To Stop Procrastinating, Start by Understanding the Emotions Involved

So... what's the alternative? Depression is another common behavior pattern/mode that "must have evolved for a reason". And sure, there might be a benefit to depression that is yet unnoticed. But since based on the current information it's so bad, treating it anyway makes sense. It's pretty implausible to somehow verify there are no benefits from procrastination, and it clearly causes problems for people (from their own and other's perspectives). That seems like something to attempt to solve. It's not like every single mental/biological feature must be beneficial somehow, that's not actually how evolution works. It might be, we can't "prove" otherwise, but we kind of have to work with what we have until there's a complete map of human neural structures or something.

So you want to build a tool/data-structure to track your yak-shavings [0] ?

[0] : http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YakShavingDefinedIllGetThatDon...

I was a big procrastinator in the past. But I was lucky in that one of the things I procrastinated with was learning psychology !.

As I learned more and more psychology it became obvious how to win over it. I created a mastermind with other entrepreneurs and it helped enormously First, everybody has this "problem". Second, you help other people and you help yourself.

Now I can make amazing things in very small amounts of time, and spend a lot of time reading-writting things that interest me, or stay with my family.

Basically what happens is that the human beings are flexible enough to do things no animal could do. But it comes at a price, no natural things require immense amounts of effort to do, even if trivial.

For example, most men could spend all day long hunting or fishing without problem, even if it is hard, rich people do that when they are free to do whatever they can. But plowing the earth or writing a book or programming are totally different.

When you do non natural things, odds are your body responds badly. For example, programming all day means you don't exercise your inertial system. If you sit all day, your lymphatic system suffers a lot. There are hundreds of things like this. You don't see any of this, you only know that you try to work and your body says NO!! You try to force it, but the situation worsens and your body will tell you NO WAY even stronger.

My cofounder died in his twenties by cancer trying to work harder. He forced himself so much into work that he got weaker and weaker before getting cancer. No sleep, no exercise, bad food. We know today that eating well, exercise and sleep is essential for your immune system.

Anyone that offers you an easy solution, he is BS. It requires effort and time to learn how to control yourself, but it is probably the best investment you could do in your entire life.

Probably the best practical book on the issue is "the Now Habit". I prefer the audiobook. Wake up Productive from Eben Pagan is great too.

Concepts found in mindfulness and CBT can help with this.

The idea is that thoughts influence emotion and physical responses, which then influences behaviour, consequentially influencing outcomes.

With procrastination, you will think of a task that you are avoiding. This may create anxiety and a tightening in your stomach. This will then prevent you from taking action. The outcome of that is rationalisation thoughts such as "I've got loads of time on this" or "I'll just do it later", which then eases the emotional and physical responses, leading to you postponing the task and doing something else. This cycle will continue.

By being mindful of these thoughts and recording them, you can then begin to look at rational responses. So, for example, you might say "I'm not good enough" and then craft a written, rational response to it. You continue this until you have an uncertainty, where you can't be sure if it's a rational response. You then create a practical plan of behavioural experiment to test it. This may include doing a small part of the task and seeking feedback to see if you're on the right lines, as an example to not being sure if you have what it takes for the task.

Identifying these cycles and consciously taking steps to elimate them can probably do more than focus on any particular part of the cycle alone.

I tried to enforce them once with a precommitment service (i.e. you set up a deadline and pay money if you slip). The first missed deadline stressed me, which made me miss more deadlines, which got me even more stressed, thus missing even more deadlines, up until the point my credit card started bouncing. And mind you, this was on trivial tasks - I just couldn't overcome the anxiety and make myself do them.

I ended up an order of magnitude more miserable and in a very bad financial position for half a year. I can see how it works for people with big tolerance for stress (apparently I'm not one of them), but it's a double-edged sword.