Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Procrastinatory Doom Loops

brennancolberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 290 posts

Re: Procrastinatory Doom Loops

#111

Post by k8sToGo »

jacquesm wrote: post #93
cipheredStones wrote: post #33

I spent about a third of 2021 more or less consumed by this phenomenon. In my case it was triggered by job searching: I quit my existing position, intending to do a leisurely search over a few months... and then avoided nearly everything related to the job search for over four months. (While still experiencing a ton of stress as a result of constant anxiety and guilt about it.) Once I actually started, I landed an am…

What really gets me is that if I push stuff off and then finally get around to it how little time it usually takes to deal with the thing I've been putting off. I'm quite capable of spending 3 days to avoid 10 minutes of concentrated hard work. Very frustrating.

I think that is part of the problem. If it doesn't take much time, then I can just do it later... :(

Re: Procrastinatory Doom Loops

#112

Post by kubb »

I solved this by lowering the expectations of how much I'm going to do - I usually just say to myself, let's do 1-2 things today, where these things are well defined, small pieces of work. Sometimes I can finish and can take 1 more thing of the list, sometimes I do one thing, sometimes I need to break the task up because it's too large. But I make a bit of progress every day even it it's just a centimeter or two. It adds up and I'm less stressed.

Re: Procrastinatory Doom Loops

#113

Post by tobr »

Something I’ve noticed is that the worst thing I can do, strangely enough, is to write the task down on my todo list. While it might make me feel good in the moment to take a minute to write it down (at least I’ve made some kind of progress, right?), it now poisons the entire todo list; I can’t bear to look at the list because I know it includes a task that I don’t want to think about.

Re: Procrastinatory Doom Loops

#114

Post by noduerme »

What happened to me in 2020 was even weirder. I'd worked from home for 15 years and always managed my time well before the pandemic. I always wanted to get my work done as quickly as possible, because I had built up a work/reward system where I would go out at the end of the day, meet up with friends, socialize, or just sit outside a cafe and read a book. I never had to worry about deadlines because I was always way ahead of schedule.

In 2020, the deadlines vanished - my contracts all didn't want anything in a hurry, because they were in no hurry to pay. And so did my entire structure of social life. So suddenly I had way too much time.

I always thought if I had that much time, I'd pick up painting again, or record some new music, or just read all the books I'd been waiting to get to. But 2020 showed me a new problem:

If you pick up that book, said my mind, you'll just get trapped in it all night.

If you start painting you'll blow the whole day.

So I'd panic-read news for an hour, work an hour, panic read some more, get drunk, worry, walk circles, forget I was doing laundry, mop the floor, forget I was mopping the floor, and literally never sit down and just lose myself to anything.

This actually went on for almost 2 full years, and it's been the least creative time of my life; I'm only just starting to get over it. I bought myself a new laptop, a drawing tablet, art supplies, a new guitar, and got my piano tuned. And I still jump from one to another thing like a crazed monkey. When I fall into one thing, it goes all night and I feel like a wreck the next morning, with no useful result. A couple songs, a couple paintings, and they bring me memories of this oppressive, crazed, all-night insanity and bottles of wine I shouldn't have drunk. Then I go sober for a few days and bury myself into work, burn myself to the ground. Try to make $2k a day, burn burn burn. Look up and it's dark; I haven't gone out.

I went out, a bunch, between Delta and Omicron. I'm triple vaxed but I'm at the point where I'd kick myself forever if I got long covid because I lapsed and went out to shoot pool or hang out with friends.

I've read so many articles lately about this ...procrastination... I don't think it's the right word. What we are is afraid of the future, and every day has to be divided up into smaller and smaller pieces just to make sure you're sort of trying to take care of your mind. So you listen to your podcasts or you do something that you know won't take up all day because all day is too much commitment.

Sobering up adds 4 hours, I know that. But then I just play video games and try to forget I want a drink. It might actually be better in prison, since your options for what to do are so limited. I'd have to finish the book, or keep writing, or finish the code I was writing on the wall.

