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.
> Returning from the holiday meant you had avoided your usual procrastination cues -couch, TV, phone, schedule.
I doubt this is it. Instead, I think that enough time without having to do the tasks that are being procrastinated reduces pressure and makes you less resistant to do them.
In a way, procrastination is your brain resisting continuous grind.
I like Terry Crews attitude:
“TREAT THE GYM LIKE A SPA.
Yes. It has to feel good. I tell people this a lot - go to the gym, and just sit there, and read a magazine, and then go home. And do this every day.
Go to the gym, don't even work out. Just GO. Because the habit of going to the gym is more important than the work out. Because it doesn't matter what you do. You can have fun - but as long as you're having fun, you continue to do it.”
I’m practicing the same - it’s mostly about the routine, habit, without aiming lofty goals. That’s probably why most of the side projects fail - overachieving and aiming perfection.
For the gym it's worked consistently for several years. The idea is that you build a habit in the brain so that you do it "because that's what you do". Similar to you brush your teeth when you do into the chrome in your pyjamas, you don't make a decision to do it.
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.
I've been through what you are talking about, but unfortunately I could not continue using those medications.
What worked for me was not forcing structures in the brain to function through chemicals but actually changing them through a breakthrough treatment called Neurofeedback. It is possible to physically and permanently alter the behavior of the brain and achieve far greater results than any drug could possibly do. Along with proper physical/mental training you can come out far ahead and still retain the "you" instead of some artificial version that may never go away.
The leading specialist in this field can be found on this website. You can find information about it here[1]. After significant research into the functioning of the brain. I realized that ADHD isn't a focusing problem. It's that the focus networks in your brain haven't been adequately trained and require the use of pharmaceuticals to temporarily induce this along with other negative side effects.
Hey thank you. I’ll look into it. I did have excellent results with simply reducing my baseline stimulation, thereby making normal things more interesting. I stopped watching TV and playing video games for almost six months, didn’t listen to the radio in the car, tried to have quiet as much as possible.
But it was also difficult because it was easy to slide back into old habits, and the ADHD would come back. For me it definitely seems to be a sensitization issue, the more generally stimulated I am the more difficult it is to do much of anything aside from the absolute most stimulating things.
I also have diminishing returns and consequences from the medications that enable me to be gainfully employed. I'm very interested in this.
The website wasn't super clear on what Neurofeedback was after a cursory glance. Here's the summary from wikipedia[1] for anyone that is curious.
> Neurofeedback (NFB), also called neurotherapy or neurobiofeedback, is a type of biofeedback that uses real-time displays of brain activity—most commonly electroencephalography (EEG)—in an attempt to teach self-regulation of brain function. Typically, sensors are placed on the scalp to measure electrical activity, with measurements displayed using video displays or sound.
Unfortunately it is difficult to understand without experience and "learning" it. It was completely different from what I expected, but I was going to try anything.
Basically by mounting a few EEG electrodes on your head it can measure 3 types of frequencies(Delta, Gamma and Alpha, although don't quote me on this). These frequencies relate to the "focus", "relaxation" and "cross-talk" functions of the brain that primarily are controlled by the Sensory-Motor Cortex. Most people who have trouble concentrating and functioning probably have difficulty in all these areas.
Once you are hooked up you are expected look at a screen and listen to some music(usually classical), and try to get your frequency responses below some baseline. Basically strengthening them like a muscle. You actually train yourself based on the feedback the sensors are giving you.
I managed to do some reverse engineering and figure out how the brain works to blow the numbers out of the water. Going from far below average to way above in a matter of months changed my life. I even figured out some things the center never tried before. Like significantly increasing the time I try to maintain the baseline, which allowed me get above average results. There was a lot more I figured out, but far to much for a HN post. Feel free to email for more info. I might make a post on it one day.
You don't have an email in your profile. I'm very interested in learning more. This sounds like something an enterprising hacker could set up in the comfort of his own home.
I updated my profile before the post with my email, not sure why you can't see it. I added in the description in case you still want to contact.
I also thought about doing this at home, but the risks are just too great to mess with something as deep as the Sensory-Motor function. I was happy to work with trained experts who monitor and correct problems. There is actually a lot to it, but the treatment is only a few months and you never really need think about it ever again. Since you can focus on doing things instead of endlessly trying improving brain function.
Why are you sleeping so much on weekends? The specific reason?
I really need to stop taking stimulants on weekends. Or at least one day a week too. I don’t know if being off them one day a week will help enough. A lot of the issues you cited are happening to me. And the problems you cited of what happens if you take them 7 days a week are happening to me as well.
I also feel trapped by them. I’ve been off them. But my work output drops steadily until I’m barely doing much. I believe if I stay off them long enough I’ll recover. But the two times I’ve tried i give up after 1-2 weeks as I want to get work done and go into a depressive spiral not doing enough.
Especially now being out of work and changing career paths I feel I can’t stop taking my relatively high or at least strong medium dosage.
I don’t want to be on my current dosage once I begin working for an employer. I’m really hoping I can delay work start date by a few weeks and go cold turkey then continue on a lower dosage. Like half.
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...
I have the exact same issues regarding starting tasks/hobbies and not being able to finish them. I've actually never, in my entire life, managed to stick to anything for longer than a week. Aside from school, but you're basically forced to go through it.
I've tried multiple times to get through college, but I could never study consistently or at any length of time without feeling exhausted after a couple of minutes, if not before even starting. People keep talking about getting started is the hardest part... No, not for me. I'm lucky if I can get through 20 minutes before I can't focus and need to do something else for an hour or two.
I've thought about ADHD before, but I'm just not sure. There are plenty of situations where I feel engaged enough to do a single task for a long time. I can read a book in one sitting. I can binge watch entire seasons of GoT (or any number of other series) back-to-back. So it feels like grasping for ADHD is just a cop out of actually learning how to study or how to adult and I feel like even more of a failure.
I will not deny that I am biased as I am pretty sure I am afflicted with ADHD and it fucked up parts of my life well and good. So, by all means, take it with a grain of salt and do your independent research.
That said:
>I've thought about ADHD before, but I'm just not sure. There are plenty of situations where I feel engaged enough to do a single task for a long time. I can read a book in one sitting. I can binge watch entire seasons of GoT (or any number of other series) back-to-back. So it feels like grasping for ADHD is just a cop out of actually learning how to study or how to adult and I feel like even more of a failure.
This again is not untypical, some call it "hyperfocus" which I hate because it sounds like a superpower while it probably just is what neurotypicals call "flow".
Do you get "in the zone" while doing your taxes? Or do you get into it while devouring information, researching things you find super interesting or in the initial phase of a new project? If it is the latter, it fits.
ADHD does not mean you are unable to concentrate at all - it means you have troubles concentrating on boring tasks, on extrinsical tasks, on yak-shaving problems. It still allows you to go super deep into some rabbit hole you find interesting in the moment.
If I were you, I'd research the symptoms and different presentations (https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html) and see how well they fit. If they fit, maybe head over to https://old.reddit.com/r/ADHD/ to read some personal perspective. The sub is not super high quality, and confirmation bias is an issue, but I felt it is a good resource to check how well I click with others from an ADHD background.
And if you still think that maybe there's more to it than being a failure, seek treatment. A bit of Adderall or Ritalin should give you a pretty good idea whether your functioning can be improved by meds. Exercise is extremely valuable as well.
>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!
A guy is standing on the beach and his clothes and hair are all ablaze. Another guy says to him, "dude go jump in the water, you're on fire!" To which he responds, "I know, just a minute tho, I gotta figure out where this damn fire came from."
It’s funny you mention praying! I’ve found that praying about accomplishing a task really helps me. I’m not a regular churchgoer, but praying definitely does something. I feel centered and like my mind becomes less scattered.
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.
Wow this struck a chord with me, because it's actually exactly how I feel. Finally when I DO decide to start working on the task, often just as midnight hits, I feel like all the buildup and stress gives me a wave of energy to just plow through it no matter what. But it's a horrible way to do things...
> Finally when I DO decide to start working on the task, often just as midnight hits, I feel like all the buildup and stress gives me a wave of energy to just plow through it no matter what.
This speaks to me more closely than I'd like. I've pulled off some admittedly productive all-nighters (where "productive" means that the results satisfied the recipients), but at great personal cost. For years, I've yearned to harness the mental state of procrastination-induced late nights of solitary work.
I'm not a professional, but it sounds like you're adding challenge or pressure to the task at hand to make it more exciting and gratifying.
Unfortunately, a lot of tasks / work are just boring and ungratifying, that's the harsh reality of e.g. software development. Going to e.g. HN and seeing how everyone else is doing something cooler is not helping in that regard.
For me exercise and internet reduction helps to a degree. Daily exercise (like 45min+ with some real sweating). For the weed: It fucks with my short-term memory and once I really understood that, it got boring. However I'm still smoking cigarettes, less so with weed - choose at least one or two shitty addictions is it for me it seems :/
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.
It’s true that this is consistent with ADHD, but it’s not nearly enough information to diagnose because it’s also a common experience to many people (really). ADHD is basically defined as the bottom of a bell curve in a number of areas (depending on how you look at it, executive functions or behaviors) that are normal to the human experience, just so extreme and frequent that they are impairing to functioning in life. It is a real disorder, but it’s challenging to understand and diagnose because it’s basically an extreme version of experiences and troubles that most people have. Books and lectures about procrastination are extremely popular for a reason. Procrastination, to some extent, on work and school projects is almost a universal experience. Apart from a few outliers, most people I know waited until the day or two before to work on on week or month long assignments.
Please be careful about telling strangers they may have a mental disorder — just like a false positive on a medical test, it can induce anxiety and cost a lot of money to investigate.
> Please be careful about telling strangers they may have a mental disorder — just like a false positive on a medical test, it can induce anxiety and cost a lot of money to investigate.
