How to Procrastinate Productively

I tend to do that but is super draining. I could spend hours and then look back at it and get depressed because I didn't do as much as I expected.

And at the end I'm still as tired as if I worked 100% focused on something, I try to avoid this as much as possible.

> Re-frame procrastination as a natural desire for variety and curiosity in your life. If you give this natural curiosity regular outlets throughout your days and weeks, it won’t need to blow up into major procrastination.

That's a good point I haven't seen expressed in that way before, though I realize now I've been using this as one of anti-procrastination tricks. If I'm procrastinating because I really want to some particular other thing, doing that thing usually makes me quickly want to go back to the original task.

But I do also have a lot of open-ended curiosity that's a problem. During university times, I often joked I owe half of my knowledge of the world to binge-reading Wikipedia at nights in high-school. These days, I try to rein it in a bit, otherwise I could spend the whole day following different trails of knowledge, without ever feeling a desire to come back to the task at hand.

> By cultivating hobbies and interests that are at least indirectly supportive of your primary work, anytime you choose to procrastinate you’ll be engaging in productive procrastination.

Yeah, right :). I use that excuse a lot. But the truth is, I've been stuck at the last 40 pages of Polya's book for the past 2 weeks, not because I didn't have any opportunity to procrastinate, but because it's somehow much easier to open a HN article or comment on one (as I'm doing right now), than it is to read a few pages of a book, or do a tiniest contribution to any of 20 open side-projects I have...

So you are saying that 30 minutes of procrastination is only marginally better than binge-watching Netflix series? What Netflix region are you in? I’d be hard pressed to find a series where one episode is less than 30 minutes, let alone whole seasons.

Sure you have to finish things, but that is what the article is all about. Didn’t your read it?

With this kind of metacommentary in mind, you may be intrigued/horrified by some of the Black Mirror-esque ideas that come up in transhumanist scifi now and again of future people creating automation for themselves for given activities, and that automation when sufficiently advanced emulating the person well enough to create automation for itself for given activities, and that automation when sufficiently advanced... you get the idea, until it's Russian nesting dolls all the way down and it's impossible to find the original person again.