I've long known my procrastination is born out of anxieties centered around the task or myself.
But I'm so kind to myself that I forgive myself for procrastinating before I've even done it - a great example of the many ways/excuses to defeat most anti-procrastination techniques I've come up with :)))
I even wonder how much my propensity toward picking up new hobbies (which usually involves spending decent amounts of money aka "shopping") before getting bored, selling everything (which I usually put off until I physically can't accommodate more stuff) and repeating the process is actually just me avoiding doing life stuff like saving for a house and being a responsible adult.
I eat takeaway because I "don't have time" but then I don't actually get things I need to do done AND find myself becoming more and more unhealthy.
I often get asked "what have you done today?" and it's quite frequent for me to not really even know (or care to admit).
Interestingly, I went away on holiday the other week - when I arrived home, before I even paused (shoes still on), I immediately started doing things I'd been putting off for months, like I had an urge despite there being no more time pressure than at any point in the past 12 months that I had regularly ignored.
Procrastination, and being with it, is a large part of my life. I find it incredibly interesting but if I could pay a large sum of money to take it away in an instant, I'd hand over the cash immediately. (And thus, this is another example of my aversion to difficult work)
Returning from the holiday meant you had avoided your usual procrastination cues -couch, TV, phone, schedule.
The key to defeating your procrastination may be to progressively build up a habit of doing work you prefer to avoid by setting up regular cues.
Eg to build a gym habit I set out my gym clothes each night. Then after a week of that I began to put them on before getting in the car to work. Then after a few days I drove past the gym in the way to work. Then went in for 1 minute and so forth. I know this sounds absurd. With these tiny steps I built a habit of the gym that is now 1 hour five times a week. Now I am building a habit of keeping my kitchen clean with the same progression of micro cues. You could imagine similar steps involving preparing your desk, later just sitting down at it, and so forth,all with cues like your first coffee, or you finished dinner etc. The formula is regular cue + micro progression to build a habit. Eventually it is mentally easier to maintain the habit than to break it.
Another tip, if you absolutely do not want to fulfill the habit on a particular cue, complete as many micro steps as you can, eg if I have an injury I will still go into the gym for a shower and to change before work.
I do pay to remove procrastination. I think a great example of the level of procrastination I’m talking about is this — despite getting two tickets, I didn’t renew my tags for my car for a year and a half after their expiration. It’s not like I was broke or busy. I just felt UGH every time I thought about it. I procrastinate things despite the great personal cost it might incur because of the anxiety of something even the most mildly unpleasant.
I wouldn’t want to do work at work, so I’d endlessly scroll Hacker News or Reddit for about a year and a half. I’d leave at three because I was bored. I left one job and got fired from another.
I take prescription amphetamines now. The difference is night and day. Developers I’ve worked with on the medication think I’m intelligent and diligent. Developers who have worked with me off the medication are baffled I got hired. People have a hard time believing they’re talking about the same person. The reward is great, but so are the costs. I’m really irritable in the evenings, and I struggle to be kind and enjoy time with my wife and daughter whom I’m ostensibly doing this for. I can’t just take some in the evenings, or I can’t sleep. It makes me more distant emotionally. My wife can instantly tell if I’ve taken Adderall, and not in a good way. My sense of humor changes, more cutting and rude. I take a drug that changes what interests me. I don’t take it on the weekends, because I’m terrified I’ll develop a tolerance, as happened once before. Tolerance doesn’t mean all effects (including side effects) are diminished. When tolerant the emotional effects seemed to scale linearly, bizarre things like crying on the kitchen floor because my wife didn’t want to talk about Austrian economics at 6am, but the concentration effect would level off and I’d feel foggy. So I sleep 14 hours on weekends, giving me even less time away from work and with my family. Vacations are the best because my wife says I’m “the man she married again” after a few days off the meds. I feel good but maaan am I unmotivated.
I’m not saying I live in some dystopian nightmare. My life is so much better for it. Adderall has made me a firmly middle class citizen, it took me a year and a half of not taking it to realize without it (and propranolol, which reduces anxiety by just a tiny bit), there’s no way I can work a developer job. So every three months I pay the doctor, then pay the pharmacist, and I get a pill that fundamentally alters who I am.