The flip side is that in some cases, such possibility can be relieving. For me, the idea of having undiagnosed ADHD (which I plan on verifying soon) means there may be a better solution to the problem available than endless talks about pomodoros, bullet journals and getting one's shit together. In general, given symptoms which aren't going to disappear on their own, it's probably universally better if it turns out to be a medically recognized condition, as it gives a way forward.
You can't really be diagnosed with symptom (although of course your money will be cheerfully taken to do just this).
Attention and focus and other related ADHD-type issues are bell curve.
It can feel good, for sure, to externalize our weakness and failings into one of these labels, like ADD. If that is helpful to get over the psychic weight of past failures, then that is helpful and useful.
Taking stimulants definitely helps most people with ability to work and focus, regardless of where they are on the attention-ability curve. There are also drawbacks and side-effects, at least I have observed.
It is pretty well understood that people with true ADD and ADHD have dopamine deficiency and issues with dopamine regulation and re-uptake in the brain. This has been highlighted in many studies. While I understand that there is an epidemic of over-diagnosis of ADHD, it does not make it any less of a legitimate medical condition in which the only treatment for it, is to increase the usable dopamine in the brain. One of the tell tail signs of ADD/HD is that the first time one with dopamine deficiency takes an amphetamine or one of it's derivatives, they realize that they are completely clear and it's like they come out of a fog in their brain, it's more profound than just the feeling of I can get stuff done. Again that alone is not effective as a single point to diagnose attention disorders but it is a strong indicator that there could be a dopamine deficiency.
TLDR it is a true disorder, it is over-diagnosed but that does not make it any less a chemical disorder of the brain.
Pomodoro and journals are part of ADHD treatment and that's OK. (There may be better behavioral therapies, like setting alarms and writing plans). The presence of a drug for a condition is not the same as the existence of a condition, and drugs are not always superior to behavior therapy. If you had low muscle mass, you wouldn't say "thank heavens it's a recognized condition that I can treat with steroid injections, so I can stop messing around with weightlifting!"
Pomodoro actually works quite OK for me. It doesn't solve the problem, but it's one of the more effective strategies to get some work done.
I'm not saying there are magic pills. But most articles about procrastination seem to target regular people, for whom this is not that big of a problem.
If you had low muscle mass, and weightlifting and diet didn't help, you'd sure be grateful if it turned out to be a recognized condition. Even if there was no effective remedy, you could at least tell the people saying "you're doing dieting/sports wrong" to shut up.
Human psychology is on a spectrum. Mental disorders are extremely common, as are minor physical disorders. We aren't ashamed of seeking remedies for high blood pressure or low muscle mass or high fat, all of which are extremely common physical disorders. We shouldn't be ashamed of seeking remedies for mental disorders either.
I agree with you that most of human psychology is on a spectrum and that there is no shame in having a mental disorder or in seeking treatment for it, so I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with me or adding more information. At the same time, I think we should be cautious about suggesting to someone that they have a particular mental disorder for a behavior that is common.
A psychiatrist or neurologist would want to know significantly more about the original commenter than "Procrastination is an addiction [for me]... I've been praised for my excellent work and rewarded with raises and bonuses, even though I often procrastinate until the very last minute" before deciding that they had ADHD. That experience exists well beyond the 5% of the population that has ADHD and in my opinion is not nearly close to sufficient in the DSM-5 to suggest ADHD, particularly as even extremely severe procrastination can explained by a number of other causes.
> Please be careful about telling strangers they may have a mental disorder — just like a false positive on a medical test, it can induce anxiety and cost a lot of money to investigate.
Thanks for someone telling me that I may have this problem, I felt relieved a lot. I am not a failure and some things that many people struggle with are harder for me.
Later I got a diagnosis (I, well, procrastinated for 2 years with seeking professional help), at 33. I wish I knew that 15 years earlier, it would impact some of my career choices, and very likely - stress would have caused less harm.
On the other hand, I went over 20 years with an undiagnosed condition because nobody ever suggested to me that I might in fact have a problem that isn't me just being lazy.
I had a study partner in intro to CS. I met him in Calc, which was much more of a weedout class than the CS class was. God the homework was boring. If we got the assignment done early, we’d spend an hour or so trying to make ours go fastest or take the largest input without crashing. It rubbed the wrong way that a fib(n) implementation that blew stack at n=50 was considered acceptable. So we gamified doing a better job.
As a grownup in a hurry to reach mastery, I kept that but reduced it to 20-30 minutes. Although these days I concentrate on robustness and readability. I tell junior programmers to do the same; finish the work and then ask yourself how you could make it better in 20 minutes. Nobody is going to notice that your day long task took an extra 20 and in six months the quality of what you turn in will be much higher as you start incorporating those ideas up front.
Oh yes. There was that one time in my life many years ago, that I completed a pretty complex piece of a project while carefully keeping myself within Ballmer Peak. I was severely burned out back then, and discovered that a single beer was enough to kick me out of high-anxiety state for a couple hours without impacting cognitive capacity too much (in fact, I recovered cognitive capacity as anxiety tends to make it difficult to think). This trick probably saved me a couple days worth of work. Fortunately, I later changed jobs and worked in much less stressful environment; with the burnout slowly subsiding, I didn't need to use it again (I tried it a couple of times off-work as a control measure, and I discovered that the effect most likely came from anxiety reduction).
--
[0] - https://www.xkcd.com/323/; the BAC values are probably made up and the peak doesn't feel as thin or high as drawn.
Sounds about right. Other methods along those lines, besides alcoholic beverages, would be sleep deprivation, loud active music, microdosing. These are all from the bag of just-the-right-amount-of-cognitive-impairment. This is ok bag. Fun bag.
There's also bag of make-it-hards, including time constraint, software astronauting, refactoritis. I hate this one. Not fun at all.
Of course, there's also bag of do-it-rights, like discussing how you feel with your stakeholders or partners, recognizing your NFC (need for cognition; handling it with, well, cognition or exercise, either will do), meditation (or just introspection). I love this one.
Out of the fun bag, sleep deprivation and loud active music work really well for me. They've been my main coping mechanisms for the past 15 or so years (loud music didn't feel cognitively impairing, though in retrospect I recognize it may have been - but it paid it back with interest in the elevated energy levels).
> There's also bag of make-it-hards, including time constraint
Or artificial commitments, aka. making it hurt to miss the deadline, usually by committing to pay someone money (there are services like Beeminder that handle this for you). I hate that one and it almost made me broke (it was around the same time I had to use the Ballmer Peak method to finally move forward). It works for some people, but it doesn't work for me; it only ends up triggering huge, debilitating anxiety attacks.
> also bag of do-it-rights, like discussing how you feel with your stakeholders or partners
AKA. career or social suicide. Nah, not risking that. There's too good a chance that your boss never had that problem, and way too likely your replacement won't have it either.
> recognizing your NFC (need for cognition; handling it with, well, cognition or exercise, either will do)
Could you elaborate on that one? Wrt. exercise, nah, I procrastinate too much on that :/.
> meditation (or just introspection)
I keep trying the insight meditation (vipassana) ever since I learned about it on HN & LessWrong close to a decade ago. It keeps not working :/.
> AKA. career or social suicide. Nah, not risking that. There's too good a chance that your boss never had that problem, and way too likely your replacement won't have it either.
Sure, this is definitely dependant on environment. You owe it to yourself to someday work in a place where they'll go: "Sure, go hack at whatever you want for a week, get it out of the system. We've all been there." But, to note, main effect of this (for me at least) is early acknowledgment of the situation in a safe environment and a timely manner. These things can spiral out of control and shaving of a day or two in its inital stage is very helpful. Additionally, I'm frequently surprised by responses of the type "What? We didn't even have those expectations you think we had. Why are you even worried?" Don't let your mind build illusory labyrinths.
> Could you elaborate on that one? Wrt. exercise, nah, I procrastinate too much on that :/.
It's pretty well outlined on wikipedia[1], and it's simple idea - some people have a literal need to do cognitively hard things, so piled up boring stuff will drain you in various ways. An alternative route, recently proposed[2], is to wear that out via physical exercise. That route is a bit at odds with my goals in life, but I guess there's some sort of healthy balance.
> I keep trying the insight meditation (vipassana) ever since I learned about it on HN & LessWrong close to a decade ago. It keeps not working :/.
I've never studied any formal approach to it so I keep it simple - whenever I feel "noise" (anxiety, neurosis, whatever), I sit (not any strange yogi poses or whatever, nor lying down, since I'd fall asleep) in a quiet place for 5-10 minutes, and try to tune everything out. I focus on breathing and heartbeat, as those are the only things you can't really tune out in a non-handwavey way. If you're in a noisy environment, headphones with some brown noise or similar help.
Also, I always welcome recommendations for "loud active cognitively-draining music". :) Just putting on King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard discography on album shuffle works really well for me last few months.
> early acknowledgment of the situation in a safe environment and a timely manner.
That could work. The problem is trust though - how do you know the environment is safe? Especially in employe-employer relations. I did worked in a receptive place once, and I regret not being slightly more open, telling about a few more of my personal quirks. Ultimately, we all hide stuff that are implementation details of the abstraction a "productive employee" is; the question is, how many of those details can leak before you start looking bad against candidates whose abstractions don't leak?
> Don't let your mind build illusory labyrinths.
Yeah, that's a good point. Seen that happen both in myself and in others.
> It's pretty well outlined on wikipedia
Oh, thanks. I didn't realize "need for cognition" is a proper name.
> Also, I always welcome recommendations for "loud active cognitively-draining music". :)
I don't have any particular recommendations; I tend to keep a collection of individual songs, not artists. I've also discovered that the most cognitively enhancing music for me is the one that "resonates" with my current mood - so if I feel sad, I listen to depressive stuff; if I feel energetic, I pick something powerful. In that latter case, quite often it's either Sabaton (or other power metal), or random Nightcore songs from YouTube, on a loop.
for music, I've tried lots of different genres and have settled on progressive house mixes as a good focusing background sound. It's complex enough to occupy me without any jarring changes or vocals that cause me to pay active attention to it. There's quite a few playlists on YouTube and I just run random ones each day, this is the one that's currently playing for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w23j_nspEy0
A better way is to slam it our under artificial deadline pressure in exchange for some reward.
