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Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination

davidthorpe.dev

131–140 of 165 posts

Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination

#131
post #15

I find that a lot of my procrastination comes from the anxiety of the thing I want to start doing not being completed. Literally, because I am worrying that the thing I want to work on is not already completed, I procrastinate from doing it. This is obviously counter productive and creates a feedback loop. Something I'm bad at but seems to work is to have a conversation with myself that sort of comforts me about the…

I see the same on a micro-scale. I have a task that will take an hour of concentrated effort - I'm afraid to start because I know I'll be interrupted. But it accumulates.

Wow, that one really hit home. I knew I rarely get work done when there's upcoming events on my calendar, but I think _fear of being interrupted_ is the real source of procrastination there.

Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination

#132

Is anyone aware a way to identify this window of potential high productivity using a Fitbit/Apple Watch or other device that measure physical body characteristics like heart rate, temperature, etc? I find that on some days my productivity window comes and goes and is wasted during times I have a meeting, or need to deal with something urgent but simple and then my brain is fried when I need to tackle a complex creati…

No, learn how to listen to your body. Heart rate, temperature are side effects in response to an emotional block (e.g. anxiety, fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of the unknown).

We have been taught a giant lie that the head is separate, reigning over the “dumb” body. “I think therefore I am” is a load of bull, or a delusion. Your body is your subconscious, your stomach your primitive brain. Your body is chock-full of hard-learned lessons, all delivered to you subconsciously as instincts. Don’t ignore these instincts. We are animalistic creatures, heavily driven by instinct, and rightly so. To discard your instincts is actually irrational!

Observe what your body is telling you. Why is there anxiety? Think to a physical manifestation of your anxiety. Is it tightness in your chest or a lump in your throat, where do you feel that anxiety? Observe it. Do not rationalize it, do not explain it, do not deconstruct it, do not jump to any conclusions. The moment you reach to touch it with your fingers of reason, the truth (body instinct) will slip away. That’s why you just have to observe, non-judgementally.

As you observe and think more about the physical manifestation of your anxiety, see what thoughts and reasons rise up. The more in touch you get with your body, the less information you will be throwing out.

You don’t need external devices to tell you how you are feeling for productivity potential, you just need to A) accept that observing subconscious reactions is a huge source of information, B) your gut feel is correct, but it takes time to process and understand what the gut is telling you, and C) it will take time to get in touch with all your body.

Urgent but simple — have you considered how much of an emotional toll that takes on you? No wonder that can put you into a state where you feel maybe knocked off rails, or some kind of self criticism starts up and you’re beating yourself up for the root cause of urgent task or you’re lamenting the team situation that got you there. These are heavy background burdens, though they may be emotional, are still background threads your brain gives slices to. Now your brain scheduler has less brainpower available for your complex task. Another way to put it is: They are clouds in your heads sky, obscuring the sun of creativity and productivity.

Learn to feel the productivity window by feel, by gut. The same gut feeling will also tell you when to stop. Procrastination often involves avoidance of something, for whatever reason. The trick is to observe what you are avoiding and what feelings are there when you think about this avoidance.

Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pomodoro also works for me, I've had weeks of doing almost nothing, after I started simple 25 min bits with pauses, for some reason it can go on forever.

Any mobile or desktop app you use specifically for this that you'd recommend?

I've been using https://pomelloapp.com/

Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination

#134
The only thing that helps me concentrate on work (coding) is exercising. When I come back from bike/run/whatever, catch my breath and take a shower, only after that my mind is calm enough so that I can concentrate well for ~2 hours. After that, you have to eat again, participate in a meeting, read your email, deal with messages from family, check the news, the latest coding tutorial, etc etc, and the concentration is gone, no matter how hard I try again later.

Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination

#135
post #94

In 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 a…

This is true for me as well. Procrastinating happens when I feel shitty (which is essentially every morning). It's my brain requesting easy dopamine hits like YouTube or CS:GO so that it can feel better. But those things only help your brain feel better in the very short term (ie. while they are occurring). After you're done and you close YouTube or the video game, you still feel shitty so you need another easy dopamine source to stimulate your brain again. This continues the cycle and it's very hard to break out of because each source of easy dopamine leaves you feeling crappy after engaging with it, so you find another one which does the same thing. Once you've started that cycle for any given day it's extremely difficult to break because your brain was built to be addicted to dopamine. This worked when we only got hits of dopamine for following animal tracks to hunt or when we saw the smoke from the sticks we were rubbing together and were about to start fire, but today it just doesn't work.

To solve this the steps listed in the article are pretty good actually, but for me it is unrealistic to just remove all the apps on my phone/computer. It doesn't solve the underlying problem and is pretty simple to just download whatever app again or use my tv instead in a moment of boredom/sadness/frustration. The real key is to make each task that you have to do for work so incredibly simple (ie break them down to the smallest units possible) that avoiding the task becomes an absolute joke. I basically start with super specific tasks to get me started, and then ramp up once I'm engaged. Sometimes the first few tasks are literally "Open the codebase", "Change the header text to something better", "make element x have a border radius". One thing I've noticed is that I always try to think of every edge case and what the best way to code something would be before even typing anything. Planning is good, but eventually it hits a point where I get annoyed or stressed because I can't find the most optimal way to do something and then....I procrastinate. So what I've started doing is if I feel this starting to happen I implement the feature or whatever I'm working on in the EASIEST way I can think of at that moment. If I have even a tiny idea of how it could be done, I start working on it that way, and then later as I get further along I can clean it up or reimplement it a different way. That's been pretty useful to me, it kind of goes back to breaking problems down but it's slightly different.