Did you get tested for ADHD? I know I always wondered about my procrastination habits, lack of discipline or executive functions (prioritizing and time-boxing tasks) and anxiety.
Seems this is very frequently co-morbid with ADHD - and there are different ADHD subtypes, the loud-mouthed and irritable one and the silent, inattentive one.
>my propensity toward picking up new hobbies (which usually involves spending decent amounts of money aka "shopping") before getting bored, selling everything (which I usually put off until I physically can't accommodate more stuff) and repeating the process
This also is sooo common in ADHD people, just saying...
>Procrastination, and being with it, is a large part of my life. I find it incredibly interesting but if I could pay a large sum of money to take it away in an instant, I'd hand over the cash immediately.
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good ─ Søren Kirkegaard
Try mediation to identify and get more comfortable with the feelings that trigger the procrastination or task avoidance. Once you start on that path and identify the problems you can also make changes in your life, instead of just accepting the feelings.
> And thus, this is another example of my aversion to difficult work
Nice. A parallel: "I'd take a pill just to take my procrastination away! Hell I'd take 2."
I had some real procrastination issues at work. I mean, I was really beating myself up, praying about it every night and sometimes during the day. Eventually I just had to start in on the tasks I had been putting off.
Perfectionism is another facet of this thing: I need to handle x, y and z but that's going to be really tough, especially "z"... Fuck I'll start tomorrow. I had a gnarly data-munging thing for work, one of those "garbage in, garbage out"-type things, except the expectation was "garbage in, $$ out". I couldn't see my way around all the tiny difficulties I foresaw arising.
When the pain of procrastinating became greater than the pain of just starting in on the work, I finally was able to make progress. It wasn't as bad as I had been thinking. So pessimism and cynicism seem to also play a role.
Anyway, a favorite saying of mine is "god don't do manual labor". I could pray for motivation (or meditate or whatever), but what was needful was for me to tolerate the feelings and get started. Hard to do!
Procrastination is an addiction because it offers relief from anxiety and instant gratification. Also, being a chronic procrastinator and a skilled developer is a deadly combination. I've been praised for my excellent work and rewarded with raises and bonuses, even though I often procrastinate until the very last minute.
Tip: to make your git logs look socially acceptable to co-workers and management, don't commit at 3AM Monday morning, wait until 9AM.
I definitely feel it like an addiction, and I often try to describe it like a drug. I build up this anxiety for a task, in small increments throughout the day. Then, finally, mercifully, at some point, my brain finds a way out. I find something easy to replace the thing I was worried about, or I find a somewhat valid justification for why I can do it tomorrow, and the anxiety just vanishes and I get this hit of dopamine that feels a tiny bit like weed, honestly.
Are you sure you don't have ADHD? Because that sounds a lot like what you're describing.
ADHD is an addiction to procrastination in a sense. It could be that you missed diagnoses at a young age due to being intelligent enough to cruise through school and university with little effort, so your problem was never picked up as you never suffered any serious negative effects from ADHD due to your intelligence and ability to get tasks done quickly.
That's basically what happened to me. I'd be able to do an assignment that would take people several days, in half a day. So I'd be able to procrastinate and delay up to the last minute and still manage to pull through, usually not with great grades, but I'd pass. I always thought I was lazy, and never considered the fact that it could be a deeper neurological problem.
I code at odd hours. I'm not going to live my life being afraid of people who judge me for it. Life is short, and those people probably aren't good to have in my life anyway.
I don't buy the "normative pressure" argument. We need to encourage independent thinking. If someone is told over and over that it's his work not his schedule that matters and still feels an internal pressure to imitate others' schedules, he's not thinking independently.
> I often procrastinate until the very last minute.
I need that pressure too. Time clocking systems don't work at all and I tend not to use them after a while. Sure, fire me, be my guest. I think you have a release to worry about...