But be aware that sometimes "it's too easy is an excuse for unconscientiousness inability to do work at the demanded level of precision. Often smart people have a problem where that write off their low abilities in some areas as a problem with the assignment instead of acknowledging that they lack a valuable aptitude like conscientious.
Boring doesn’t necessarily mean easy. It could mean mundane. If the outcome isn’t rewarding and the time and energy investment is high that can lead to stress. If you start narrating in your head about how unfair this is or what else you’d rather be doing then you are really sunk.
For people used to a certain intensity level, just sweeping a large enough floor could be thought of as a punishment. It’s straightforward and you can’t really speed it up much, which makes the act much harder to get through than it appears to be, creating dissonance.
I wait until 9am because I don't want to be part of a normative pressure to work all the time, especially when there are devs on the team who are junior to me and therefore might be more easily pressured.
I don't really work outside office hours much, but as a personal policy, when I do I don't commit or push (which triggers CI builds).
I don't want to build any expectation that I work outside the office, because I generally don't. I have my own things going on, and literally anything else takes priority over work outside work hours.
Not all of us have that luxury. Not everyone is on Git, and some employers have in-house version control that sends email notifications at the time of the commit.
Yes, one can always schedule it with a script, but the advice still stands (I'm very much like the OP in that regard).
Not all programming work is done in hipster web companies following software development trends; there's a lot of employers out there who bought into proprietary VC systems a decade or more ago, and stick with them because of a combination of business needs, legacy requirements and the principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
At one of my previous jobs we had to deal with a proprietary, combined version control and time reporting system that to us, developers, felt like utter garbage. Only later on I learned that it was used by our main customer because it facilitated workflows useful in a mid-to-large corp, and some of our pain points were in fact conflicts between "the developer way" and "the business at large way".
The word is used to describe companies which tend to be overrepresented in tech communities compared to industry baseline, not tools.
As for "industry-standard tools", I find it hard to use this term in our industry. There's a diverse range of practices and recommendations.
Git is popular in some subset of the industry (around web in particular), but I'm hesitant in calling it an industry-standard tool. I don't know if there are estimates around the size of it, but there's plenty of proprietary 'shadow' tooling and practices hiding under the surface.
You can do the same thing with author information as well... had some fun with a Junior developer the other day who I was showing something to, and I just modified my commit as thought it was from him.
Git records the committer as well as the author, so even though a simple 'git log' shows only the author (which you can set with 'git commit --author', which is very useful when you want to apply an external patch from somebody), you can show both the committer and the author with e.g. git log --format <something>. As you probably know, but in any case, many companies, and a number of open source projects do require signed commits.
You can also set the date of the commit, so the person who wanted his commits to be at 09:00 - just do 'git commit --date="2019-05-22 09:00:00". Of course git logs both the commit date and the author date, internally.
> Git records the committer as well as the author, so even though a simple 'git log' shows only the author (which you can set with 'git commit --author', which is very useful when you want to apply an external patch from somebody), you can show both the committer and the author with e.g. git log --format <something>.
It’s all just data. Even if git didn’t offer the ability to edit all of these
Anyway, even if git itself did not provide the tools to set this information on a per-commit basis you could still of course change your ~/.gitconfig and adjust your system clock time prior to committing. Or you could edit the commit data using a third-party tool that you yourself or someone else created. Like I said, it’s all just data.
Just because a file says something doesn’t mean that what it is saying is true, basically. Same goes for a piece of software.
And signing provides limited value as well, though useful to some. But for example you still wouldn’t know that the date information was correct even if the commit was signed.
Personally though I prefer to just commit things when I do them and push them immediately. And I don’t sign my commits but I would be willing to do so if there was any reason to — for example if it was the policy of a company I worked for that we do so.
Suppose someone checks some malicious code into the repo. Without signed commits it can be very difficult to determine or prove who was responsible. That ability to audit is important to most companies, and should be important to most popular open source projects as well.
The idea that most corporate dev teams, as they exist in the real world, are sophisticated enough to glean managerial and employee performance information from their code repositories is laughable.
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.
The pressure isn't internal, it comes from a boss pointing to one worker's schedule to get leverage over another. I think it's responsible to keep such ammunition out of the hands of bosses.
I agree, but a complete solution is often out of reach.
Also, many bosses aren't crazed gunmen, but they're still uncareful about how they communicate and wield their power. By being careful as a worker, you can reduce the accidental harm these bosses do.
> 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.
Not even the workplace I just don't want to have that conversation. Because - yes you finished that up at 3am and it's working and you are happy in the moment but you know well enough that the praise is also some expectation that you are always there at 3am when there is a problem. It's also - if raised in public a big fuck you to your colleagues - look this guy works deep at night - what are you doing? Well.. I just tried to solve that fucking problem, leave me alone and leave my colleages out of it.
As the lead developer here, I would be very against that except in an emergency.
We don't currently allow remote work, and I strongly discourage overtime for salaried employees. (We don't pay overtime, but even if we did, I'd discourage it still.)
If we did allow remote work, I know my bosses would be against 3am commits because they value being able to talk to the devs and ask questions and solve problems with immediate feedback. So they aren't going to like 3am commits either, because they'd mean that the dev wasn't available during normal hours.
So my answer would be: Workplaces that value collaboration and work-life balance.
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.
No blog. it's just essentially a work from home gig. I usually end up around the house most of the day, working for an hour or 2 and doing chores or going to the gym and lunch for 2 hours during the day, grabbing lunch with peers or friends. but i feel empowered to get stuff done when i can.
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..
I've gradually unlearned the anxiety-driven procrastination habits that I picked up in school but it's taken almost as long as the time I spent in the system:
* I now focus on developing my own feedback mechanisms rather than worry about assigned/external ones. If you have a large enough number of "required to succeed" and "instant fail if this occurs" signals, you can know roughly how well you are doing without anyone to guide you.
* I focus on work as a cycle, rather than tasks to be cleared out. The converse of the procrastinating is the idea that if you rush around enough, you will open up time for something else, something better, but what that something is, is a big ??? The cyclical approach keeps me more grounded in hammering out a few hours of work on a regular basis, which is more sustainable.
* I look for opportunities to use my "activated" levels of energy to chase after a thread of a problem. I often don't know how long anything takes, but what I do know is that I'm doing more if I periodically throw myself at the work and solve the things I can solve and use the rest to develop more feedback(if I failed: okay, why?) - and doing this cyclically makes it sustainable.
I still have periods where my work energy is low, but the causes are typically more obvious: stress is up, I found a new game that captured my attentiom, etc.
What solved procrastination for me (I described in more detail above) is to do the tiniest step. If that seems too large, do something tinier.
For example say I have a presentation to prep for. For whatever reason, I'm procrastinating - maybe because it's boring or in nervous about delivering it. So I do a small step, perhaps, open my laptop, create a presentation and the title slide. Then it's ok to do something else, but often I will find myself continuing.
(If that's intimidating the step could simply be to sit down and open the laptop.)
If I don't continue that's OK, I don't get frustrated, I take a break (something bounded like coffee, walk, get groceries - not start reading reddit...) then again do a tiny step, perhaps draft one more slide.
Again I often find myself continuing, one tiny step at a time. It's easy to commit to something they just takes 60 seconds. Again if I don't continue I take a little break and so on. Again when I take a break I don't judge myself.
This system has been a revelation for me and I no longer procrastinate until the point of stress. I have also found it helpful to deal with with lack of motivation due to depression. I don't feel able to empty the dishwasher, well I can at least do one cup.
Keys are
- establish a regular cue that already exists, either an existing habit or something else regular such as kids leaving for school
- do some tiny step
- if that's intimidating make it tinier. There is always tinier!
- if you find yourself continuing, go with it
- otherwise take a break, without judging yourself. Return immediately you feel ready to make a tiny step. Sooner is better than less tiny
I think that's what Larry Wall once described as his workflow. You get a problem, but you don't start working on it. Instead, you just procrastinate but slowly you'll think about the problem every now and then. You basically let it brew for some time, and at some point, the problem and solution will become clear.
(I could misremember who said this).
Contrast with the "Feynman approach" described by Gell-Mann:
Write down the problem, think real hard, write down the solution
A useful way to use this emotion is to imagine how you are going to feel in an hours time when you have just got on and done that thing and it's all over with.
It's a nice trick but for some people - like me - it doesn't work. The brain accepts the anticipated emotion on a conscious level, and then proceeds to ignore it.
(I have a fresh case of this just recently; I was procrastinating on a household chore for a week. I was fully aware that I'll feel great if I complete it, and I'll feel really bad if I keep on procrastinating. That awareness did nothing. It took a realization that my sidearm netbook is still powerful enough to play a TV show to motivate me to go and do the chore, under the guise that I can allow myself to watch the show then. 3 hours and 4 episodes later, a whole bunch of chores was done. And I kind of understand now why some people I know like playing TV shows when cooking or cleaning.)
TV is also good because it creates a simulation of human company that reduces social isolation anxiety and makes you feel better about being where you are.
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.
If you read the section of his book that was quoted, he makes it clear that he understands the argument that you're making, but he thinks it's wrong. He goes on to say:
Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one's profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one's impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.
I think he would say that if your environment (which is requiring you to do things you don't want to do) is creating the conditions for a positive feedback loop as you describe, then it's your environment which is "irrational" (as he says), not you.
The difference between his and mine viewpoints seem to be that Taleb thinks everything is fine with him/most procrastinators. I, on the other hand, believe my brain has buggy firmware and possibly even buggy hardware.
Since we don't have the specs of a "correct" human brain, the distinction between buggy brain and a problematic environment may be in some areas a matter of perspective, but when you have problems dealing with things that are part of our environment since before civilization, and when you see most other people dealing well with those things, you have to seriously consider the option that it's a wetware fault.
