Why Wait? the Science Behind Procrastination

> I think I get a lot of work done (solo game dev on my own), but I also re-organise my task list about every week too, does that make me a procrastinator? If I get stuck on a hard problem, I'll often browse the internet mindlessly, then come back and solve it. Does that make me a procrastinator? If I take a week off, am I a procrastinator!?

No, that behavior seems pretty rational, not like what is described in the article. You're not consistently putting off a painful task, you're taking breaks.

> Just because we made up a word for 'not doing work' doesn't make it real, or a problem.

Call it what you will, but procrastination has been a serious problem for me. The negative effects on my life are far too plentiful to mention, but an easy example is that I dropped out of college because I didn't want to write a paper. I tried to write it, couldn't make progress, stopped going to the class, and then didn't sign up for any more classes. There are just some tasks that are very stressful to think about, and for better or worse, my instinctual response is to simply not think about them at all. Unless you've experienced this, and seen relationships, jobs, personal projects, etc fall apart right in front of you, over and over again, I don't think you can say procrastination is not a problem.

I do a fair amount of Yoga, and indeed it helps with relaxation, but that's rather beside the point: it's quite susceptible to the same mental flinch as any other task. If I'm procrastinating on something, it's not any easier to decide to do Yoga to help make progress on it, than it is to just not procrastinate in the first place.

"The idea is that procrastinators comfort themselves in the present with the false belief that they’ll be more emotionally equipped to handle a task in the future." This pretty much sums it up for me, and explains why the time management based approaches haven't helped me all that much.

Jon Kleinberg has a very useful graph theoretical model for procrastination:

http://uwtv.org/series/2015-computer-science-engineering-col...

I'll come back and read this later.

No matter how obvious and beaten-to-death a joke is, there's always someone who can't help themselves.