I was always sure I was better than almost any freelancer I ever met at managing my time, balancing work and life. But it turns out my balance did require having a life; now I do my work in this endless slog, with jack shit to look forward to. What good is money if you can't spend it. But I'm not okay with rejoining the human viral zoo right now and I'm not sure if or when I will be.

Re: Procrastinatory Doom Loops

#115

Post by anilakar »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #106
drakonka wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting since it reminds me of the dynamic I have with my boyfriend as well. We seem to be opposites in this regard. I work better alone. Having someone else there, even if they aren't purposefully distracting me, just adds another tiny bit of awareness: Is he hungry? Is he bored? Does he want coffee? We haven't had lunch - should I cook? I should tidy. I feel like when there's a guest in my house I need…

I have a similar issue. Its hard for me to get work done when there are other people around whether its at my place or someone else's. Just the fact that another person is there can be super distracting to me and it makes it difficult to get into a flow state. This is a problem I don't know how to deal with honestly, besides just not working on important stuff when around other people. It does impact me a little at w…

The mere awareness of stuff happening around in the office is enough to prevent me from focusing on anything. At home, the main source of distraction is the endless queue of undone household chores all around me.

Over half of my committed code has been written at work after hours in complete silence.

Re: Procrastinatory Doom Loops

#116

Post by noduerme »

drakonka wrote: post #100
cipheredStones wrote: post #33

I spent about a third of 2021 more or less consumed by this phenomenon. In my case it was triggered by job searching: I quit my existing position, intending to do a leisurely search over a few months... and then avoided nearly everything related to the job search for over four months. (While still experiencing a ton of stress as a result of constant anxiety and guilt about it.) Once I actually started, I landed an am…

This is interesting since it reminds me of the dynamic I have with my boyfriend as well. We seem to be opposites in this regard. I work better alone. Having someone else there, even if they aren't purposefully distracting me, just adds another tiny bit of awareness: Is he hungry? Is he bored? Does he want coffee? We haven't had lunch - should I cook? I should tidy. I feel like when there's a guest in my house I need…

I'm a non-eater (24-hr faster, usually this goes along with other manic, focused, driven episodes where I'm really being the best I can be at what I do). I lived for 10 yrs with my ex-gf (still my business partner and best friend) who used to have these worries about me, even though we were both working together. I was like don't worry about me, I'm fine -it was always she who needed to eat. She kind of put it onto me. Eventually, she'd get up and cook herself food. But she was more like me. She was driven to work too.

Now I'm with a woman who's the opposite. She'll come over for the weekend and sit there quietly for 8 hours while I work and the whole time I know she's starving or bored and I feel like a shitty boyfriend. She'll be reading a book or texting her friends and in the back of my mind I'm like, uh, why are you in my house? Like, you could have this much fun in a dentist's waiting room. You think you're not experiencing aloneness but you don't know how to be alone with someone else so we're in this situation where I have a knot in my stomach because all I want to do is work, and you have a knot because you're waiting for me to say something to you. This is not how it was with my ex.

I think maybe if I read way between the lines, you and your bf haven't quite established how to truly be alone together and take care of your own needs (or he hasn't).

On the other hand, this is what it's like to have a pet. The more expensive the pet, the more care it requires. If you're a true nihilist and you don't even enjoy the company, maybe you just enjoy that extra little bit of stress it brings you to have to deal with their problems.

It's true that when my gf or my ex ever had problems, they lit a fire under me and gave me a reason to care; my work became more stressful, but it was in service to something that I finished it. Because there's some other, imminent problem in my life, in the form of another human being who needs my attention. People with children can probably attest to this, although, thank God, I'm not one of them. They say it makes your life seem more meaningful. Occasionally that might be true.