A "spec" for a human brain would have to include beliefs about questions of value, like "what is the point of human life?" Such a spec couldn't in principle be written because there is no objective basis for answers to these questions.
It sounds like you and Taleb hold different values. He thinks that living a life that involves following your own impulses is both valuable and "natural" (a suspect source of objective value IMO). You think that being able to fit into the existing environment is valuable. You might think Taleb is undisciplined and his philosophy could never be widely embraced. He might think you are just mindlessly following the orders of people who don't care about you. At the end of the day, it's up to you how you live.
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.
What you both describe sounds like a switch flipping in the brain. It's the holy grail of those struggling with procrastination - and the unsolved part is coercing the brain to flip that switch, to internalize that realization. I envy those who've done that by accident.
You're absolutely right, it's like a switch flipping in the brain.
Maybe a way to get there, or to try to explain it in a different way would be: You have to hate "having the item in your todo list" more than "doing the task".
I know I do. It's annoying to "carry" that todo item in my head all the time, with its danger of forgetting it, or the need to note it down somewhere, then remember to check the somewhere... So I know I'l feel liberated when I do it.
Yes, on the face of it this applies much better to "pay that bill" than to "write a book". But you'd be surprised. Soon you won't think of yourself as a procrastinator, you'll feel like someone who takes charge and does stuff. You know what people like that do, apart from the small stuff? The big stuff.
Did try that very early on (spoiler alert: it didn't work), and it's curious what mechanism my brain developed to neuter this trick.
One, in line with what GTD book teaches, writing down a task is very liberating experience - indeed, the act of writing a task down feels almost like doing it, so it drains the pressure to actually do it. Two, once the mental weight of a full todo list reaches a certain stage, I instinctively shy away from looking at it. The degree to which this happens subconsciously is probably worth a paper in a psychology journal; I'll instinctively stop opening my TODO files, my Org Agenda, and if I write the tasks down physically (e.g. on whiteboard), after a while my eyes will just gloss over it and essentially ignore its presence in the room.
To combat this, I started cycling through TODO stores - every other month or three I jump between .org files, bullet journal, issue tracker tickets, whiteboard, notebook, paper calendar, electronic calendar. The "freshness factor" seems to be working somewhat, but I still can sometimes go two days before realizing I have an organizer open on my desk with tasks already late.
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'm afraid I'm on undiagnosed adult ADHD, however it's difficult to get diagnosed here - expecially since I had no symptoms at a younger age - probably due to biking 3-5km to school every day and doing martial arts 2-3x a week - If I'm exercising regulary I'm procrastinating less after a few weeks - but as you can imagine I can't keep up the schedule...
I think the guilt itself exacerbates procrastination. Perversely, I only stopped procrastinating once I stopped beating myself up about it.
Now, I tell myself that some problems just need to marinate, or that I have some other need that I'm not addressing. I use procrastination as a signal that something else is wrong. It's been very helpful.
Instead of punishing yourself for not doing something, take a moment to appreciate yourself when you do something.
When I go to the gym, I used get annoyed at myself for not doing enough work. I didn't even go often enough in the first place. Now I say that any day I go is a good gym day, and I feel only good thoughts about going and exercising, and when I am not exercising I occasionally remember that if I do go I'll feel good, and that's motivating.
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.
A quick search would suggest that ADHD would call this a sign and procrastination can be a side effect in major (clinical) depression, bipolar disorder, monotropism, Aspergers spectrum disorders, and non-categorized issues with shame and low self-esteem (at least that one is covered in the article).
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.
You can say procrastination is the result of the core belief that one is not capable or will not perform the given task well, or once you do that thing, what will you have to worry about then?
I always wondered why the panic monster was so great at marshalling concentration, and so bad at defending against the wave of shame that comes once the task is complete and you wonder why you waited so long (again!!)
Panic monster is a tricky beast to use. In the early university years, looming deadlines could make me superproductive, though at an emotional cost. But after few years of using this, my mind became increasingly resistant, and now the deadline trick doesn't work anymore.
Regarding the panic monster, I noticed that the only music that can make me focus better than no music is ominous music. Specifically A.n.k.h. - I wouldn't listen to it for pleasure.
The latter rings true for me; I get a lot more done when I have a pile of stuff to do once I'm finished with the task at hand. If the task at hand is the only one left on my plate, I procrastinate, because what will I focus on after?
I like the list of things you can do to combat procrastination. It's all good to understand what drives it, but even better to know tactics that work to help you overcome it.
This is a good article, but is it not simply finding a more polite (and perhaps, for the sake of publishing, novel) way to say procrastination is caused by insufficient will?
"People procrastinate or avoid aversive tasks to improve their short-term mood at the cost of long-term goals."
This description is true, but is it not also true for virtually every case where you would typically use the term "willpower"?
It is a filter against rotting in chronic/toxic/boring things.
Too bad people are trying to kill this instinct and rape themselves instead of using it to their own benefit.
Is that really the only way you could think of to describe this? Sexual assault is a horrible thing to go through, and I can't imagine it's a lot of fun to happen upon the idea in unexpected places like this. You could easily just replace it with fuck.
Seems like an unpopular opinion, but I also think procrastination is actually beneficial in this sense.
It can sometimes eliminate or reduce recurrent tasks, IE procrastinate getting a haircut: fewer haircuts / year. Procrastinate cleaning or laundry: less total time spent since you can do more at once.
There's always a small chance the task will entirely disappear (business priorities shift). In those cases, procrastination can actually be helpful.
It's an unpopular opinion because it isn't true for many (if not most) procrastinators, for at least two reasons. One, we procrastinate on tasks that we can't eliminate and which value scales linearly with doing them. Two, the time spent agonizing over it and the emotional cost it incurs is much greater than the savings from doing a recurring task less frequently.
For me, I find procrastination to be the exact opposite. Say I have a big project I want to complete, and I know I'll feel happy, proud, and accomplished if I complete the project, but I get stuck or frustrated with some intermediate step. Then what I usually end up distracting me is chronic or boring things. I'll organize my email inbox, or watch a million YouTube videos I'm not all that into, etc.
Maybe yours. My body is as dumb as a rock. It resists "entrapment" in any and all useful activities, whether self-directed or assigned by others. It's a constant struggle against the cat-like instinct of "yeah, I'd love to do that... no, I'm not doing that".
Chronic procrastinator here: I can partially agree - sometimes, in some situations. But having two dozens of dangling 30-70% projects lingering around is toxic to self-esteem and social interaction too. Hell, I've developing a growing anxiety going to a community meetup at the local hackspace that's more like a pub because I'm way behind some small projects that effect others because I'm into other small projects :/
To begin with, most people, entering the adulthood, are already mentally destroyed by 15 years of unnatural pseudo-competitive prisons full of long term pain and mostly delusional gain. Most of natural filters are pretty off by then.
>when people believe that their bad mood is unchangeable, they do not engage in frivolous procrastination or acting on other impulses to engage in other activities
This is so simple, but also so enlightening.
Unfortunately for me, it means removing most of the instant gratification from my life, such as video games, social media (incl. HN), etc.
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.
> Returning from the holiday meant you had avoided your usual procrastination cues -couch, TV, phone, schedule.
I doubt this is it. Instead, I think that enough time without having to do the tasks that are being procrastinated reduces pressure and makes you less resistant to do them.
In a way, procrastination is your brain resisting continuous grind.
I like Terry Crews attitude: “TREAT THE GYM LIKE A SPA.
Yes. It has to feel good. I tell people this a lot - go to the gym, and just sit there, and read a magazine, and then go home. And do this every day.
Go to the gym, don't even work out. Just GO. Because the habit of going to the gym is more important than the work out. Because it doesn't matter what you do. You can have fun - but as long as you're having fun, you continue to do it.”
I’m practicing the same - it’s mostly about the routine, habit, without aiming lofty goals. That’s probably why most of the side projects fail - overachieving and aiming perfection.
why do we need habit if its already fun. Is fun not really motivation enough?
You are a mad genius. I'll think about your technique, thanks.
> The formula is regular cue + micro progression to build a habit.
Has this worked for you on long term basis. What is stopping me for ignoring that cue and just chilling.
For the gym it's worked consistently for several years. The idea is that you build a habit in the brain so that you do it "because that's what you do". Similar to you brush your teeth when you do into the chrome in your pyjamas, you don't make a decision to do it.
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.
I've been through what you are talking about, but unfortunately I could not continue using those medications.
What worked for me was not forcing structures in the brain to function through chemicals but actually changing them through a breakthrough treatment called Neurofeedback. It is possible to physically and permanently alter the behavior of the brain and achieve far greater results than any drug could possibly do. Along with proper physical/mental training you can come out far ahead and still retain the "you" instead of some artificial version that may never go away.
The leading specialist in this field can be found on this website. You can find information about it here[1]. After significant research into the functioning of the brain. I realized that ADHD isn't a focusing problem. It's that the focus networks in your brain haven't been adequately trained and require the use of pharmaceuticals to temporarily induce this along with other negative side effects.
[1] http://addcentre.com/
Hey thank you. I’ll look into it. I did have excellent results with simply reducing my baseline stimulation, thereby making normal things more interesting. I stopped watching TV and playing video games for almost six months, didn’t listen to the radio in the car, tried to have quiet as much as possible.
But it was also difficult because it was easy to slide back into old habits, and the ADHD would come back. For me it definitely seems to be a sensitization issue, the more generally stimulated I am the more difficult it is to do much of anything aside from the absolute most stimulating things.
I also have diminishing returns and consequences from the medications that enable me to be gainfully employed. I'm very interested in this.
The website wasn't super clear on what Neurofeedback was after a cursory glance. Here's the summary from wikipedia[1] for anyone that is curious.
