[deleted]
Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination
91–100 of 165 posts
Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination
#92too long didn't read
:)
Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination
#93For years I was a major procrastinator to the point that it was really affecting my job performance and my relationship.
That all changed when I got a sleep evaluation and realized I had severe sleep apnea. My quality of sleep was terrible. As a result I had zero motivation.
I got a CPAP machine, and after an initial period of adjustment, it was a profound change. The year after I received the machine was the most productive in my entire life.
Take sleeping seriously. It may help you in ways you never imagined!
Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination
#94In my case, procrastination is a sign of depression. It is an escape mechanism. I found myself dropping clients after procrastinating instead of completing their projects because something about them always stressed me, made me hate money or what I do for a living. 30 minutes or 3 hours of shutting my brain off, telling myself I will do it later is my way of escaping. There is something subconscious about it always after I 'meditate' enough to pinpoint what the problem was. These are episodes coming and going once in a while.
Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination
#95Here's what worked for me in lockdown (I had issues working at home) : aim to do minimum 6 pomodoros a day, where each pomodoro is 55 minutes long. When measuring time I try to focus on a single task that's not related to admin work (answering emails etc.) I figured that 6 hours of productive work is not far off from what most people probably get done in an office environment anyway.
How long of a break in between?
5 minutes. Sometime if I get in the flow or I'm in a middle of the meeting I'll skip the break and restart the timer.
Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination
#96I have found that having a decent computer really helps my productivity. As a grad student, an adjunct, and now a full time faculty member, I have consistently had shitty slow computers in my office on campus. I have found that because it is so slow that when I grade a paper online, i hit submit and the browser takes so long to load the next paper that I get distracted by checking email or twitter or facebook. Now that I'm stuck at home, I have noticed that my personal computer is so much faster that the next paper loads almost instantly and I get less distracted even though i have tons of more things here that could distract me than in the office.
Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination
#97If you don't want to modify your /etc/hosts file manually you can always use https://selfcontrolapp.com/ which will do it for you.
Pomodoro technique has really helped me as well. I feel it forces me to just start right away and get into the flow. The only thing you have to build the habit of is actually starting the timer.
Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination
#98I'm sure it's been said many times before, but there's a special irony to reading an essay about procrastination in order to avoid doing work.
Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination
#99I think I've successfully managed to "beat" procrastination by adopting the pomodoro technique. I've shipped software for years now. What I've come to realise however is that the brain/body can only do so much work in a day. I can program for a few hours a day (on a good day) and then it becomes increasingly more effort to do more coding. Sometimes, depending on the task, I'll be able to switch to another task. Howev…
I used to think that eventually you should reach a flow with whatever you're doing and for this, taking a break after a pomodoro seems not effective ...
I've found the 25 minute timer to have multiple benefits:
1. If I'm struggling to start, telling myself I only need to spend 25 minutes on it gets me started
2. I can pretty easily hold myself back from checking slack/email or context-switching when the block is 25 minutes - I can always peek at messages after to make sure nothing important happened.
3. It gives me a target - frequently there is something concrete I think I can _complete_ in 25 minutes, and that gives me motivation to push to get it done by then. If it goes a little over, that's fine
4. Because these periods of 25 minutes are really intense, I can't do them back-to-back all day. I have found switching to an interesting YouTube video for 5 minutes during a break (and trying to completely rest the brain during this time) re-energizes me more quickly, and lets me do more pomodoros without needing to stop for a while
Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination
#100> On my iPhone I move every single application into a folder named “.”. I then move that onto the second screen. My phone dock has four apps: Phone, Headspace, Things and SMS: Yawn. When I read these minimalism tips I always wonder if people giving this advice ever had a real job or if their job is actually giving people minimalism advice. Good luck trying to justify being the only one without Skype/Slack/Gmail
Your employer shouldn't expect you to be available on your phone via Skype/Slack. Gmail I guess it's ok, as long as it is the employee's choice when to check it or not.
In my case the very urgent messages which needed to be done right at that moment (or at the first moment when I got the chance to be in front of a computer screen) have been sent either through SMS or via direct social app messaging (we're a small shop, we all know each other). I've had only a handful of such messages in 10 years of us working together.