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Structured Procrastination (1995)

structuredprocrastination.com

141–150 of 167 posts

Re: Structured Procrastination (1995)

#141
As someone who procrastinates, I've intuited this exact thing over time. I need a dozen open threads at once -- unfinished software projects, unfinished books, work projects, areas that I'm just thinking about, topics to learn. At any given time I might pick up any of those threads and make progress on it. Maybe I might spend a few days on it, maybe a few minutes. But over the long term, I do finish them.

It helps to maintain extensive and detailed context notes so that doing this context-switching is easy.

Many great individual works in history were not produced in a "straight line" by the creator just sitting down and powering through them. They were produced as I described, in disconnected sprints over years and decades.

Re: Structured Procrastination (1995)

#142
post #102

I'm doing the same, or at least trying to do it. Worst periods for me were when I had one clear, important goal, not particularly hard but hairy, and nothing else to do, sometimes because I myself cleared it up. I could spend months doing nothing useful , and end up very, very tired and burnt up. I also several times had a conversation with managers, whom I told that I'd rather work on something very urgent, or other…

This is exceptionally early days (hours really), and perhaps over sharing a little personally but I found the same things hard and easy that you describe for working - personally I would work either by rapidly jumping between things (becoming the fix-it guy or go-to person for short things, I was totally fine being constantly interrupted because my head is doing that anyway), or working when exhausted so I found it h…

You shouldn't be evaluating your diagnosis and the effects of a drug upon it, to the point of advocacy, within hours.

Your perception that you have been helped is not coming from the drug, it's coming from the conditioning before you got to the point of trying it. I was willing to put up with a lot of bullshit that would have to be rolled back if RFK just stopped prescription drug advertisements, which are definition targeted to the weakest people in their weakest moments, but that immediately disappeared from the agenda.

Re: Structured Procrastination (1995)

#143

Never in my life have I wanted a single line of CSS more! To the author: humans with large monitors can't read text that spills across those entire monitors! Add a max-width: 1000px or something .

(1995)

New enough to have Google Ads embedded!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45492546

Re: Structured Procrastination (1995)

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like there's a reason evolution chose for ADHD to exist. Well, evolution is not an actor. It didn't 'choose' anything. It's just that people (organisms?) with ADHD have not failed to reproduce in the past, so it still exists.

This is the bell curve meme. Evolution chose -> NOOOO, evolution doesn't "choose" anything -> Evolution chose Personification of natural selection is a common way biologists speak about evolution.

Yes, we have an entire part of the language for talking about what actors do. And we have nothing at all to talk about how non-acting structures mold complex systems.

Re: Structured Procrastination (1995)

#145
Related. Others?

Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33515388 - Nov 2022 (4 comments)

Structured Procrastination (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30292440 - Feb 2022 (37 comments)

Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24884347 - Oct 2020 (9 comments)

Structured Procrastination (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941717 - April 2018 (38 comments)

Structured Procrastination: Do Less and Deceive Yourself - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13617083 - Feb 2017 (78 comments)

Structured Procrastination: Do Less, Deceive Yourself, and Succeed Long-Term - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10151481 - Sept 2015 (79 comments)

Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2514972 - May 2011 (2 comments)

Procrastination and Perfectionism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287817 - March 2011 (29 comments)

Anti-Akrasia Technique: Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=939656 - Nov 2009 (4 comments)

Structured Procrastination - "the art of making procrastination work for you" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=212590 - June 2008 (3 comments)

Re: Structured Procrastination (1995)

#146
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exceptionally early days (hours really), and perhaps over sharing a little personally but I found the same things hard and easy that you describe for working - personally I would work either by rapidly jumping between things (becoming the fix-it guy or go-to person for short things, I was totally fine being constantly interrupted because my head is doing that anyway), or working when exhausted so I found it h…

You shouldn't be evaluating your diagnosis and the effects of a drug upon it, to the point of advocacy , within hours. Your perception that you have been helped is not coming from the drug, it's coming from the conditioning before you got to the point of trying it. I was willing to put up with a lot of bullshit that would have to be rolled back if RFK just stopped prescription drug advertisements, which are definitio…

What on earth makes you think you could know what's going on in someone else's brain with such confidence.

Wild.

Re: Structured Procrastination (1995)

#147
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the "mature" coping strategy you've found, then? Did therapy get you to stop procrastinating?

A coping strategy is something you turn to to "cope" with a problem when the underlying cause of your problem is beyond your direct control. If you are in a position to address the underlying cause directly, I've found it to be a better option than "coping". Therapy was a big part of identifying the problems. Ultimately, as a sibling commenter mentioned, task avoidance is often a sign of (usually very well disguised…

My problem is that I know the underlying cause is anxiety, and I still can't bring myself to do anything about it. Like, I have to book a flight for travel in a month. I don't much like traveling so I don't do much of it, and I'm traveling by myself. That anxiety, coupled with my anxiety from flying, have had me planning to book this flight for over two months unsuccessfully. There's a good chance I'll just make up some excuse to not go, even though I really, really want to. The anxiety is literally crippling.

