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Ask HN: Does procrastination advice help you?

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Re: Ask HN: Does procrastination advice help you?

#21

Post by bun_terminator »

blinding-streak wrote: post #18

Do a test for sleep apnea. I didn't realize I had apnea but my dad and brother had it, so I did a sleep test. Turns out I had severe apnea. I suffered from massive procrastination and focus problems in the couple years leading up to the test. Once I got a CPAP machine to sleep better, it made a profound change in my life. Mental acuity, productivity, mood, everything was far better. Sleep is no joke. For about a mont…

I read this all the time. But man, CPAP machines are so ridiculous. That's a high barrier to take for treatment. I wish there was a better way

Re: Ask HN: Does procrastination advice help you?

#22

Post by jzb »

Procrastination may be a symptom of a lot of things - anxiety, ADHD, etc. Nobody on HN is going to be able to diagnose you, though - you should probably talk to someone who can actually diagnose you and possibly prescribe treatment if your experiences with procrastination are having a negative impact on your life.

Do you procrastinate about everything? Specific things? If you're just procrastinating about specific things there might be reasons that won't be solved by videos or whatnot. e.g. - like, do you turn things in last-minute at work because you get a lot of negative feedback? People develop defense strategies to avoid or at least defer painful experiences.

Or you could be suffering from a strong case of "I find zero meaning in doing these things." Coping strategies and medications are unlikely to help here.

If you really suspect that you have ADHD, depression, anxiety or something else - talk to a professional. (Mental health professional, not just any professional...) If you do have one (or more) of those things, you probably have problems aside from procrastination that may be helped by getting treatment.

Re: Ask HN: Does procrastination advice help you?

#23

Post by blinding-streak »

bun_terminator wrote: post #21
blinding-streak wrote: post #18

Do a test for sleep apnea. I didn't realize I had apnea but my dad and brother had it, so I did a sleep test. Turns out I had severe apnea. I suffered from massive procrastination and focus problems in the couple years leading up to the test. Once I got a CPAP machine to sleep better, it made a profound change in my life. Mental acuity, productivity, mood, everything was far better. Sleep is no joke. For about a mont…

I read this all the time. But man, CPAP machines are so ridiculous. That's a high barrier to take for treatment. I wish there was a better way

Yeah it's a thing. But the alternative was to continue on the road to darkness. At least if you get a test done, you can understand what the problem might be, or might not be.

Re: Ask HN: Does procrastination advice help you?

#25

Post by dr_dshiv »

Worrying about procrastination makes it worse. The energy you get from procrastination is what you want to learn to harness. Use it to get other things done. Eventually the original task looks appealing. But don’t worry about! Let your interests be drawn in different directions.

Just don’t watch tv or play games, or if you do, new ones—and enjoy it fully.

Re: Ask HN: Does procrastination advice help you?

#28

Post by arocks »

No it really didn't help much. There are a number of reasons. A tip or a hack cannot solve what is essentially an emotion regulation problem. You probably don't procrastinate on all tasks. For example you can probably read reddit or play games all day. But you dread even starting some tasks. It might be due to multiple reason: past failures, critical feedbacks etc. You will need to introspect and solve that complicated emotion.

Of course, if you notice a broad pattern in every part of your life please consider professional help.

Re: Ask HN: Does procrastination advice help you?

#29

Post by juancn »

Procrastination can be bad if pathological, but it's a great heuristic in the absence of information (close to optimal).

I think people over think it, causing excessive anxiety to themselves.

Why is it a good evolved strategy? Because of uncertainty:

If something is due at some deadline in the future, the further we're from that deadline, the larger the chance that whatever the task is won't be necessary. So waiting for it to become more certain and do something else makes sense in terms of reducing effort (energy expenditure).

Don't try to solve for it, just focus on getting the right things done and learn to let go of things that really don't matter.

I would recommend reading "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity".

It helped me a lot being successful at that point of my career where I had more things to do than time to do them (spoiler alert: you just don't do some shit, it really doesn't matter).

Re: Ask HN: Does procrastination advice help you?

#30

Post by corobo »

atemerev wrote: post #15
__rito__ wrote: post #10

There are precisely two realizations that helped me beat procrastination, but I know that these won't be helpful in every situation: - Totally keep motivation out of the equation. Depend fully on routine. Give yourself time to think before you commit to something. Totally reject it if you don't deem it worthy of doing. Once you make the decision, carve out slots in your calendar/text file for that task only. If it's…

Does not work for ADHD people, we can’t keep routines :( I have to remind myself to brush my teeth every day.

We might be shite at routine, but technology isn't!

Nothing wrong with having "brush teeth" as a daily task in Todoist or whatever flavour of todo app you click with! :)

The "Due" app on iOS is particularly nice for these sort of routine tasks - it'll keep notifying you every x minutes until you tell it you've done it

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