Always shipped on time... or at least fast enough. At least you are not getting any change requests half a day before release. The day after always feels very good.
I've started my first full remote job. The team is fairly distributed, but there is a home office. git commits are logged in slack as they happen. I've decided, that since I don't have an office to be in from a certain time and that I feel supported to work wherever and whenever I want, that I will not do this. I want to be able to start work at noon and work on collaborative work til 4pm, then live my life when most of the world is awake between 8am-noon and 4pm-8pm. I then want to work on non-collaborative projects from 8pm until I feel like I've accomplished enough for the day. Sometimes that 4am.
It's not about proving that I'm doing work, it's more about knowing that it doesn't matter when and where I do my work. I will not be chained to a desk or schedule.
I really feel I can make a helpful contribution on this topic. This article correctly asserts that procrastination is an avoidance mechanism for tasks that illicit an emotional response, but then tells you to figure out what that is by yourself. Good luck with that. So the problem is only partly identified to the reader. If this article at all interested or struck a chord with you then I strongly recommend an old-school procrastination book called The Now Habit by Niel Fiore to get a more complete explanation.
Like many commenters that chime in on these procrastination threads, I am a chronic procrastinator, and feel like it’s really held me back in life. I was completely convinced of having undiagnosed adult ADHD for several years (didn’t want to go onto stims, though) - until Fiore’s book threw a spanner in the works and identified some reasonably serious unresolved psychological issues from my childhood - the source of the emotional response identified in this article. In my case it’s to do with putting impossibly high expectations on myself, but there are other common examples explored in the book. I was absolutely not expecting that and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s obvious in retrospect, and now I’ve correctly identified the thought patterns that sit just below the surface of conscious cognition I can catch myself in the act. It’s helped enormously.
For me it's an anxiety thing. There are certain things I just can't get started on although I clearly know that I can do them well and quickly. I also know that not doing them often causes me a lot of pain but I still won't do them. I don't understand it myself. It makes no sense.
I can deeply relate to this. There are things that I'll put off for a week, sometimes for a sprint, and finally, in anguish, I'll do them and.... they take like 2 hours and are twice as easy as I anticipated.
And you get finished and have this moment of disbelief like... why on earth did I just torture myself for a week over this? For nothing..
For me, it's also anxiety. But lately I've come to realize that it's a symptom of me not knowing some component of the task. For instance, I've been putting off building a coffee table for the house. I just found out that wipe-on polyurethane exists yesterday, and it seems to be the answer to my lacquer problem. I'm already feeling a lot more likely to start working on it.
I've had other similar issues when working on our house in the last year, and they were all solved by finding the solution to something I didn't know how to do. Then I suddenly had the drive and energy to do it and knocked it out quickly.
I found Nassim Nicholas Taleb's take on procrastination in Antifragile interesting - he likens procrastination to a natural defense: "Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity."
He goes on to make the point that he use procrastination as a filter for his writing - if he feels strong resistance to writing a certain section he leaves it out as a service to his readers - why should they read something that he himself didn't particularly want to write? Instead of fighting procrastination as though it is an illness, maybe we should learn to understand it's utility:
"Psychologists and economists who study ‘irrationality’ do not realize that humans may have an instinct to procrastinate only when no life is in danger. I do not procrastinate when I see a lion in my bedroom or fire in my neighbor’s library. I do not procrastinate after a severe injury. I do so with unnatural duties and procedures."
Yeah, I'm still alive - but the amount of late-fees, insane interest rates and chronic struggle to have a flat and something to eat each months that could be solved with a lot less money and pain if I hadn't procrastinated on solving these problems earlier is not exactly nice also. Also procrastinating going to the dentist cost me... What I want to say: It's a nice quip at society - but utterly useless for the chronic procrastinator.
If Taleb's procrastination works as a negative feedback loop, preventing him from wasting time, then good for him. This is not how procrastination looks like for those who struggle, though.
For us, procrastination runs on a positive feedback loop - the pain you seek to avoid by delaying a task is increased the longer you avoid that task, locking you into a spiral of anxiety, out of which you usually break in two ways: either you flake on the task, or the "pain buffer" overflows and you find enough energy to complete it in a half-assed way. Rinse & repeat.
