Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate • Hacker News Board

Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#21

Post by tagawa » Fri, Nov 04, 2011, 10:45 PM UTC

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.

Reminds me of this well-written article/confession: http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-ProcrastinateStill/93959

Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#22

Post by thoughtsimple » Fri, Nov 04, 2011, 10:52 PM UTC

Article added to instapaper...

Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#23

Post by kevinh » Fri, Nov 04, 2011, 10:56 PM UTC

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.

When I was still in college, nothing got me more motivated to clean my apartment than having that big project that I needed to work on.

Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#24

Post by highace » Fri, Nov 04, 2011, 11:40 PM UTC

One of the best ways I've found is to just start it! Tell yourself to just force out 10 minutes of whatever it is you're putting off. Once you've started, you'll want to see it through as much as you can.

There's proven theory behind why that method works... something about unfinished jobs fatiguing the mind.

Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#25

Post by ronmac » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 12:18 AM UTC

Looks like an insightful article. I'll read it later.

Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#26

Post by ysilver » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 1:02 AM UTC

7. Effective stress management.

Stress causes procrastination. Reduce stress to procrastinate less!

It seems like this is what the author was trying to get at. My favorite stress management methods: exercise, meditate, socialize.

Also, the first thing you do each day should be something low stress, achievable and important. ...gets you off on the right foot.

Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#27

Post by greenxc » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 1:20 PM UTC

I absolutely love the first point that they make to not start out with a regular routine of reading news or checking your email because I think many people (including myself) do it as a habit and then get completely sidetracked from it (especially email) leaving everything else on a side-burner until later. I didn't even think about this point until reading this. If you do something you dont want to do first you will have more motivation to get it done so that you can get back to your regular routine. Since people are creatures of habit its quite a big motivator.

Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#28

Post by greenxc » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 1:23 PM UTC

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?

Ambitious people can often times be the worst procrastinators because they can have an over inflated idea of what they can get done in a given day putting too much on their plate and thus leaving off many things for later days (often times the things they dread most which keep getting put off)...

Re: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

#29

Post by digamber_kamat » Sat, Nov 05, 2011, 1:29 PM UTC

One Noble prize given for the research that said best way to achieve your goals is by working on a goal to procrastinate even higher goal.

Secondly, I remember reading a research paper that said, whenever you have a task at hand which you want to procrastinate at least give it a start. Urge for postponing the task goes seriously down once you at least start doing it.