Re: Procrastinatory Doom Loops

#117

Post by ckdarby »

asxd wrote: post #44

I had this issue with my first software job right out of college. I was unproductive for weeks, just due to culture shock and (shamefully) malaise. The procrastination snowballed. Luckily a fellow engineer eventually noticed, sat down with me, and recognized exactly what was going on. In the kindest way possible, he sat down behind me and basically made me finally start my next project. He stayed there with me for th…

Eventually that person couldn't be standing behind you making sure you were doing your work and at that point how did you make sure you were being productive?

Re: Procrastinatory Doom Loops

#119

Post by IAmYourDensity »

I've read lots of books (Eat That Frog, Getting Things Done, The Pomodoro Technique, The Now Habit) and tons of blog posts on procrastination and rarely do I find them very actionable (heh). Here's three techniques that work for me:

1. Baby Steps

2. Warp Speed

3. Multitask

__

Baby Steps

Do the simplest possible step to start the task, and repeat. For example, just open your word processor or IDE. Just write one sentence or prototype one function. Make a list of five topics for an essay or five requirements for a new block of code. If you get going, great. If not, look for the next baby step to move forward.

Warp Speed

Sometimes Baby Steps is not enough motivation if I really find a task distasteful or my perfectionism has set in, so I challenge myself to complete the task in some ridiculously small amount of time. For example, can I complete this 10 page essay in ... 15 minutes? Of course, spending days thinking of ideas that will win a Pulitzer is now out of the question. I have 30 seconds to outline the paper. 1.5 minutes to write each page. It's a mad dash of stream-of-consciousness to try to finish. At the end of 15 minutes, I'm usually left with either: a) a pretty terrible paper but a mental outline of ideas that I can make good by multiple re-writes, b) an actually submittable paper because I forgot about the 15min deadline an hour ago and I've been in flow the entire time. The key to Warp Speed is that I'm allowed throw away the first, second, or third drafts and start again with the ideas that were gained. Another technique that works with Warp Speed is to imagine yourself hitting SEND on the email to your professor, with essay attached, or hitting submit on the PR to your team with the new code you've written. Imagining the reaction of others helps me focus on what is absolutely essential to the project. What is the minimum level of quality that I need to avoid embarrassing myself? Once I have that, I can continue to iterate and improve if the project is worth it, or submit and move on if it's not worth my time.

Multitask

I know. I know. Multitasking is bad. But sometimes I get blocked on a Very Important Project because what I really want to be working on are some pie-in-the-sky almost-certainly-waste-of-time projects like designing a new programming language from scratch, or creating a new video game, or researching Machine Learning. But it would be totally irresponsible to work on those projects before the Very Important Project, and I really don't want to work on that, so I'll just spin here in procrastination land playing video games and watching Youtube for 10 hours. Instead, I multitask. I open a window and start prototyping the new programming language, I open another window and start brainstorming game ideas, and I open a third window and start working on Very Important Project. After I've made some progress or hit a lull on the fun projects I switch to the VIP and work on that. And now that I'm started on the VIP, and it is very important, I'll just finish it off quickly so I can focus on the fun projects.

Re: Procrastinatory Doom Loops

#120

Post by Moru »

jacquesm wrote: post #98
VBprogrammer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, having seen some of what you have done in the past, it seems almost absurd to think of you struggling with procrastination.

That's an interesting observation: yes, I do get stuff done, in the end. But the path to it is usually long, torturous and leads along many places that weren't the destination along the way and plenty of that could be avoided. And quite a few of my achievements are probably the result of procrastinating on something else! I wonder how the real achievers (Fabrice Bellard?) deal with these sort of things. And also: wha…

Pay someone to do the VAT filing for you. There are people that actually likes to play with that stuff so why don't you do the things you enjoy doing? Ok, I have no idea how much work the VAT stuff is, I'm not from US. But in general, remove the unneeded stress from life and enjoy it instead. Don't try to be a success, it's OK to just get along with life and family. Live on one salary if you can, split the time 50/50 between the two of you and just live cheap instead. Spend the extra time together with family doing things you enjoy.
Post reply on HN