There are three tricks I've found work best to stop procrastinating.
1. Ovsiankina effect. The effect states that an interrupted task, even without incentive, values as a "quasi-need". It creates intrusive thoughts, aimed at taking up the task again. [1]
2. Structured procrastination. [2]
3. Concentrating on the steps to complete the task, not your feelings and emotions about completing it. Action vs. state orientation. [3][4]
It seems like proper title would be "Procrastination is not time management problem. It is emotion regulation problem" (no articles to fit into 80 characters limit).
Currently submission title is "Procrastination is not a time management problem. It is an emotion".
Some things that have helped procrastination for me are 2 things:
1) think about something to look forward to regarding the particular task — for example maybe just simply writing the email saying that it’s done is the only thing I can look forward to, the current thing is super annoying to do, or the food I’ll eat afterward.
2) second thing I do is when I sense that I’m not going to make progress on the thing, I just stop working on the thing and schedule it for later.. trying to do something for hours and not actually doing it is actually fairly stressful and wastes a bunch of time and emotionally you feel annoyed about it as well. This sounds like procrastination but I mean within a context where I actually attempt to do the thing at each scheduled time rather than sit there and play on your phone on top of your math book while you are supposed to be studying. I just say welp math ain’t happening right now. Schedule for later when I’ll be mentally prepared.
I have definitely pretty much always thought procrastination is super emotional. Certain things you don’t want to do so you put it off. Once there is very little time left you know that you have forced yourself into a limited engagement on a thing you want to minimize your involvement with so you have made a reasonable decision to avoid dealing with something that could annoy you for an extended time.
So true to the second point. I've discovered that recognizing when to give it a break is a hugely important skill to have and one that that took me a long time to develop as a software engineer/entrepreneur.
That works for some things, but I feel like it breaks down when others put tasks on your TODO list. For example, when I finish a task around the house, my wife adds more, so by procrastinating, I'm reducing the total amount of work I do.
So there's always some element of prioritization, which means procrastinating on some things and not procrastinating on others. I think my trouble is properly prioritizing, and I'm sure that's similar for others as well.
This is beautiful. If you have a thing that takes some manageable effort, and that is important enough to do. Do it at the first time you to not have anything more important to do. It is nothing else but a different mindset. It sounds easy, because it is once you get going.
The fact that Chronic procrastination = Likely ADHD i.e. an inherent neurological issue, needs to be propagated more widely so people can stop feeling guilty about it and not treat it like some emotional/moral/work ethic failure.
I've done this in the past, but I find it's infinitely more painful to me when I genuinely care about getting the task done and I still can't make myself get a start on it.
I find myself procrastinating the most when I know what what I'm doing will likely be interrupted, even if it's hours down the line. For instance, even if I can work on a certain thing for 3 hours, when I get word that I'm probably going to have to work on something else for the rest of the day, chances are I'll take those 3 hours less seriously because I know that, when I come back to the task the following day, I'll have to mentally start over. Even if I consciously try to push through it, the back of my mind keeps shouting "What's the point?"
My favorite tool/trick against procrastination is pomodoro technique: Work 25 minutes continuously with no interruptions, then take 5 minutes to relax/do other things, e.g. answer texts - then rinse and repeat. Do this 6-8 times and you'll have done more than most people do in a full work day. When I first heard of it I was very skeptical of it, because I know that as a programmer I need hours of uninterrupted focus, so purposely interrupting myself every 25 mins seemed counterproductive. But it turns out, most of us get micro-interruptions all the time, and they're much easier to ignore if you know that in at most 25 mins, you'll have 5 mins to deal with them. That way you don't create 5 mins of interruption, you batch the already existing interruptions together and timebox them. And 5 mins isn't enough to get you out of 'the zone' as long as you keep the breaks mentally 'light' - and going for a little walk really is healthier than just sitting all the time.