> Neurofeedback (NFB), also called neurotherapy or neurobiofeedback, is a type of biofeedback that uses real-time displays of brain activity—most commonly electroencephalography (EEG)—in an attempt to teach self-regulation of brain function. Typically, sensors are placed on the scalp to measure electrical activity, with measurements displayed using video displays or sound.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurofeedback
Unfortunately it is difficult to understand without experience and "learning" it. It was completely different from what I expected, but I was going to try anything. Basically by mounting a few EEG electrodes on your head it can measure 3 types of frequencies(Delta, Gamma and Alpha, although don't quote me on this). These frequencies relate to the "focus", "relaxation" and "cross-talk" functions of the brain that primarily are controlled by the Sensory-Motor Cortex. Most people who have trouble concentrating and functioning probably have difficulty in all these areas.
Once you are hooked up you are expected look at a screen and listen to some music(usually classical), and try to get your frequency responses below some baseline. Basically strengthening them like a muscle. You actually train yourself based on the feedback the sensors are giving you.
I managed to do some reverse engineering and figure out how the brain works to blow the numbers out of the water. Going from far below average to way above in a matter of months changed my life. I even figured out some things the center never tried before. Like significantly increasing the time I try to maintain the baseline, which allowed me get above average results. There was a lot more I figured out, but far to much for a HN post. Feel free to email for more info. I might make a post on it one day.
You don't have an email in your profile. I'm very interested in learning more. This sounds like something an enterprising hacker could set up in the comfort of his own home.
I updated my profile before the post with my email, not sure why you can't see it. I added in the description in case you still want to contact.
I also thought about doing this at home, but the risks are just too great to mess with something as deep as the Sensory-Motor function. I was happy to work with trained experts who monitor and correct problems. There is actually a lot to it, but the treatment is only a few months and you never really need think about it ever again. Since you can focus on doing things instead of endlessly trying improving brain function.
Why are you sleeping so much on weekends? The specific reason?
I really need to stop taking stimulants on weekends. Or at least one day a week too. I don’t know if being off them one day a week will help enough. A lot of the issues you cited are happening to me. And the problems you cited of what happens if you take them 7 days a week are happening to me as well.
I also feel trapped by them. I’ve been off them. But my work output drops steadily until I’m barely doing much. I believe if I stay off them long enough I’ll recover. But the two times I’ve tried i give up after 1-2 weeks as I want to get work done and go into a depressive spiral not doing enough.
Especially now being out of work and changing career paths I feel I can’t stop taking my relatively high or at least strong medium dosage.
I don’t want to be on my current dosage once I begin working for an employer. I’m really hoping I can delay work start date by a few weeks and go cold turkey then continue on a lower dosage. Like half.
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...
I have the exact same issues regarding starting tasks/hobbies and not being able to finish them. I've actually never, in my entire life, managed to stick to anything for longer than a week. Aside from school, but you're basically forced to go through it.
I've tried multiple times to get through college, but I could never study consistently or at any length of time without feeling exhausted after a couple of minutes, if not before even starting. People keep talking about getting started is the hardest part... No, not for me. I'm lucky if I can get through 20 minutes before I can't focus and need to do something else for an hour or two.
I've thought about ADHD before, but I'm just not sure. There are plenty of situations where I feel engaged enough to do a single task for a long time. I can read a book in one sitting. I can binge watch entire seasons of GoT (or any number of other series) back-to-back. So it feels like grasping for ADHD is just a cop out of actually learning how to study or how to adult and I feel like even more of a failure.
I will not deny that I am biased as I am pretty sure I am afflicted with ADHD and it fucked up parts of my life well and good. So, by all means, take it with a grain of salt and do your independent research.
That said:
>I've thought about ADHD before, but I'm just not sure. There are plenty of situations where I feel engaged enough to do a single task for a long time. I can read a book in one sitting. I can binge watch entire seasons of GoT (or any number of other series) back-to-back. So it feels like grasping for ADHD is just a cop out of actually learning how to study or how to adult and I feel like even more of a failure.
This again is not untypical, some call it "hyperfocus" which I hate because it sounds like a superpower while it probably just is what neurotypicals call "flow".
Do you get "in the zone" while doing your taxes? Or do you get into it while devouring information, researching things you find super interesting or in the initial phase of a new project? If it is the latter, it fits.
ADHD does not mean you are unable to concentrate at all - it means you have troubles concentrating on boring tasks, on extrinsical tasks, on yak-shaving problems. It still allows you to go super deep into some rabbit hole you find interesting in the moment.
If I were you, I'd research the symptoms and different presentations (https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html) and see how well they fit. If they fit, maybe head over to https://old.reddit.com/r/ADHD/ to read some personal perspective. The sub is not super high quality, and confirmation bias is an issue, but I felt it is a good resource to check how well I click with others from an ADHD background.
And if you still think that maybe there's more to it than being a failure, seek treatment. A bit of Adderall or Ritalin should give you a pretty good idea whether your functioning can be improved by meds. Exercise is extremely valuable as well.
Good luck (and no, you are not a failure :)
>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
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/14/kierkegaard-boredom...
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!
There are two classic jokes about praying for help:
https://truthbook.com/stories/funny-god/the-drowning-man
http://jokes.cc.com/funny-god/1gkcpp/the-lottery-ticket
Here's a similar story:
A guy is standing on the beach and his clothes and hair are all ablaze. Another guy says to him, "dude go jump in the water, you're on fire!" To which he responds, "I know, just a minute tho, I gotta figure out where this damn fire came from."
It’s funny you mention praying! I’ve found that praying about accomplishing a task really helps me. I’m not a regular churchgoer, but praying definitely does something. I feel centered and like my mind becomes less scattered.
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.
Wow this struck a chord with me, because it's actually exactly how I feel. Finally when I DO decide to start working on the task, often just as midnight hits, I feel like all the buildup and stress gives me a wave of energy to just plow through it no matter what. But it's a horrible way to do things...
> Finally when I DO decide to start working on the task, often just as midnight hits, I feel like all the buildup and stress gives me a wave of energy to just plow through it no matter what.
This speaks to me more closely than I'd like. I've pulled off some admittedly productive all-nighters (where "productive" means that the results satisfied the recipients), but at great personal cost. For years, I've yearned to harness the mental state of procrastination-induced late nights of solitary work.
I'm not a professional, but it sounds like you're adding challenge or pressure to the task at hand to make it more exciting and gratifying.
Unfortunately, a lot of tasks / work are just boring and ungratifying, that's the harsh reality of e.g. software development. Going to e.g. HN and seeing how everyone else is doing something cooler is not helping in that regard.
wow nice way to put it in words... any tips on fixing this? I am have a little addiction to weed aswelll...
For me exercise and internet reduction helps to a degree. Daily exercise (like 45min+ with some real sweating). For the weed: It fucks with my short-term memory and once I really understood that, it got boring. However I'm still smoking cigarettes, less so with weed - choose at least one or two shitty addictions is it for me it seems :/
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.
It’s true that this is consistent with ADHD, but it’s not nearly enough information to diagnose because it’s also a common experience to many people (really). ADHD is basically defined as the bottom of a bell curve in a number of areas (depending on how you look at it, executive functions or behaviors) that are normal to the human experience, just so extreme and frequent that they are impairing to functioning in life. It is a real disorder, but it’s challenging to understand and diagnose because it’s basically an extreme version of experiences and troubles that most people have. Books and lectures about procrastination are extremely popular for a reason. Procrastination, to some extent, on work and school projects is almost a universal experience. Apart from a few outliers, most people I know waited until the day or two before to work on on week or month long assignments.
Please be careful about telling strangers they may have a mental disorder — just like a false positive on a medical test, it can induce anxiety and cost a lot of money to investigate.
> Please be careful about telling strangers they may have a mental disorder — just like a false positive on a medical test, it can induce anxiety and cost a lot of money to investigate.
The flip side is that in some cases, such possibility can be relieving. For me, the idea of having undiagnosed ADHD (which I plan on verifying soon) means there may be a better solution to the problem available than endless talks about pomodoros, bullet journals and getting one's shit together. In general, given symptoms which aren't going to disappear on their own, it's probably universally better if it turns out to be a medically recognized condition, as it gives a way forward.
ADHD is a label, not a disease.
You can't really be diagnosed with symptom (although of course your money will be cheerfully taken to do just this).
Attention and focus and other related ADHD-type issues are bell curve.
It can feel good, for sure, to externalize our weakness and failings into one of these labels, like ADD. If that is helpful to get over the psychic weight of past failures, then that is helpful and useful.
Taking stimulants definitely helps most people with ability to work and focus, regardless of where they are on the attention-ability curve. There are also drawbacks and side-effects, at least I have observed.
It is pretty well understood that people with true ADD and ADHD have dopamine deficiency and issues with dopamine regulation and re-uptake in the brain. This has been highlighted in many studies. While I understand that there is an epidemic of over-diagnosis of ADHD, it does not make it any less of a legitimate medical condition in which the only treatment for it, is to increase the usable dopamine in the brain. One of the tell tail signs of ADD/HD is that the first time one with dopamine deficiency takes an amphetamine or one of it's derivatives, they realize that they are completely clear and it's like they come out of a fog in their brain, it's more profound than just the feeling of I can get stuff done. Again that alone is not effective as a single point to diagnose attention disorders but it is a strong indicator that there could be a dopamine deficiency.
TLDR it is a true disorder, it is over-diagnosed but that does not make it any less a chemical disorder of the brain.
Pomodoro and journals are part of ADHD treatment and that's OK. (There may be better behavioral therapies, like setting alarms and writing plans). The presence of a drug for a condition is not the same as the existence of a condition, and drugs are not always superior to behavior therapy. If you had low muscle mass, you wouldn't say "thank heavens it's a recognized condition that I can treat with steroid injections, so I can stop messing around with weightlifting!"
Pomodoro actually works quite OK for me. It doesn't solve the problem, but it's one of the more effective strategies to get some work done.