The last thing is exercise in the morning. Starting my day with something difficult sets the tone for the whole day. Sure, I could still go watch YouTube after working out but usually I feel good about the workout and my body that I don't need the easy dopamine hits after that and it's easier for me to get started on work.

I do wish there was an inherent way to make productive work the source of easy dopamine hits but I haven't quite figured that one out, yet. Depression is momentum. If you're feeling bad, it's a spiral down (wasting time watching TV, then your brain is so fried from that that you don't cook dinner and instead just eat an unhealthy meal, then dessert because you're still sad, etc). If you're feeling good it's a spiral up. Keep trying, keep working at it. Harder things (like work and exercise) will help you feel better in the long term. The things we try to avoid; YouTube, tv, video games, will make your brain stimulated in the moment but you fall further and further into depression (or I do at least).

Hopefully any of that was helpful but it may not even apply to you at all

Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination

#136
post #19

I 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…

The Pomodoro technique has been hugely valuable to me over the years. So much so that I recently built a web app for it that doubles as a work log with social accountability:

https://timmytimer.com

Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its like the advice "set your watch 10 mins behind" so you always reach on time. No shit I know its 10 mins behind every time I see the watch.

Sure, and yet... why is anyone ever late to anything? Let alone why are some people persistently late, in circumstances where that matters, and they know it's an issue? Rationally that makes no sense so dismissing techniques for resolving it that also don't make rational sense on that basis seems wrong.

they are late because being on time is inherently inefficient and detrimental to maximal value extraction from the lives of individuals and humanity as a whole.

if you code then easiest analogy i can think of is that people tend to optimise for a certain wait time on average rather than always have cpu time available exactly when you need it.this is like - everyone should shoot to be at a meeting / event within a certain time frame that reflect the length of time this event is going to block them out for, how far it deviates from their planned activities and how much noticed they had.

If everyone is sometimes late then many more important things will get done much faster as people didn't just drop what they were doing to be on time.

rather than get upset by lateness I try to just never ask for people to be anywhere any given time..and if i am asking them then i think about how much extra time it takes out of their life to do it exactly when i asked (not 5 mins after or before - as both cause problems).

I also factor into these considerations that time is an abstract concept - so humans will never really give a hoot what it has to say, outcomes matter. i have never met an "always on time" person that doesn't spend way to much pointless time checking the time and thinking about the time... much like the ridiculous lengths you have to go to when programming to stop processing something at the correct time (e.g. truly deterministic control systems or games with a strong commitment to never drop a frame but carry out tasks that take way more than a frame to do)

Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination

#138

> 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

Its like the advice "set your watch 10 mins behind" so you always reach on time. No shit I know its 10 mins behind every time I see the watch.

You need to set it ahead, not behind. ;) Otherwise you'll be even more late.

I'm sure it doesn't work for everyone, but I've been doing this for years, and it does help me. Yes, of course you always know that it's ahead, but it takes a moment for that fact to register, and that moment can be just long enough to incite action.

(For those who have read Thinking Fast and Slow, I think this is sort of a "hack" of System 1.) Basically I'm leveraging the reactive part of my mind to help me achieve the result that the more strategic part wants.

Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination

#139

I find that a lot of my procrastination comes from the anxiety of the thing I want to start doing not being completed. Literally, because I am worrying that the thing I want to work on is not already completed, I procrastinate from doing it. This is obviously counter productive and creates a feedback loop. Something I'm bad at but seems to work is to have a conversation with myself that sort of comforts me about the…

As a variation on this, I've discovered over the years that "resistance" to working on a task sometimes comes from a clash between a conscious thought that the task should be easy and an unconscious realization that it's actually not going to be easy at all.

It's sort of the internal version of having a manager present you with a task and telling you up front that it will be "easy". That's enough to elicit a silent, knowing groan from most of us.

The good news is that often once I accept that a task is really quite complex and will take a long time, the resistance fades, and it becomes easier to start working on.

Re: Kick the Shit Out of Procrastination

#140
post #7

I have made "device of purpose" that fixes this behavior over time. 1) Laptop is for work only ( every thing else is blocked ) 2) Mobile is for social media and procrastination ( I switch off internet while working. )

You can just turn the internet back on though...

Because the action of checking the feeds or whatever is so ingrained, it's effortless and, more importantly, thoughtless. Even though that extra step is tiny, it can often be just enough of a jolt to make you notice the habit and decide more consciously whether to indulge it this time. After becoming conscious of it more and more, you can choose to break it. Although, in my experience, it's easy for it to come creeping back, too. Once you've destroyed the reflexive nature of it, setting some rules around it can be helpful. And again, even though those rules are just simple, easily-overcome agreements with yourself, they can be enough.
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