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Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert

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Re: Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert

#61

Post by Tade0 »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #18
Tade0 wrote: post #13

This article gives great advice, but there's also the other end that I personally struggle with, namely: where's the reward? I noticed that it's especially hard for me to bring things to the state of "100% done", because the emotional reward for that is so much smaller than getting to the first 70%. I tried shifting my thinking about this by treating that 70% as an actual 50% (given the time spent), but it feels like…

Theres this thing called "the 80/20 rule". Story time: My dad used to work at Sainsbury's (big UK supermarket chain). One day the CEO (Lord Sainsbury I think he said it was) popped over to his desk. " , you do great work. I know I can always count on you." "But... You spend so much effort on details that don't end up being important. The first 80% of your work takes as long as the last 20%." "The thing is, that first…

I use the moniker "CEO Richard Johnson" for such stories.

Anyway I'm so painfully aware of the 80/20 rule that during college I came up with the concept of "lifetime success rate" as in - "the end result of any endeavor done with the maximum effort one could apply".

Mine is at around 83%[0], which makes getting to 90% of anything a nightmare.

[0] This was my result of the final high school exam in Physics - a subject I almost failed a year before and managed to learn from scratch with the guidance of the best tutor I ever had.

Re: Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert

#62

Post by claudiusd »

> We believed that it was poor time management and that if we just worked a bit harder and had more self-discipline, we could do the job

It's frustrating that the "experts" still see things this way. As if it's some moral defect that people are too lazy to overcome.

Can't stop procrastinating? "Just work a little harder and get started already"

Depressed? "Just cheer up and get over it."

Addicted to drugs? "Just look at the negative consequences and stop using them"

I guess I could see this article as a step in the right direction, but it's still frustrating to see how the casual stigmatization of behavioral health and its symptoms continues to linger.

Re: Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert

#63

Post by rvanlaar »

leadingthenet wrote: post #42
Tenoke wrote: post #37

>'Just get started'? If I could just get started then I wouldn't have a procrastination problem." I thought: fair enough. This never worked for me. I write one sentence or do the small task and then I go off and do something else. Perhaps it's due to my (bad) habit of context-switching but either way I've never benefited much from this approach despite often trying it.

I am exactly the same, though ADHD medication has helped tremendously in this respect. Terrible context switching, not lack of attention, is the bane of my existence. Have you ever had a test?

Here are a few things I noticed when I started using ADHD medication.

I was suddenly able to focus on a task in a way that I wasn't able before. It was such an epiphany to experience what other people call focus.

That made me also notice that I'm really good at context switching. It's what I naturally do. It also makes me good at breadth first approaches.

Which makes me ask: Are you lamenting terrible context switching or the amount of context switching that you experience?

Re: Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert

#64

Post by abiogenesis »

oigursh wrote: post #54
dijksterhuis wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theres this thing called "the 80/20 rule". Story time: My dad used to work at Sainsbury's (big UK supermarket chain). One day the CEO (Lord Sainsbury I think he said it was) popped over to his desk. " , you do great work. I know I can always count on you." "But... You spend so much effort on details that don't end up being important. The first 80% of your work takes as long as the last 20%." "The thing is, that first…

He's asking your dad not to finish any work? This is really hard to apply to development or, say, mowing the lawn.

It is applicable to most things. You can omit some bells and whistles while doing development, or skip edging after mowing the lawn.

Re: Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert

#65

Post by myth2018 »

I always read here and there people commenting about certain tips not working well on their own procrastination issues. My experience is no different.

Some months ago I wrote about how procrastination had harmed my life. I was going through a lot. Thankfully, things have hugely improved since then. Step by step, I'm getting my life together.

Way before my ex-wife left me, I had been reading some books on the subject. I had already identified the emotional nature of my procrastination, but I was still struggling to find a solution.

If I could give one advice to people who are facing very bad cases of procrastination, that would be: if you have the chance, get some psychotherapy. That was instrumental in my recovering.

My case had a complex emotional background. The extreme pressure I was putting over myself. The insanely huge goals I had established. My inclination to define my own value as a person based solely on my intellectual accomplishments. Everything mixed together. Overwhelming.

Don't get me wrong, the books helped. But mine was too complex a case and some personalized advice was needed.