I'm not saying there are magic pills. But most articles about procrastination seem to target regular people, for whom this is not that big of a problem.
If you had low muscle mass, and weightlifting and diet didn't help, you'd sure be grateful if it turned out to be a recognized condition. Even if there was no effective remedy, you could at least tell the people saying "you're doing dieting/sports wrong" to shut up.
Human psychology is on a spectrum. Mental disorders are extremely common, as are minor physical disorders. We aren't ashamed of seeking remedies for high blood pressure or low muscle mass or high fat, all of which are extremely common physical disorders. We shouldn't be ashamed of seeking remedies for mental disorders either.
I agree with you that most of human psychology is on a spectrum and that there is no shame in having a mental disorder or in seeking treatment for it, so I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with me or adding more information. At the same time, I think we should be cautious about suggesting to someone that they have a particular mental disorder for a behavior that is common.
A psychiatrist or neurologist would want to know significantly more about the original commenter than "Procrastination is an addiction [for me]... I've been praised for my excellent work and rewarded with raises and bonuses, even though I often procrastinate until the very last minute" before deciding that they had ADHD. That experience exists well beyond the 5% of the population that has ADHD and in my opinion is not nearly close to sufficient in the DSM-5 to suggest ADHD, particularly as even extremely severe procrastination can explained by a number of other causes.
> Please be careful about telling strangers they may have a mental disorder — just like a false positive on a medical test, it can induce anxiety and cost a lot of money to investigate.
Thanks for someone telling me that I may have this problem, I felt relieved a lot. I am not a failure and some things that many people struggle with are harder for me.
Later I got a diagnosis (I, well, procrastinated for 2 years with seeking professional help), at 33. I wish I knew that 15 years earlier, it would impact some of my career choices, and very likely - stress would have caused less harm.
On the other hand, I went over 20 years with an undiagnosed condition because nobody ever suggested to me that I might in fact have a problem that isn't me just being lazy.
Sounds a lot like my experience getting diagnosed, but with miserably failing out of university, twice.
Did you do anything about it?
Not to mention that the pressure/anxiety of being late actually makes you able to focus on the task at hand.
One source of the procrastination is that the assignment is boring and the only way you can feel alive is to slam it out under pressure.
There are other coping mechanisms you can use, although some of them are arguably worse than procrastination (eg overengineering).
I had a study partner in intro to CS. I met him in Calc, which was much more of a weedout class than the CS class was. God the homework was boring. If we got the assignment done early, we’d spend an hour or so trying to make ours go fastest or take the largest input without crashing. It rubbed the wrong way that a fib(n) implementation that blew stack at n=50 was considered acceptable. So we gamified doing a better job.
As a grownup in a hurry to reach mastery, I kept that but reduced it to 20-30 minutes. Although these days I concentrate on robustness and readability. I tell junior programmers to do the same; finish the work and then ask yourself how you could make it better in 20 minutes. Nobody is going to notice that your day long task took an extra 20 and in six months the quality of what you turn in will be much higher as you start incorporating those ideas up front.
>some of them are arguably worse than procrastination (eg overengineering).
Drinking.
Oh yes. There was that one time in my life many years ago, that I completed a pretty complex piece of a project while carefully keeping myself within Ballmer Peak. I was severely burned out back then, and discovered that a single beer was enough to kick me out of high-anxiety state for a couple hours without impacting cognitive capacity too much (in fact, I recovered cognitive capacity as anxiety tends to make it difficult to think). This trick probably saved me a couple days worth of work. Fortunately, I later changed jobs and worked in much less stressful environment; with the burnout slowly subsiding, I didn't need to use it again (I tried it a couple of times off-work as a control measure, and I discovered that the effect most likely came from anxiety reduction).
--
[0] - https://www.xkcd.com/323/; the BAC values are probably made up and the peak doesn't feel as thin or high as drawn.
Sounds about right. Other methods along those lines, besides alcoholic beverages, would be sleep deprivation, loud active music, microdosing. These are all from the bag of just-the-right-amount-of-cognitive-impairment. This is ok bag. Fun bag.
There's also bag of make-it-hards, including time constraint, software astronauting, refactoritis. I hate this one. Not fun at all.
Of course, there's also bag of do-it-rights, like discussing how you feel with your stakeholders or partners, recognizing your NFC (need for cognition; handling it with, well, cognition or exercise, either will do), meditation (or just introspection). I love this one.
Out of the fun bag, sleep deprivation and loud active music work really well for me. They've been my main coping mechanisms for the past 15 or so years (loud music didn't feel cognitively impairing, though in retrospect I recognize it may have been - but it paid it back with interest in the elevated energy levels).
> There's also bag of make-it-hards, including time constraint
Or artificial commitments, aka. making it hurt to miss the deadline, usually by committing to pay someone money (there are services like Beeminder that handle this for you). I hate that one and it almost made me broke (it was around the same time I had to use the Ballmer Peak method to finally move forward). It works for some people, but it doesn't work for me; it only ends up triggering huge, debilitating anxiety attacks.
> also bag of do-it-rights, like discussing how you feel with your stakeholders or partners
AKA. career or social suicide. Nah, not risking that. There's too good a chance that your boss never had that problem, and way too likely your replacement won't have it either.
> recognizing your NFC (need for cognition; handling it with, well, cognition or exercise, either will do)
Could you elaborate on that one? Wrt. exercise, nah, I procrastinate too much on that :/.
> meditation (or just introspection)
I keep trying the insight meditation (vipassana) ever since I learned about it on HN & LessWrong close to a decade ago. It keeps not working :/.
> AKA. career or social suicide. Nah, not risking that. There's too good a chance that your boss never had that problem, and way too likely your replacement won't have it either.
Sure, this is definitely dependant on environment. You owe it to yourself to someday work in a place where they'll go: "Sure, go hack at whatever you want for a week, get it out of the system. We've all been there." But, to note, main effect of this (for me at least) is early acknowledgment of the situation in a safe environment and a timely manner. These things can spiral out of control and shaving of a day or two in its inital stage is very helpful. Additionally, I'm frequently surprised by responses of the type "What? We didn't even have those expectations you think we had. Why are you even worried?" Don't let your mind build illusory labyrinths.
> Could you elaborate on that one? Wrt. exercise, nah, I procrastinate too much on that :/.
It's pretty well outlined on wikipedia[1], and it's simple idea - some people have a literal need to do cognitively hard things, so piled up boring stuff will drain you in various ways. An alternative route, recently proposed[2], is to wear that out via physical exercise. That route is a bit at odds with my goals in life, but I guess there's some sort of healthy balance.
> I keep trying the insight meditation (vipassana) ever since I learned about it on HN & LessWrong close to a decade ago. It keeps not working :/.
I've never studied any formal approach to it so I keep it simple - whenever I feel "noise" (anxiety, neurosis, whatever), I sit (not any strange yogi poses or whatever, nor lying down, since I'd fall asleep) in a quiet place for 5-10 minutes, and try to tune everything out. I focus on breathing and heartbeat, as those are the only things you can't really tune out in a non-handwavey way. If you're in a noisy environment, headphones with some brown noise or similar help.
Also, I always welcome recommendations for "loud active cognitively-draining music". :) Just putting on King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard discography on album shuffle works really well for me last few months.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19606141
EDIT: Oh, I forgot one more for the fun bag - fasting.
> early acknowledgment of the situation in a safe environment and a timely manner.
That could work. The problem is trust though - how do you know the environment is safe? Especially in employe-employer relations. I did worked in a receptive place once, and I regret not being slightly more open, telling about a few more of my personal quirks. Ultimately, we all hide stuff that are implementation details of the abstraction a "productive employee" is; the question is, how many of those details can leak before you start looking bad against candidates whose abstractions don't leak?
> Don't let your mind build illusory labyrinths.
Yeah, that's a good point. Seen that happen both in myself and in others.
> It's pretty well outlined on wikipedia
Oh, thanks. I didn't realize "need for cognition" is a proper name.
> Also, I always welcome recommendations for "loud active cognitively-draining music". :)
I don't have any particular recommendations; I tend to keep a collection of individual songs, not artists. I've also discovered that the most cognitively enhancing music for me is the one that "resonates" with my current mood - so if I feel sad, I listen to depressive stuff; if I feel energetic, I pick something powerful. In that latter case, quite often it's either Sabaton (or other power metal), or random Nightcore songs from YouTube, on a loop.
for music, I've tried lots of different genres and have settled on progressive house mixes as a good focusing background sound. It's complex enough to occupy me without any jarring changes or vocals that cause me to pay active attention to it. There's quite a few playlists on YouTube and I just run random ones each day, this is the one that's currently playing for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w23j_nspEy0
A better way is to slam it our under artificial deadline pressure in exchange for some reward.
But be aware that sometimes "it's too easy is an excuse for unconscientiousness inability to do work at the demanded level of precision. Often smart people have a problem where that write off their low abilities in some areas as a problem with the assignment instead of acknowledging that they lack a valuable aptitude like conscientious.
Boring doesn’t necessarily mean easy. It could mean mundane. If the outcome isn’t rewarding and the time and energy investment is high that can lead to stress. If you start narrating in your head about how unfair this is or what else you’d rather be doing then you are really sunk.
For people used to a certain intensity level, just sweeping a large enough floor could be thought of as a punishment. It’s straightforward and you can’t really speed it up much, which makes the act much harder to get through than it appears to be, creating dissonance.
I don't wait until 9am because my co-workers and my managers accept me the way I am. And I think that's how it should be.
Ultimately, you create value to the company by getting stuff done, not by trying to fit in.
I wait until 9am because I don't want to be part of a normative pressure to work all the time, especially when there are devs on the team who are junior to me and therefore might be more easily pressured.
Yep, somewhere along the way freedom of (or from) a schedule got butchered into the war on sleep.
I don't really work outside office hours much, but as a personal policy, when I do I don't commit or push (which triggers CI builds).