And now for the real kicker: I found that I always procrastinate the most in the beginning of a project, where everything is vague and there's not yet a list of nicely broken down tasks to execute. And that makes sense cf. the whole 'procrastination is emotional' perspective that the article talks about, because completing tasks gives you a dopamine kick as a reward, but with no easy tasks in sight at the start of a project, it just feels like wandering the desert. It feels unpleasant and unsatisfying to grapple with that vagueness and trying to fit that 'too large' problem into your head so it can be broken down into bite size tasks. So you put it off until guilt or panic about a looming deadline becomes bigger than the pain of doing the work - it's the classic 'put off homework until the day before it's due' from school.
A situation like this is where pomodoro technique really shines - I may not have small easy tasks to give me periodic dopamine kicks, but every 25 mins, I still get one for having completed a pomodoro without letting myself get distracted. And I even get to celebrate with a little break. Or to put this in other terms, at the beginning of a project, you cannot measure or reward results like you would prefer (because results are still a ways off - it takes too long to break down the initial vagueness, you don't even know what a result looks like or how hard it is to achieve yet), so you should measure and reward effort instead. And each pomodoro becomes a measure of effort that you can reward. It really does work for me - I often stop doing them later in the project, when I have a nice list of tasks to execute, and I don't do them at all for small easy projects. But whenever I realize that I dread some task or I begin to procrastinate, I pull out the pomodoros and soldier through that way.
"Maybe whatever fresh-faced grad student built this on their summer internship flubbed the feature engineering, modeling autorespond as a library of independent phrases rather than a library of choices."
Whats wrong with a fersh-faced grad student trying to build a new feature if at all he/she is trying to do so?
I’m grumpy about the aside that some medical conditions cause procrastination yet refusal to list them. They don’t need to diagnose readers to just list common issues for which the DSM lists procrastination. That might encourage more sympathy when we see others procrastinating.
On top of the suggestions in the article, a good diet and a regular routine of intense exercise helps me. If I have a consistent balance of diet, exercise, sleep, meditation, and some alone/solitude time in nature, I am most productive and unlikely to procrastinate.
[+] [-] beaker52|6 years ago|reply
But I'm so kind to myself that I forgive myself for procrastinating before I've even done it - a great example of the many ways/excuses to defeat most anti-procrastination techniques I've come up with :)))
I even wonder how much my propensity toward picking up new hobbies (which usually involves spending decent amounts of money aka "shopping") before getting bored, selling everything (which I usually put off until I physically can't accommodate more stuff) and repeating the process is actually just me avoiding doing life stuff like saving for a house and being a responsible adult.
I eat takeaway because I "don't have time" but then I don't actually get things I need to do done AND find myself becoming more and more unhealthy.
I often get asked "what have you done today?" and it's quite frequent for me to not really even know (or care to admit).
Interestingly, I went away on holiday the other week - when I arrived home, before I even paused (shoes still on), I immediately started doing things I'd been putting off for months, like I had an urge despite there being no more time pressure than at any point in the past 12 months that I had regularly ignored.
Procrastination, and being with it, is a large part of my life. I find it incredibly interesting but if I could pay a large sum of money to take it away in an instant, I'd hand over the cash immediately. (And thus, this is another example of my aversion to difficult work)
[+] [-] cheerlessbog|6 years ago|reply
The key to defeating your procrastination may be to progressively build up a habit of doing work you prefer to avoid by setting up regular cues.
Eg to build a gym habit I set out my gym clothes each night. Then after a week of that I began to put them on before getting in the car to work. Then after a few days I drove past the gym in the way to work. Then went in for 1 minute and so forth. I know this sounds absurd. With these tiny steps I built a habit of the gym that is now 1 hour five times a week. Now I am building a habit of keeping my kitchen clean with the same progression of micro cues. You could imagine similar steps involving preparing your desk, later just sitting down at it, and so forth,all with cues like your first coffee, or you finished dinner etc. The formula is regular cue + micro progression to build a habit. Eventually it is mentally easier to maintain the habit than to break it.
