101–110 of 324 posts
Or rather, knowing that a half assed job will only backfire when we have to present it.
The solution is to break things down into smaller units and increase collaboration with others. This is also true of solitary things like working out or quitting a bad habit.
Lower your client’s expectations of a first draft etc. and involve one of their low level stakeholders in a collaboration.
Then you will stop procrastinating.
Words of warning from a not so young (36) chronic procrastinator with a rather messed up life: Take it seriously. I'm not talking about reading HN in your 7th work hour when doing stupid Excel sheets. I'm talking about messing up years and years of your life. I believe it's a symptom of some deeper issues and it won't go away from alone. Lack of sleep, stress, work overload, information overload amplify the effects b…
>'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.
For me it depends strongly on the task whether 'just get started' works or not. With menial tasks like emptying the dishwasher I only have to convince myself to do the minimum possible amount of progress and I will usually keep doing until I'm done. I might even get inspired to do some related task afterwards. But if it is something boring but purely cognitive, like say data entry, I start, congratulate myself for ma…
I have been procrastinating on all types of home projects and they've been piling up. I'm not certain what is meant by 'negative emotions' in this case. One specific task I have is hanging up towel holders. The negative thoughts I have are generally around what happens if I do it wrong; are they crooked or do I have a bunch of holes in the wall. Is that what they are talking about? I didn't listen to the 22 minute audio clip, I'm guessing it is explained further in there.
Yepp went from a very bad grade to a very good grade.
You can't tell me its about 'avoiding negative emotions' if i have prepared my learning desk with everything i need, cleaned it, etc. then i open the book and i literlay can't learn.
That wall is much easier to break with ritalin.
Is that shitty? Probably. Is it healthy? Probably not. But it brought me much further then before and i'm pretty sure that through that i have more habbits which stay without ritalin.
I have had a weird relationship with procrastination, I find I get more appropriate work done when I'm exhausted. When I have no energy it will take all my concentration to stick to the job at hand but I do stick to it, when I have plenty of energy my monkey brain gets distracted easier. I've also found the the GTD technique of breaking items into smaller tasks, setting a next action and make sure the action starts w…
It's frustrating, because it's not like it's a solution to be tired all the time. If I'm sleeping better, I get less work done and more life done, feel happier and better, but get swamped by work later. If I'm exhausted, I get some work done and no life done, feel horrible and eventually dip back into depression, but I'm a little bit more on top of work.
Eventually I get too exhausted to even do that, so again it's no solution, but it is interesting none the less.
Well, the difficult emotion is often some form of fear. Fear of failing, of making a mistake, in some cases, of making the problem worse. All of these fears are in a fundamental sense legitimate, but the direct solution is, insofar as it is possible, to prepare and practice. The alternative is to tackle something even harder that includes the thing you want to make as a special case. This is a recent discovery of min…
[1]: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/julia-donaldson/a-squas....
Well that's the point, to get better at it. It helps to have some good instructions; the book The Mind Illuminated is fantastic.