I don't want to build any expectation that I work outside the office, because I generally don't. I have my own things going on, and literally anything else takes priority over work outside work hours.
You might be interested to know that you can set the date of a commit arbitrarily: https://codewithhugo.com/change-the-date-of-a-git-commit/
Not all of us have that luxury. Not everyone is on Git, and some employers have in-house version control that sends email notifications at the time of the commit.
Yes, one can always schedule it with a script, but the advice still stands (I'm very much like the OP in that regard).
> some employers have in-house version control
Why would anybody do that ?
Not all programming work is done in hipster web companies following software development trends; there's a lot of employers out there who bought into proprietary VC systems a decade or more ago, and stick with them because of a combination of business needs, legacy requirements and the principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
At one of my previous jobs we had to deal with a proprietary, combined version control and time reporting system that to us, developers, felt like utter garbage. Only later on I learned that it was used by our main customer because it facilitated workflows useful in a mid-to-large corp, and some of our pain points were in fact conflicts between "the developer way" and "the business at large way".
Why are you using the word "hipster" to describe industry-standard best-of-breed best-practice tools?
The word is used to describe companies which tend to be overrepresented in tech communities compared to industry baseline, not tools.
As for "industry-standard tools", I find it hard to use this term in our industry. There's a diverse range of practices and recommendations.
Git is popular in some subset of the industry (around web in particular), but I'm hesitant in calling it an industry-standard tool. I don't know if there are estimates around the size of it, but there's plenty of proprietary 'shadow' tooling and practices hiding under the surface.
>Why would anybody do that ?
Because they have good reasons to?[1][2][3] There really is more to version control than Git.
[1]https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...
[2]https://www.perforce.com/9-10-top-semiconductor-companies-us...
[3]https://code.fb.com/core-data/scaling-mercurial-at-facebook/
You can do the same thing with author information as well... had some fun with a Junior developer the other day who I was showing something to, and I just modified my commit as thought it was from him.
This is why companies should really be requiring GPG-signed commits.
Git records the committer as well as the author, so even though a simple 'git log' shows only the author (which you can set with 'git commit --author', which is very useful when you want to apply an external patch from somebody), you can show both the committer and the author with e.g. git log --format <something>. As you probably know, but in any case, many companies, and a number of open source projects do require signed commits. You can also set the date of the commit, so the person who wanted his commits to be at 09:00 - just do 'git commit --date="2019-05-22 09:00:00". Of course git logs both the commit date and the author date, internally.
> Git records the committer as well as the author, so even though a simple 'git log' shows only the author (which you can set with 'git commit --author', which is very useful when you want to apply an external patch from somebody), you can show both the committer and the author with e.g. git log --format <something>.
It’s all just data. Even if git didn’t offer the ability to edit all of these
- Author
- Committer
- Author date
- Commit date
Which by the way it does allow of course, as it should. See for example git commit-tree. https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit-tree
Anyway, even if git itself did not provide the tools to set this information on a per-commit basis you could still of course change your ~/.gitconfig and adjust your system clock time prior to committing. Or you could edit the commit data using a third-party tool that you yourself or someone else created. Like I said, it’s all just data.
Just because a file says something doesn’t mean that what it is saying is true, basically. Same goes for a piece of software.
And signing provides limited value as well, though useful to some. But for example you still wouldn’t know that the date information was correct even if the commit was signed.
Personally though I prefer to just commit things when I do them and push them immediately. And I don’t sign my commits but I would be willing to do so if there was any reason to — for example if it was the policy of a company I worked for that we do so.
Suppose someone checks some malicious code into the repo. Without signed commits it can be very difficult to determine or prove who was responsible. That ability to audit is important to most companies, and should be important to most popular open source projects as well.
The idea that most corporate dev teams, as they exist in the real world, are sophisticated enough to glean managerial and employee performance information from their code repositories is laughable.
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.
The pressure isn't internal, it comes from a boss pointing to one worker's schedule to get leverage over another. I think it's responsible to keep such ammunition out of the hands of bosses.
If you have a crazed gunman for a boss, keeping one particular type of bullet away from them is an incomplete solution to the problem.
I agree, but a complete solution is often out of reach.
Also, many bosses aren't crazed gunmen, but they're still uncareful about how they communicate and wield their power. By being careful as a worker, you can reduce the accidental harm these bosses do.
Haha, I have used an Android app to schedule a text message to call in sick to work at 7AM instead of 3.
> 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.
> Tip: to make your git logs look socially acceptable to co-workers and management, don't commit at 3AM Monday morning, wait until 9AM.
You mean commit locally any time, and then squash your commits into one big one with a socially acceptable timestamp before you push?
What kind of work place would be against 3am commits?
“look how dedicated Johnny is. He was working at 3am!”
Not even the workplace I just don't want to have that conversation. Because - yes you finished that up at 3am and it's working and you are happy in the moment but you know well enough that the praise is also some expectation that you are always there at 3am when there is a problem. It's also - if raised in public a big fuck you to your colleagues - look this guy works deep at night - what are you doing? Well.. I just tried to solve that fucking problem, leave me alone and leave my colleages out of it.
As the lead developer here, I would be very against that except in an emergency.
We don't currently allow remote work, and I strongly discourage overtime for salaried employees. (We don't pay overtime, but even if we did, I'd discourage it still.)
If we did allow remote work, I know my bosses would be against 3am commits because they value being able to talk to the devs and ask questions and solve problems with immediate feedback. So they aren't going to like 3am commits either, because they'd mean that the dev wasn't available during normal hours.
So my answer would be: Workplaces that value collaboration and work-life balance.
I've been thinking about your tip a lot lately.
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'm genuinely interested to see how this goes, do you have a blog?
No blog. it's just essentially a work from home gig. I usually end up around the house most of the day, working for an hour or 2 and doing chores or going to the gym and lunch for 2 hours during the day, grabbing lunch with peers or friends. but i feel empowered to get stuff done when i can.
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.
So have you largely managed to "fix" your chronic procrastination or is it something you still deal with on a day-to-day basis?
I still deal with it, but being aware of how it works has made it a lot easier.
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..
I've gradually unlearned the anxiety-driven procrastination habits that I picked up in school but it's taken almost as long as the time I spent in the system:
* I now focus on developing my own feedback mechanisms rather than worry about assigned/external ones. If you have a large enough number of "required to succeed" and "instant fail if this occurs" signals, you can know roughly how well you are doing without anyone to guide you.
* I focus on work as a cycle, rather than tasks to be cleared out. The converse of the procrastinating is the idea that if you rush around enough, you will open up time for something else, something better, but what that something is, is a big ??? The cyclical approach keeps me more grounded in hammering out a few hours of work on a regular basis, which is more sustainable.
* I look for opportunities to use my "activated" levels of energy to chase after a thread of a problem. I often don't know how long anything takes, but what I do know is that I'm doing more if I periodically throw myself at the work and solve the things I can solve and use the rest to develop more feedback(if I failed: okay, why?) - and doing this cyclically makes it sustainable.
I still have periods where my work energy is low, but the causes are typically more obvious: stress is up, I found a new game that captured my attentiom, etc.
What solved procrastination for me (I described in more detail above) is to do the tiniest step. If that seems too large, do something tinier.
For example say I have a presentation to prep for. For whatever reason, I'm procrastinating - maybe because it's boring or in nervous about delivering it. So I do a small step, perhaps, open my laptop, create a presentation and the title slide. Then it's ok to do something else, but often I will find myself continuing.
(If that's intimidating the step could simply be to sit down and open the laptop.)
If I don't continue that's OK, I don't get frustrated, I take a break (something bounded like coffee, walk, get groceries - not start reading reddit...) then again do a tiny step, perhaps draft one more slide.
Again I often find myself continuing, one tiny step at a time. It's easy to commit to something they just takes 60 seconds. Again if I don't continue I take a little break and so on. Again when I take a break I don't judge myself.
This system has been a revelation for me and I no longer procrastinate until the point of stress. I have also found it helpful to deal with with lack of motivation due to depression. I don't feel able to empty the dishwasher, well I can at least do one cup.
Keys are - establish a regular cue that already exists, either an existing habit or something else regular such as kids leaving for school
- do some tiny step
- if that's intimidating make it tinier. There is always tinier!
- if you find yourself continuing, go with it
- otherwise take a break, without judging yourself. Return immediately you feel ready to make a tiny step. Sooner is better than less tiny
- next tiny step
Could you give some examples for "required to succeed" and "instant fail if this occurs" signals?
this comment is so powerful! Thanks a lot for sharing!
Sometimes you have to let a task ripen for a while.
I think that's what Larry Wall once described as his workflow. You get a problem, but you don't start working on it. Instead, you just procrastinate but slowly you'll think about the problem every now and then. You basically let it brew for some time, and at some point, the problem and solution will become clear.
(I could misremember who said this).
Contrast with the "Feynman approach" described by Gell-Mann:
Write down the problem, think real hard, write down the solution
EDIT: Formatting
And the worst is that despite this positive experience I will do the same next time. There is no learning.
A useful way to use this emotion is to imagine how you are going to feel in an hours time when you have just got on and done that thing and it's all over with.
It's a nice trick but for some people - like me - it doesn't work. The brain accepts the anticipated emotion on a conscious level, and then proceeds to ignore it.
(I have a fresh case of this just recently; I was procrastinating on a household chore for a week. I was fully aware that I'll feel great if I complete it, and I'll feel really bad if I keep on procrastinating. That awareness did nothing. It took a realization that my sidearm netbook is still powerful enough to play a TV show to motivate me to go and do the chore, under the guise that I can allow myself to watch the show then. 3 hours and 4 episodes later, a whole bunch of chores was done. And I kind of understand now why some people I know like playing TV shows when cooking or cleaning.)
TV is also good because it creates a simulation of human company that reduces social isolation anxiety and makes you feel better about being where you are.
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.
I think "procrastination" means a different thing when you're able to write a large number of books, etc.
At that point you're not a procrastinator, just a productive person who doesn't like to do particular things.