Another tip, if you absolutely do not want to fulfill the habit on a particular cue, complete as many micro steps as you can, eg if I have an injury I will still go into the gym for a shower and to change before work.
[+] [-] wincy|6 years ago|reply
I wouldn’t want to do work at work, so I’d endlessly scroll Hacker News or Reddit for about a year and a half. I’d leave at three because I was bored. I left one job and got fired from another.
I take prescription amphetamines now. The difference is night and day. Developers I’ve worked with on the medication think I’m intelligent and diligent. Developers who have worked with me off the medication are baffled I got hired. People have a hard time believing they’re talking about the same person. The reward is great, but so are the costs. I’m really irritable in the evenings, and I struggle to be kind and enjoy time with my wife and daughter whom I’m ostensibly doing this for. I can’t just take some in the evenings, or I can’t sleep. It makes me more distant emotionally. My wife can instantly tell if I’ve taken Adderall, and not in a good way. My sense of humor changes, more cutting and rude. I take a drug that changes what interests me. I don’t take it on the weekends, because I’m terrified I’ll develop a tolerance, as happened once before. Tolerance doesn’t mean all effects (including side effects) are diminished. When tolerant the emotional effects seemed to scale linearly, bizarre things like crying on the kitchen floor because my wife didn’t want to talk about Austrian economics at 6am, but the concentration effect would level off and I’d feel foggy. So I sleep 14 hours on weekends, giving me even less time away from work and with my family. Vacations are the best because my wife says I’m “the man she married again” after a few days off the meds. I feel good but maaan am I unmotivated.
I’m not saying I live in some dystopian nightmare. My life is so much better for it. Adderall has made me a firmly middle class citizen, it took me a year and a half of not taking it to realize without it (and propranolol, which reduces anxiety by just a tiny bit), there’s no way I can work a developer job. So every three months I pay the doctor, then pay the pharmacist, and I get a pill that fundamentally alters who I am.
[+] [-] iSnow|6 years ago|reply
Seems this is very frequently co-morbid with ADHD - and there are different ADHD subtypes, the loud-mouthed and irritable one and the silent, inattentive one.
>my propensity toward picking up new hobbies (which usually involves spending decent amounts of money aka "shopping") before getting bored, selling everything (which I usually put off until I physically can't accommodate more stuff) and repeating the process
This also is sooo common in ADHD people, just saying...
[+] [-] johnnycab|6 years ago|reply
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good ─ Søren Kirkegaard
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/14/kierkegaard-boredom...
[+] [-] lifty|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _pgmf|6 years ago|reply
Nice. A parallel: "I'd take a pill just to take my procrastination away! Hell I'd take 2."
I had some real procrastination issues at work. I mean, I was really beating myself up, praying about it every night and sometimes during the day. Eventually I just had to start in on the tasks I had been putting off.
Perfectionism is another facet of this thing: I need to handle x, y and z but that's going to be really tough, especially "z"... Fuck I'll start tomorrow. I had a gnarly data-munging thing for work, one of those "garbage in, garbage out"-type things, except the expectation was "garbage in, $$ out". I couldn't see my way around all the tiny difficulties I foresaw arising.
When the pain of procrastinating became greater than the pain of just starting in on the work, I finally was able to make progress. It wasn't as bad as I had been thinking. So pessimism and cynicism seem to also play a role.
Anyway, a favorite saying of mine is "god don't do manual labor". I could pray for motivation (or meditate or whatever), but what was needful was for me to tolerate the feelings and get started. Hard to do!
[+] [-] hashberry|6 years ago|reply
Tip: to make your git logs look socially acceptable to co-workers and management, don't commit at 3AM Monday morning, wait until 9AM.
[+] [-] Benjammer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|6 years ago|reply
ADHD is an addiction to procrastination in a sense. It could be that you missed diagnoses at a young age due to being intelligent enough to cruise through school and university with little effort, so your problem was never picked up as you never suffered any serious negative effects from ADHD due to your intelligence and ability to get tasks done quickly.
