Structured Procrastination (1995)

This post gives me hope as someone with ADD. I have a MTHFR mutation and cross-dominant eye, with a little autism spectrum, psychosis, OCD tendencies, depression, injury, sleep apnea, and insomnia.

I recommend eggs, spinach, potentially fasting, walking, and maybe some kind of fidget device.

I also recommend giving yourself a little slack.

If you’re like me, we don’t belong. We’re pirates when it comes to what’s expected of us. We don’t fit in. We’re made that way. We go all out until we can’t, and then we don’t until we do again. We’re hard on everything, but we care immensely and at the same time, we can’t feel. We exist to be that agent of randomness that does the unexpected thing that saves everyone that one time in a thousand.

I could do blue collar work, but preferably factory work.

He read it as a teenager, and it became part of his personal philosophy. And so he used it to avoid feeling responsible for his own priorities, and struggled in every role he had for years.

He routinely derailed projects and created chaos by switching away from projects as soon as they became mission-critical. And he demanded an infuriating amount of managerial attention.

His absolute brilliance and charisma made this far worse, as his attitude was inherently culture-setting. The more impressionable employees around him would inevitably become worse than useless, while the more senior, mature employees ended up hating working with him despite his incredible impact on the thing he was paying attention to at a given moment.

Be convinced of this article's ideas at your own risk.

Via therapy I’ve come to realise that the procrastination is ultimately driven by underlying anxiety. That anxiety comes from growing up in an environment where my ADHD frequently resulted in me being punished for not working the same way other children did, not completing tasks as expected, and generally struggling with school work despite being “intelligent”. In short being in an environment that simply didn’t accept it was possible to be “intelligent” and struggle with school life at the same time, and thus punished me for being “lazy”.

The procrastination becomes a coping mechanism to put off the expected punishment from attempting to do a task, and failing/struggling with it. Along with deep associations with those tasks being given by authority figures and having arbitrary deadlines.

The mature coping mechanism has been to confront the anxiety head on, which is much easier said than done, and working on the underlying causes of the anxiety via therapy, mindfulness, and other pretty standard mental health techniques. It’s hard work, and I fail often, but I’ve been failing less and less as time goes on.

The side effect of dealing with the anxiety directly is less procrastination. Not because I’m better at not procrastinating, but simply because I’m getting better at coping and dealing with the anxiety that triggers procrastination.