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.
If you read the section of his book that was quoted, he makes it clear that he understands the argument that you're making, but he thinks it's wrong. He goes on to say:
Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one's profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one's impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.
I think he would say that if your environment (which is requiring you to do things you don't want to do) is creating the conditions for a positive feedback loop as you describe, then it's your environment which is "irrational" (as he says), not you.
The difference between his and mine viewpoints seem to be that Taleb thinks everything is fine with him/most procrastinators. I, on the other hand, believe my brain has buggy firmware and possibly even buggy hardware.
Since we don't have the specs of a "correct" human brain, the distinction between buggy brain and a problematic environment may be in some areas a matter of perspective, but when you have problems dealing with things that are part of our environment since before civilization, and when you see most other people dealing well with those things, you have to seriously consider the option that it's a wetware fault.
A "spec" for a human brain would have to include beliefs about questions of value, like "what is the point of human life?" Such a spec couldn't in principle be written because there is no objective basis for answers to these questions.
It sounds like you and Taleb hold different values. He thinks that living a life that involves following your own impulses is both valuable and "natural" (a suspect source of objective value IMO). You think that being able to fit into the existing environment is valuable. You might think Taleb is undisciplined and his philosophy could never be widely embraced. He might think you are just mindlessly following the orders of people who don't care about you. At the end of the day, it's up to you how you live.
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]
[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
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".
Or: Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem.
Incidentally, if I'm to believe the video linked recently on HN - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCAGc-rkIfo - so is ADHD.
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.
I was "cured" of my procrastination when I "discovered" the best way to not having things I hate to do in my to do list was to do the things.
It sounds silly because it is. Just do it now.
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.
What you both describe sounds like a switch flipping in the brain. It's the holy grail of those struggling with procrastination - and the unsolved part is coercing the brain to flip that switch, to internalize that realization. I envy those who've done that by accident.
You're absolutely right, it's like a switch flipping in the brain.
Maybe a way to get there, or to try to explain it in a different way would be: You have to hate "having the item in your todo list" more than "doing the task".
I know I do. It's annoying to "carry" that todo item in my head all the time, with its danger of forgetting it, or the need to note it down somewhere, then remember to check the somewhere... So I know I'l feel liberated when I do it.
Yes, on the face of it this applies much better to "pay that bill" than to "write a book". But you'd be surprised. Soon you won't think of yourself as a procrastinator, you'll feel like someone who takes charge and does stuff. You know what people like that do, apart from the small stuff? The big stuff.
Good luck!
Did try that very early on (spoiler alert: it didn't work), and it's curious what mechanism my brain developed to neuter this trick.
One, in line with what GTD book teaches, writing down a task is very liberating experience - indeed, the act of writing a task down feels almost like doing it, so it drains the pressure to actually do it. Two, once the mental weight of a full todo list reaches a certain stage, I instinctively shy away from looking at it. The degree to which this happens subconsciously is probably worth a paper in a psychology journal; I'll instinctively stop opening my TODO files, my Org Agenda, and if I write the tasks down physically (e.g. on whiteboard), after a while my eyes will just gloss over it and essentially ignore its presence in the room.
To combat this, I started cycling through TODO stores - every other month or three I jump between .org files, bullet journal, issue tracker tickets, whiteboard, notebook, paper calendar, electronic calendar. The "freshness factor" seems to be working somewhat, but I still can sometimes go two days before realizing I have an organizer open on my desk with tasks already late.
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'm afraid I'm on undiagnosed adult ADHD, however it's difficult to get diagnosed here - expecially since I had no symptoms at a younger age - probably due to biking 3-5km to school every day and doing martial arts 2-3x a week - If I'm exercising regulary I'm procrastinating less after a few weeks - but as you can imagine I can't keep up the schedule...
I think the guilt itself exacerbates procrastination. Perversely, I only stopped procrastinating once I stopped beating myself up about it.
Now, I tell myself that some problems just need to marinate, or that I have some other need that I'm not addressing. I use procrastination as a signal that something else is wrong. It's been very helpful.
Instead of punishing yourself for not doing something, take a moment to appreciate yourself when you do something.
When I go to the gym, I used get annoyed at myself for not doing enough work. I didn't even go often enough in the first place. Now I say that any day I go is a good gym day, and I feel only good thoughts about going and exercising, and when I am not exercising I occasionally remember that if I do go I'll feel good, and that's motivating.
I procrastinate because the task has no real personal value to me.
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.
Thus the emotion of listlessness?
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?"
Yes yes yes. The treatment for this is to split your work into smaller tasks so you feel you can hit a milestone before the interruption.
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?
Website is giving an error 500. Perhaps this is a popular article?
Fortunately it's in the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190522001001/https://cognition...
Same Gentle had an interesting observation about procrastination:
https://samgentle.com/posts/2016-09-16-what-changes
follow up: https://samgentle.com/posts/2019-01-29-the-leverage-instinct
What is a laziness then? Does it even exists as "just being lazy", or it's all a spectrum of anxiety issues?
I remember something similar being discussed earlier:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17878716
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19482238
thx for sharing
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.
A quick search would suggest that ADHD would call this a sign and procrastination can be a side effect in major (clinical) depression, bipolar disorder, monotropism, Aspergers spectrum disorders, and non-categorized issues with shame and low self-esteem (at least that one is covered in the article).
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.
This is why I love production work (food, manufacturing), no analysis paralysis ever.
You can say procrastination is the result of the core belief that one is not capable or will not perform the given task well, or once you do that thing, what will you have to worry about then?
Personally, I don't procrastinate on things I believe will pose a challenge. I procrastinate on the easy but tedious things.
Personally I procrastinate on almost everything that doesn’t either shoot up the dopamines immediately or make the panic monster go away
I always wondered why the panic monster was so great at marshalling concentration, and so bad at defending against the wave of shame that comes once the task is complete and you wonder why you waited so long (again!!)
Panic monster is a tricky beast to use. In the early university years, looming deadlines could make me superproductive, though at an emotional cost. But after few years of using this, my mind became increasingly resistant, and now the deadline trick doesn't work anymore.
Regarding the panic monster, I noticed that the only music that can make me focus better than no music is ominous music. Specifically A.n.k.h. - I wouldn't listen to it for pleasure.
A popular motivation equation: motivation = (expectation of success * expected reward) / (feedback delay * impulsiveness)
I feel "easy but tedious" comes as "low reward" even though expectation of success is high.
The latter rings true for me; I get a lot more done when I have a pile of stuff to do once I'm finished with the task at hand. If the task at hand is the only one left on my plate, I procrastinate, because what will I focus on after?
I like the list of things you can do to combat procrastination. It's all good to understand what drives it, but even better to know tactics that work to help you overcome it.
One could also argue that procrastination is time management (vs a time management problem). Just not the one with the best reputation.
This is a good article, but is it not simply finding a more polite (and perhaps, for the sake of publishing, novel) way to say procrastination is caused by insufficient will?
"People procrastinate or avoid aversive tasks to improve their short-term mood at the cost of long-term goals."
This description is true, but is it not also true for virtually every case where you would typically use the term "willpower"?
Procrastination is against energy expenditure. Energy expenditure is degenerative in nature.
a useful tool for people that might be in here... http://www.stayfocusd.com/
It is a filter against rotting in chronic/toxic/boring things. Too bad people are trying to kill this instinct and rape themselves instead of using it to their own benefit.
Is that really the only way you could think of to describe this? Sexual assault is a horrible thing to go through, and I can't imagine it's a lot of fun to happen upon the idea in unexpected places like this. You could easily just replace it with fuck.
The term's meaning has evolved over time, and the origin of "seize, carry off by force, abduct" remains a useful, if decidedly minority, concept:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/rape
It is the exact reason I have used the word with a self-assault meaning.
Seems like an unpopular opinion, but I also think procrastination is actually beneficial in this sense.
It can sometimes eliminate or reduce recurrent tasks, IE procrastinate getting a haircut: fewer haircuts / year. Procrastinate cleaning or laundry: less total time spent since you can do more at once.
There's always a small chance the task will entirely disappear (business priorities shift). In those cases, procrastination can actually be helpful.
It's an unpopular opinion because it isn't true for many (if not most) procrastinators, for at least two reasons. One, we procrastinate on tasks that we can't eliminate and which value scales linearly with doing them. Two, the time spent agonizing over it and the emotional cost it incurs is much greater than the savings from doing a recurring task less frequently.
For me, I find procrastination to be the exact opposite. Say I have a big project I want to complete, and I know I'll feel happy, proud, and accomplished if I complete the project, but I get stuck or frustrated with some intermediate step. Then what I usually end up distracting me is chronic or boring things. I'll organize my email inbox, or watch a million YouTube videos I'm not all that into, etc.
Your body is much wiser - it rebels against your entrapment in "projects".
Maybe yours. My body is as dumb as a rock. It resists "entrapment" in any and all useful activities, whether self-directed or assigned by others. It's a constant struggle against the cat-like instinct of "yeah, I'd love to do that... no, I'm not doing that".
Chronic procrastinator here: I can partially agree - sometimes, in some situations. But having two dozens of dangling 30-70% projects lingering around is toxic to self-esteem and social interaction too. Hell, I've developing a growing anxiety going to a community meetup at the local hackspace that's more like a pub because I'm way behind some small projects that effect others because I'm into other small projects :/
Horribly inappropriate word choice aside, many many things in life require short term pain and effort for long term gain.
To begin with, most people, entering the adulthood, are already mentally destroyed by 15 years of unnatural pseudo-competitive prisons full of long term pain and mostly delusional gain. Most of natural filters are pretty off by then.
>when people believe that their bad mood is unchangeable, they do not engage in frivolous procrastination or acting on other impulses to engage in other activities
This is so simple, but also so enlightening.
Unfortunately for me, it means removing most of the instant gratification from my life, such as video games, social media (incl. HN), etc.
Water is wet.