151–160 of 324 posts
For instance, cleaning the house. Spend 15 minutes doing it but no more than 2 hours. See how long you can go. This simple rule gets me to the gym and for runs in the morning, doing my taxes, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“ > 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.
When you procrastinate on mopping the floor or mowing the lawn, you're making a choice to live with dirtier floors or longer grass in exchange for more time to spend on other things. Some of that work actually goes away forever when you procrastinate. It's not like you mow the grass twice to make up for missing a week! Perhaps the difficult emotion that 'lazy' people are avoiding is admitting to themselves that they'…
Sometimes comments like "Oh I'm procrastinating by reading this article while at work (at my successful software engineering job)" seem a little insensitive. It's like telling a blind man "Yeah, I close my eyes too sometimes".
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…
Not having a real passion on pretty much anything, but have small impulses for pretty much EVERYTHING. Means that I wasted a lot of hours/days/weeks but didn't gain much. Plus no experience of major positive feedback makes me less and less confident.
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…
I don't think it's about "avoiding difficult emotions" anymore. You'd think after years of procrastinating and as a result, getting even worse emotions, the brain would learn to not procrastinate in order to avoid unpleasant emotions. Imo, it's a brain malfunction/illness. Some spectrum of ADD, some people being affected more than others. Perhaps it was useful in the millions of years of evolution, but it's counterpr…
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…
I haven't been able to find a "final" solution. Most recently I've been writing things down with pen and paper to keep me on task. To make the ethereal physical and break it down into steps and checklists. Again totally recommend this video on the wall of awful for ADHD procrastination https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo08uS904Rg
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…
I haven't been able to find a "final" solution. Most recently I've been writing things down with pen and paper to keep me on task. To make the ethereal physical and break it down into steps and checklists. Again totally recommend this video on the wall of awful for ADHD procrastination https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo08uS904Rg
When you catch a wave, you ride it out knowing that eventually it ends. And when it does, you get off the wave and paddle back out to catch another one. Repeat forever :)
Sometimes comments like "Oh I'm procrastinating by reading this article while at work (at my successful software engineering job)" seem a little insensitive. It's like telling a blind man "Yeah, I close my eyes too sometimes".
Or a closer analogy, like someone saying "Oh I'm such OCD" because they arranged their pens in colour order.
Whenever I do something. I assume that it's going to be a business failure. That helps me to avoid procrastination which could otherwise arise out of a fear of failure. Business success is not within my own control so everything I do needs to have a "fallback purpose". Everything I do is at once a business opportunity, a learning experience and a technical stepping stone which I can re-use for future projects. All of…
Thank you for sharing this perspective, it really resonated with me. I've always struggled with procrastination at a moderate level, but the last 6 months or so have been especially bad. I had worked my heart out on a project that the business decided not to pursue. It killed me, all my time was wasted, business was fucking up, would have to re-do all this work in subpar tools etc. As I got moved onto a new project,…
I highly recommend working for an open source company if possible. I find it motivating to think that some people I've never met from a future generation could pick up ideas from my work and continue the mission.
> 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 certainly true for me that procrastination is essentially avoiding a form of anxiety. But I don't think there's some deeper, larger problem. It feels more like "choking", just a fairly specific learned, maladaptive response. At some times in my life, I've pushed it into the background and become more productive, but it always seems to creep back.
Drinking seems to reliably reduce it, but I can't very well program lit all day.