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Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

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Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#11

Post by bitops »

X-Istence wrote: post #8
AngryParsley wrote: post #2

They forgot #7: Do not read articles of the form "n ways to do X". Also enable noprocrast on Hacker News, and use a time-tracking tool like RescueTime.

noprocast doesn't work for me. I have Hacker News added to my "Top Sites" and Safari likes to refresh those every so often. When I did have it enabled I was locked out more often than not making it particularly useless for me. What I have found is that I have started finding a lot of the articles that make the frontpage are boring and I have naturally started visiting less and less.

That's funny, I've had the opposite experience with the lockout. I figure that if I set the refresh to be reasonably low, it turns into more of an odds thing whether or not I can read HN. And, after a while, I've stopped needing discipline to come looking here.

Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#13

Post by timwiseman »

tmh88j wrote: post #5

The "startup kind of person" is ambitious so I'm not sure how many people that applies to. An ambitious procrastinator...is that an oxymoron?

No...many ambitious people are also perfectionists, and perfectionists are often horrible procrastinators as they wait for things to line up perfectly or wait to refine it one more time before releasing, putting off the next phase over and over.

Also, one very dangerous form of procrastination is doing real work...just work that is less important than what you should be doing. Paul Graham touches on this at http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#14

Post by pbreit »

I like Marc Andreessen's post on productivity, especially "structured procrastination" where procrastination is actually encouraged (there's a good chance that the things you procrastinate on aren't all that important).

http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-pers...

Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#16

Post by antoinehersen »

My favorite way to procrastinate is to read online article about procrastination. I also bought a book about it, one of the few I never finished. If you procrastinate too much there is usually a reason for it, try to find out why, and what you can do about it. For me it is ambitious project that are ill defined. Breaking them in smaller task that can become daily achievements helps a lot.

Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#18

Post by georgieporgie »

TillE wrote: post #17

I still believe in Merlin Mann's "First, care." http://www.43folders.com/2010/02/05/first-care All these little tips and tricks are fine. But they're usually treating the symptoms rather than examining the cause.

For as long as you know in your heart that what you're making or doing matters, and, consequently, for as long as you accept and embrace the immutable laws of scarcity, your options for maintaining focus will, like Frank's perfect answer, remain stunningly obvious.

Those are very true observations, but the problem is, how do you care? We're told things like, "do what you love," and " follow your passions," but that's just not realistic in an adult, professional world. Writing code is awesome for the first 10% of a project. After that, it usually becomes a grind to complete all the uninteresting things.

Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#20

Post by s00pcan »

georgieporgie wrote: post #19

7. Always have something worse to do. It's amazing how much you'll get done trying to avoid that one thing you're really, really dreading.

Sometimes I will actually clean stuff just to avoid working on something I hate more, and it's actually almost fun. So this is definitely true from my experience.

It's also amazing what you'll get done when the power is out or you don't have internet, but that's almost impossible for me nowadays thanks to my smartphone.

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