Re: Structured Procrastination (1995)

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't be evaluating your diagnosis and the effects of a drug upon it, to the point of advocacy , within hours. Your perception that you have been helped is not coming from the drug, it's coming from the conditioning before you got to the point of trying it. I was willing to put up with a lot of bullshit that would have to be rolled back if RFK just stopped prescription drug advertisements, which are definitio…

What on earth makes you think you could know what's going on in someone else's brain with such confidence. Wild.

Likely because of own experience and shared experience of others?

Medication here is not exactly new.

Re: Structured Procrastination (1995)

#149
post #33

Over the years I have become more or less convinced that I have adult ADHD. The overlap in symptoms are too difficult to leave unacknowledged. But, at the same time I have been procrastinating on getting myself diagnosed. Oh, well.

Thing with adult diagnoses for these is that most adults have adapted and are managing fine. But, the adults I've seen that did end up getting a diagnosis were no longer managing fine. I theorize there's two factors, one is family life - where you can't do your own decompression or coping as much anymore because you are Needed. The other is mental and physical resilience, once you're past 30 this starts to decline so…

In the UK, currently, adult ADHD care is basically broken.

The NHS will accept you on waiting lists, if you're in one or two lucky regions, you have to wait a few weeks, otherwise you have to wait years. If you are in a very unlucky region, you can randomly get dropped from the waiting list, and effectively barred from ever getting back on it, because someone looked at the referral and diagnosed you as not having ADHD. Under the NHS you are not entitled to a second opinion (hence why you don't get to go back on the list).

So the NHS has this system called "Right to Choose" (RTC) where private care providers can register to offer services to NHS patients, charged to the NHS. You go to your GP and you say: "Hi, I noticed that if I go on the NHS waiting list for an ADHD diagnosis, it's uncertain if it will come before or after the heat death of the universe. Can you please refer me to this private provider of my choice instead?" And if your GP knows what RTC is, you get on the private provider's waiting list which is often between to 2w and 1y.

Cool, so that solves it right? Okay, but what happens once you're diagnosed? If you decide to go with the medication route (somehow it's either Meds or therapy but not both - what?), they give you a prescription. You take it to your local pharmacy to fulfil, and you fulfil it at the NHS prescription cost (currently just under £10 per prescription). You do this for a few months, trying different things until you find something that works for you. Now what?

Most providers will tell you to move to a "Shared Care Agreement". They contact your GP and say: "Hi, this person needs meds, they're stable on these meds, can you take over prescribing them." and for a while some GPs would be like: "Sure, that seems like the right thing to do in this situation."

Recently the advice has been for GPs to drop SCAs for ADHD medication. Why? I honestly have no complete picture. But the gist seems to be that it costs the GP practice time and money, that the NHS doesn't reimburse. IDFK. To me it sounds like people with ADHD are being used as a pawn in some idiotic game of chess between the regional NHS authorities and whatever higher-ups set the budgets for those regional NHS authorities. The current move is "People with ADHD get fucked+". I guess we're waiting for the reply from the higher ups. This is a conference chess game and who knows if the privately owned Royal Mail is going to actually deliver the letters in a timely fashion.

So now people who have been stable on medication for months to years are suddenly being told that they have 6 months to get an NHS diagnosis (which in most cases takes at least a year) or switch to a private provider that the practice likes (whose waiting list is now almost inevitably close to a year because everyone else is in the same shoes).

So now that you've successfully managed to deal with a bunch of bullshit, get a diagnosis, deal with the pains of titration etc, you are suddenly told you have 6 months before you'll undoubtedly become unproductive and struggle to hold your job.

And on the Nth day, the devil started creating Hell, and then stopped 5 minutes later because he realised that the UK already existed and would suffice.

Re: Structured Procrastination (1995)

#150

If you truly enjoy the procrastination as opposed to fighting it or distracting to another thing - sooner or later you'll want to do the thing you were supposed to do. Try that out. There is a reason why you don't want to do something and that fundamentally has to do with your mental relationship to the task - the repetition fatigue, the way you think and feel about it etc. needs a reset and enjoying the idle procras…

This is great if you have that freedom, but the person that wrote the article needs to do tasks for their job; other people depend on it. Same with me and my job, I am paid to perform a specific task at the moment. Same with people in a family situation, you can't procrastinate daily routines like picking your kids up from school... which leads to procrastinating about everything else because you have something comin…

Yeah, what I do is make use of the freedom fully when I can and that way it's like I have fulfilled my quota for procrastination and it's easy sailing for the stuff then I need to do :D - complicated and works for me but YMMV. Feels intuitive to me lol.
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