doing something so ridiculously insignificant and be satisfied with it, while at the same time treating the deeper roots of the problem.
Just don’t watch tv or play games, or if you do, new ones—and enjoy it fully.
Of course, if you notice a broad pattern in every part of your life please consider professional help.
I think people over think it, causing excessive anxiety to themselves.
Why is it a good evolved strategy? Because of uncertainty:
If something is due at some deadline in the future, the further we're from that deadline, the larger the chance that whatever the task is won't be necessary. So waiting for it to become more certain and do something else makes sense in terms of reducing effort (energy expenditure).
Don't try to solve for it, just focus on getting the right things done and learn to let go of things that really don't matter.
I would recommend reading "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity".
It helped me a lot being successful at that point of my career where I had more things to do than time to do them (spoiler alert: you just don't do some shit, it really doesn't matter).
I respect your take, because generalizing advice is always impossible and at some surface level I agree.
I’d investigate more on the poor emotional management and regulation that leads to procrastination, I think there, there is always room for self improvement that applies to other areas of life.
What I see is a push to make procrastination look like a character flaw and trying to sell "solutions" to it. Even to the point of using ADHD medication to increase focus, training courses, etc.
This causes a lot of anxiety and pressure to perform in otherwise healthy individuals.
As if procrastination is THE reason you don't succeed (and why daddy doesn't love you), and if you could just fix it, all your dreams will become true.
Success is (in my experience) more about luck and prioritization.
Luck because there are a lot of things you don't control, and prioritization because most things don't really matter, and learning to focus your energy in the ones that do, will take you a long way.