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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

#211

Post by TeMPOraL »

_curious_ wrote: post #162
unethical_ban wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you. For me, it is a feeling like you said, of never being able to catch up. Like with debt, for years, I would just keep spending on my credit cards. I tried consolidating several times, and finally, I have used a 401k loan against myself to consolidate. My student loans and car loan are paid off, and I have When something seems hopeless, or too much to overcome, I think the mind says "fuck it", and wants to…

"Fuck, there should be a support group for this." Be the change you want to see!

At the risk of going completely opposite to what you meant here: I would join such a group if it existed on-line. Hell, I've used HN for that purpose in the past.

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

#213

Post by TeMPOraL »

fizixer wrote: post #114
nisa wrote: post #73

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…

Procrastination is a symptom and stuff like pomodoro is the band-aid.

Often a band-aid is all what you need to heal, instead of getting the wound infected and making things worse over time.

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

#214

Post by michaelbarton »

yamrzou wrote: post #209
zerkten wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend therapy. Generally, men in the US find it difficult to seek out help. Often they think it's a failing and avoid it, especially in the context of relationships. Therapy is something you could almost do for yourself, if you could work out the puzzle. Therapy can do wonders at breaking the initial problem and giving you some things you can work on. Therapists can also provide useful inputs for career…

Practically speaking, what would a therapiat tell me that I can't find or learn on my own?

Some things can be so intensively painful that we can't even acknowledge they exist within us, let alone begin to unpack and talk about them.

Speaking from my own experience it took me two years of therapy to get to acknowledge something very traumatic. Then the work could finally begin to start working on it.

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

#215

Post by ci5er »

cgs wrote: post #184
zerkten wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend therapy. Generally, men in the US find it difficult to seek out help. Often they think it's a failing and avoid it, especially in the context of relationships. Therapy is something you could almost do for yourself, if you could work out the puzzle. Therapy can do wonders at breaking the initial problem and giving you some things you can work on. Therapists can also provide useful inputs for career…

I would also add to give it time and not give up after one or two sessions. It takes time to establish a relationship with a therapist you connect with and to see patterns in your life emerge.

At one point (maybe 15~20 years ago?), I had two sessions/week with a therapist for about a year. 3 therapists in a row.

I must be crap at finding therapists. The ones I found were really against being "interventionists" and didn't want to share with me what they were seeing from our very lightly guided conversation (where I didn't even know what I should be talking about).

"A little intervention and a little guidance would be cool folks! Otherwise, why am I not talking to a tape recorder?"

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

#216

Post by TeMPOraL »

mattmanser wrote: post #69
mc32 wrote: post #27

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.

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 t…

> 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

This reminds me: is there a word to describe a related phenomenon, that I find incredibly frustrating? It goes as follows: say I want to take a one minute break to fetch myself some coffee. I go to the kitchen, find the dishwasher running and no clean cup, so I have to clean one myself. I do that, then discover I have to refill the water and the beans in the coffee machine. I make the coffee, and the machine flashes red. The dredgewater bin is full. I need to pour it out and clean it. I get dirty and coffee-smelly, so I want to wash my hands. Doing that, I use the last bit of soap in the dispenser, so now I have to fetch the 5L jug and carefully refill it. By this time, what started as a one-minute break turned into 10 minutes of chores, and I'm already anxious about getting back to work.

Some form of the story above happens to me pretty much every other day. Is there a name for this kind of unexpected recursive expansion of chores?

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

#217

Post by TeMPOraL »

dillonmckay wrote: post #190
jimmydddd wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst thing is when you put something off, like a project at work, and then it gets cancelled. That's the type of positive reinforcement that leads to even more procrastiantion. :-)

Sometimes the best action is inaction?

Not unless it got cancelled because you procrastinated on it, and your superiors decided to cut the loss.

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

#218

Post by oblib »

Coding has always been humbling for me. I'm reminded daily that I'm very low on the totem pole. But I don't really procrastinate with what I think will be difficult for me, or beat myself up over stuff that I really cannot even grasp (higher math).

I don't feel any pressure to bullshit about my skills or depth of knowledge so I have no problem admitting I don't know squat about something, and I'm fearless about diving in to learn what I need to know because it's really not that hard to admit when something is over my head. In my experience everyone I've worked with appreciated it when I told them "I can't do that". The tangible upside to that is when I say I can do it they have complete confidence it will get done.

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

#219

Post by nisa »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #196
nisa wrote: post #73

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…

Pomodoro is magic and should be worshipped. It's the only thing that seems to consistently work for me. When I was so emotionally overwhelmed I couldn't focus and it took me half a day to begin working, I would switch to doing pomodoros and rewarding myself for achieving a certain amount any given day. I tried punishing myself through not achieving too (via Beeminder), but that ended up worsening my emotional negativ…

Thank you!

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

#220

Post by Loughla »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #207
Loughla wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pop culture OCD: I like to organize my pens and post-it notes on my desk. OCD in my life: I have a tourretic tic that forces me to grunt forcibly and wink whenever there is a square around me (side note, why is everything a fucking square?). The grunt is misinterpreted as a rude gesture, often. The wink has caused me to get punched regularly, so I don't go to social gatherings anymore. When I do go out, I have to pla…

I hope you don't suffer through all of these simultaneously. I'm at the stage of repeatedly checking the gas stove after each use and whenever I enter or leave the kitchen, plus closing the water faucet in the bathroom repeatedly until it clicks the right way several times in a row (there's a pattern to it). And triple-checking if I closed the apartment (sometimes with additional gas stove check) when I'm leaving any…

The nice thing about OCD is that it doesn't have to make any sense, and you get to know and understand that it doesn't make any sense!

That paragraph generally sums up my day, but you do learn coping strategies.

I'm not sure if OCD generally gets worse, but mine definitely has gotten worse over the years. Therapy and counseling have helped in the last few years. I can at least leave the house now. I'm told there are medications that can help as well, but I'm pretty anti-psychotropic of any kind after a bad experience some years back; so that's a grave that I've dug for myself.

I'll be thinking of you brother/sister. It's never so bad you can't get out of it, even when it seems like it's impossible.

Looking for silver linings, people like us at least can say we're worried about the people around us, so we can't be completely terrible people!

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