That's basically what happened to me. I'd be able to do an assignment that would take people several days, in half a day. So I'd be able to procrastinate and delay up to the last minute and still manage to pull through, usually not with great grades, but I'd pass. I always thought I was lazy, and never considered the fact that it could be a deeper neurological problem.
[+] [-] hinkley|6 years ago|reply
There are other coping mechanisms you can use, although some of them are arguably worse than procrastination (eg overengineering).
[+] [-] esolyt|6 years ago|reply
Ultimately, you create value to the company by getting stuff done, not by trying to fit in.
[+] [-] mopierotti|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quotemstr|6 years ago|reply
I don't buy the "normative pressure" argument. We need to encourage independent thinking. If someone is told over and over that it's his work not his schedule that matters and still feels an internal pressure to imitate others' schedules, he's not thinking independently.
[+] [-] ClassyJacket|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raxxorrax|6 years ago|reply
I need that pressure too. Time clocking systems don't work at all and I tend not to use them after a while. Sure, fire me, be my guest. I think you have a release to worry about...
Always shipped on time... or at least fast enough. At least you are not getting any change requests half a day before release. The day after always feels very good.
[+] [-] throwaway287391|6 years ago|reply
You mean commit locally any time, and then squash your commits into one big one with a socially acceptable timestamp before you push?
[+] [-] jdsully|6 years ago|reply
“look how dedicated Johnny is. He was working at 3am!”
[+] [-] bluntfang|6 years ago|reply
I've started my first full remote job. The team is fairly distributed, but there is a home office. git commits are logged in slack as they happen. I've decided, that since I don't have an office to be in from a certain time and that I feel supported to work wherever and whenever I want, that I will not do this. I want to be able to start work at noon and work on collaborative work til 4pm, then live my life when most of the world is awake between 8am-noon and 4pm-8pm. I then want to work on non-collaborative projects from 8pm until I feel like I've accomplished enough for the day. Sometimes that 4am.
It's not about proving that I'm doing work, it's more about knowing that it doesn't matter when and where I do my work. I will not be chained to a desk or schedule.
[+] [-] dcsilver|6 years ago|reply
Like many commenters that chime in on these procrastination threads, I am a chronic procrastinator, and feel like it’s really held me back in life. I was completely convinced of having undiagnosed adult ADHD for several years (didn’t want to go onto stims, though) - until Fiore’s book threw a spanner in the works and identified some reasonably serious unresolved psychological issues from my childhood - the source of the emotional response identified in this article. In my case it’s to do with putting impossibly high expectations on myself, but there are other common examples explored in the book. I was absolutely not expecting that and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s obvious in retrospect, and now I’ve correctly identified the thought patterns that sit just below the surface of conscious cognition I can catch myself in the act. It’s helped enormously.
[+] [-] jplayer01|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxxxxx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RickS|6 years ago|reply
And you get finished and have this moment of disbelief like... why on earth did I just torture myself for a week over this? For nothing..
[+] [-] wccrawford|6 years ago|reply
I've had other similar issues when working on our house in the last year, and they were all solved by finding the solution to something I didn't know how to do. Then I suddenly had the drive and energy to do it and knocked it out quickly.
[+] [-] jacobedawson|6 years ago|reply
He goes on to make the point that he use procrastination as a filter for his writing - if he feels strong resistance to writing a certain section he leaves it out as a service to his readers - why should they read something that he himself didn't particularly want to write? Instead of fighting procrastination as though it is an illness, maybe we should learn to understand it's utility:
"Psychologists and economists who study ‘irrationality’ do not realize that humans may have an instinct to procrastinate only when no life is in danger. I do not procrastinate when I see a lion in my bedroom or fire in my neighbor’s library. I do not procrastinate after a severe injury. I do so with unnatural duties and procedures."
[+] [-] nisa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|6 years ago|reply
For us, procrastination runs on a positive feedback loop - the pain you seek to avoid by delaying a task is increased the longer you avoid that task, locking you into a spiral of anxiety, out of which you usually break in two ways: either you flake on the task, or the "pain buffer" overflows and you find enough energy to complete it in a half-assed way. Rinse & repeat.