Re: Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert

#66

Post by abiogenesis »

lazyjones wrote: post #38
londons_explore wrote: post #12

People wouldnt procrastinate if there wasn't some evolutionary advantage... Personally, I have found that if I get on with certain tasks in a team environment with too much vigor, I start to get other team members feeling left out or feeling their input isn't adding value. Keep doing it and the team will fall apart. Sitting around and being lazy for a bit helps keep the team together and has more forward progress ove…

> People wouldnt procrastinate if there wasn't some evolutionary advantage... That's probably not a reasonable assumption. Evolution doesn't work so fast. Procrastination might simply be an indication that we're not living under liveable conditions. Why do octopuses eat their own limbs under some conditions? Does it give them an evolutionary advantage?

Not sure how authentic it is, but here [1] is an explanation:

> It is believed that it is caused by a virus/bacteria which can manage to take hold on a stressed octopus. The biting is said to be due to irritation and biting alleviates the affected area. An octopus can lose an arm without harm and regrow it. By biting it off, the octopus loses the infected arm and hopefully a healthy one regrows, but in captive situations, probably caused by bad water quality, the infection can't be shaken off.

[1] https://tonmo.com/articles/do-octopuses-commit-suicide.47/

Re: Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert

#67

Post by jimmyjack »

sova wrote: post #57
hirundo wrote: post #55

Time boxing is the best treatment I've found. A project may feel overwelming, but usually I can bring myself to bite off one tomato (25 minutes) of it. I can generally make a noticeable amount of progress in that time, and more importantly, clarify the next actions whose ambiguities have been leading me to procrastinate. In one such session I actually completed a project I had put off for years

Three years ago a friend and I were looking at different divisions of time -- in one of our Eastern Philosophy books there was a mention of splitting the day into 60 segments. We were puzzled. If there are 60 snaps in a day, how many minutes are in each snap? The answer is delightfully simple: 24 minutes per snap. (60 minutes an hour with 24 hours or 24 minutes a snap with 60 snaps). We have started using the 24-minu…

What book is this if you don't mind me asking?

Re: Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert

#68

Post by Accacin »

I’m not sure what my problem is, but I find it incredibly hard to focus on some things for any meaningful amount of time.

For example, I’ve been diving back into C recently and going through and exercises takes me forever.

I notice I’ll do one, switch to YouTube to swap song, find an interesting video about literally anything, watch that, and then do another exercise.

I’ve looked at ADHD but I’m not sure I fit, in pretty good at getting my work tasks done by the deadline, but if I focused I could probably do them a day earlier.

For reading, I use an old Kindle and can stay focused easily, so maybe it’s just not opening a web browser is what I need to try.

Re: Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert

#69

Post by mattmanser »

mc32 wrote: post #27
melvinroest wrote: post #2

> Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert I love this tagline! I think this is as accurate as one can get about why we procrastinate, in one sentence. --- > What research has indicated across a wide variety of studies is that it is an emotion regulation situation. So CBT, meditation and similar things might help. I'd like to see studies on that. Hypothesis: emotion regulation…

“ > Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert” That makes sense for some procrastination, but other procrastination is laziness. Mopping the floor, taking out the garbage, mowing the lawn types of procrastination... those are under your own purview and don’t involve big emotions or decisions... So I think it explains some kinds of procrastination but not all.

It's not about just doing the dishes, it's about the sum of all the other chores and things you have to do. It's overwhelming in its entirety, not the individual tasks.

When they look at the washing up a procrastinator doesn't just see the washing up, they also see that they have to do a laundry, fix the cupboard creak, do a full clean of the cupboards, clean under the fridge, wash the floors, dust the cobwebs, fix the dripping tap, take out the recycling, decide what to do with those old jars, etc., etc.

Even if they do eventually manage to do a flurry of chores, and usually feel great, it's not a habit to do it again. It's not a scheduled minor, automatic, task. Your brain deals with habits much easier than things you have to consciously do.

So it inadvertently builds up, and BAM, as if from nowhere, there's a massive pile of washing up with a whole load of OTHER tasks mentally attached to it again.

You see it as easy and lazinness, but we don't. The irony is that living like this is actually a lot harder, you're having to ultimately put more work in for often worse results.

Re: Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert

#70

Post by diegoperini »

Accacin wrote: post #68

I’m not sure what my problem is, but I find it incredibly hard to focus on some things for any meaningful amount of time. For example, I’ve been diving back into C recently and going through and exercises takes me forever. I notice I’ll do one, switch to YouTube to swap song, find an interesting video about literally anything, watch that, and then do another exercise. I’ve looked at ADHD but I’m not sure I fit, in pr…

I assume you do programming in your day job. If so, no matter what HN crowd claims about side projects, picking another programming task as your extra curricular activity can be the main reason why you are easily distracted. Maybe by the end of the week (or work day) you are simply tired of looking at screens with small and dense text.
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