[+] [-] vborovikov|6 years ago|reply
1. Ovsiankina effect. The effect states that an interrupted task, even without incentive, values as a "quasi-need". It creates intrusive thoughts, aimed at taking up the task again. [1]
2. Structured procrastination. [2]
3. Concentrating on the steps to complete the task, not your feelings and emotions about completing it. Action vs. state orientation. [3][4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovsiankina_effect
[2] http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
[3] https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_1668041
[4] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jopy.12140
[+] [-] anonymfus|6 years ago|reply
Currently submission title is "Procrastination is not a time management problem. It is an emotion".
[+] [-] titanomachy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xt00|6 years ago|reply
1) think about something to look forward to regarding the particular task — for example maybe just simply writing the email saying that it’s done is the only thing I can look forward to, the current thing is super annoying to do, or the food I’ll eat afterward.
2) second thing I do is when I sense that I’m not going to make progress on the thing, I just stop working on the thing and schedule it for later.. trying to do something for hours and not actually doing it is actually fairly stressful and wastes a bunch of time and emotionally you feel annoyed about it as well. This sounds like procrastination but I mean within a context where I actually attempt to do the thing at each scheduled time rather than sit there and play on your phone on top of your math book while you are supposed to be studying. I just say welp math ain’t happening right now. Schedule for later when I’ll be mentally prepared.
I have definitely pretty much always thought procrastination is super emotional. Certain things you don’t want to do so you put it off. Once there is very little time left you know that you have forced yourself into a limited engagement on a thing you want to minimize your involvement with so you have made a reasonable decision to avoid dealing with something that could annoy you for an extended time.
[+] [-] chrshawkes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrP|6 years ago|reply
It sounds silly because it is. Just do it now.
[+] [-] beatgammit|6 years ago|reply
So there's always some element of prioritization, which means procrastinating on some things and not procrastinating on others. I think my trouble is properly prioritizing, and I'm sure that's similar for others as well.
[+] [-] hvidgaard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abhi3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pelagic_sky|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taneq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sridca|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m12k|6 years ago|reply
And now for the real kicker: I found that I always procrastinate the most in the beginning of a project, where everything is vague and there's not yet a list of nicely broken down tasks to execute. And that makes sense cf. the whole 'procrastination is emotional' perspective that the article talks about, because completing tasks gives you a dopamine kick as a reward, but with no easy tasks in sight at the start of a project, it just feels like wandering the desert. It feels unpleasant and unsatisfying to grapple with that vagueness and trying to fit that 'too large' problem into your head so it can be broken down into bite size tasks. So you put it off until guilt or panic about a looming deadline becomes bigger than the pain of doing the work - it's the classic 'put off homework until the day before it's due' from school.
A situation like this is where pomodoro technique really shines - I may not have small easy tasks to give me periodic dopamine kicks, but every 25 mins, I still get one for having completed a pomodoro without letting myself get distracted. And I even get to celebrate with a little break. Or to put this in other terms, at the beginning of a project, you cannot measure or reward results like you would prefer (because results are still a ways off - it takes too long to break down the initial vagueness, you don't even know what a result looks like or how hard it is to achieve yet), so you should measure and reward effort instead. And each pomodoro becomes a measure of effort that you can reward. It really does work for me - I often stop doing them later in the project, when I have a nice list of tasks to execute, and I don't do them at all for small easy projects. But whenever I realize that I dread some task or I begin to procrastinate, I pull out the pomodoros and soldier through that way.
[+] [-] linux_devil|6 years ago|reply
Whats wrong with a fersh-faced grad student trying to build a new feature if at all he/she is trying to do so?
[+] [-] christefano|6 years ago|reply
Fortunately it's in the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190522001001/https://cognition...
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|6 years ago|reply
https://samgentle.com/posts/2016-09-16-what-changes
follow up: https://samgentle.com/posts/2019-01-29-the-leverage-instinct
[+] [-] ivanhoe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thisisit|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17878716
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19482238
[+] [-] tyler109|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inlined|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] decasteve|6 years ago|reply