This is basically a stripped-down article version of The Now Habit [0], without the good bits, such as guilt-free play, the idea that you should set aside time to do whatever without constantly thinking "I should be working", or the Unschedule, where you mark down the times you actually <i>did</i> good work.<p>[0]: <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination-Guilt-Free-ebook/dp/B001QNVP7M/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.co.uk/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination...</a>
Motivation isn't an eternal flame waiting to be discovered, it can be a daily practice of reminding similar to showering and eating, if we don't do it, our thoughts and feelings tend to stink.<p>This article stuck out to me in providing relatively clear and immediately applicable strategies that could be a lot closer to a first principles of addressing procrastination.<p>Knowledge is not power, acting on knowledge is. Remembering to remind yourself to imagine the future feeling of accomplishment, building momentum with small items, and practicing forgiveness might be a realer challenge for many.<p>An interesting question that this article leads me to wonder is, how do others here remind themselves of their big picture, their why, that leads them to keep their flywheel spinning?
Interesting.<p>I have difficulties with procrastination as well. I don't recall having met anyone in our realm who says they don't have some difficulties with it.<p>Generally, I agree with what the article is saying. I have found my own ties to procrastination and emotion; specifically anxiety, which the article touched on.<p>I think the suggested approach from the article is missing something that I have found to be important for personal growth and also applicable to startups: <i>you must be able to measure your progress</i>. The process of measuring the progress should be easy, if not automatic, and the ability to digest the measured progress should be just as easy.<p>My blog post from last week[1] shares my personal experience with how I've implemented the approach of measuring (and hopefully defeating) anxiety tied to my procrastination. I go about describing my process to turn those anxieties into actionable and measurable goals that sort of turned into my resolutions for the year.<p>[1] - <a href="http://randomdrake.com/2014/01/02/destroying-personal-anxiety-from-anxieties-to-actionable-and-measurable-2014-resolutions/" rel="nofollow">http://randomdrake.com/2014/01/02/destroying-personal-anxiet...</a>
The irony of all these procrastination articles appearing on HN is not lost on me. :-) For better or worse, the "Just get started" approach works best for me.
I am reminded of a simple diagram a therapist drew for me (on a whiteboard, no less): a triangle connecting "mood" to "thought" to "behavior" illustrating how the human mental state is a feedback system and that you can adjust one thing by applying pressure to another.<p>Sure, it is simple and obvious, but seeing it visualized that way, coupled with the idea of "mood hygiene" was helpful to me.
One of the causes of procrastination is perfectionism. The fear of not meeting your own high standards probably affects HN readers more than anything else.
Dr. Pychyl advises procrastinators to "just get started, and make the threshold for getting started quite low."<p>That's like telling a depressed person to just feel better. I've tried a lot of things to help with procrastination but very little works, this is just another thing to try that maybe will or won't work.<p>Also, personally, I've never had the "suffering" from failing when I put things off, so it's hard to believe that this method would work for me :(
I just took the small comics from the sidebar, and put them as my desktop background image. I find they give particularly short but useful advice as to how to proceed once procrastination attempts to strike.
I was pretty disappointed in this article. Rather than offering any new insight or techniques, it was just a reiteration of well-known techniques, each of which I've personally found to be barely helpful at best, and counter-productive at worst. The "time travel" technique in particular is actually just my default behavior, and only serves to reinforce my ugh fields.<p>Beyond that, all the article offers is a piece of jargon to name the obvious motivation behind procrastination: doing something to distract you from an unpleasant obligation.
This is very primitive advice.<p>We should meditate on why surfing Facebook is "bad mood repair" but forgiving yourself is "good mood repair." If it's bad to feel good, maybe forgiving yourself is just another way to dodge your responsibilities? The advice presented in the article offers no escape from this psychological tangle, except projecting yourself into an imagined future, where your present work is done -- but you don't feel any more like working (so start now).<p>The truth is, feeling good only helps. You should feel as good as possible, and make time for the things you enjoy. Be understanding with yourself, and feel free to just watch TV sometimes. At the same time, dial down your anxiety and worry. This is helped by not racing to react when you feel anxious -- to distract or fix or rationalize -- but just breathing deeply and carrying as best you can. Finally, get in touch with who you are helping <i>now</i>, who you are being now, how you are serving your values and what's important to you now, and what progress you can make now -- not in the future. Get in touch with your motivations and what you care about. If you don't care enough about something in your life, try not doing it. You can choose your life and your work (at least, once you get out of school). Don't clean your car, then. Oh, that bothers you? Enough to clean a car? Sit with your anxiety for a bit and observe it without reacting. It will pass if you face it head on.<p>Time management is also a whole skill unto itself, like math or small talk. It takes practice. There are no bad activities (among the usual ones cited, like surfing the Internet), only bad uses of time. And you're in charge of your time. What do you want to achieve with it? If your ideal life is to sit around all day and you can afford it,
go for it.
I'm so bad with procrastinating, in fact I'm avoiding work right now! I've found virtually all the books and blog posts useless, but this one really made me think differently.. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Self-Discipline-10-days-Thinking-Doing/dp/1880115107" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Self-Discipline-10-days-Thinking-Doing...</a>
Actually, I had a lot more productive day when HN was down then when I'm reading the wall street journal's 1500 words on the science of mood repair, plus all the comments on it. And participating in writing my own.
Definitely some good stuff in there, a lot of those are techniques that I've discovered on my own. But the big problem in talking about procrastination is that it's caused by so many different things. It might be anything from small fears to 30,000 foot problems in your life which may intractable in the short term. Assuming no true pathology, the key is really self-awareness and stopping the productivity drumbeat long enough to peel back a few of the top layers of your own psychology.
No book has helped me overcome procrastination more than Steven Pressfield's "The War of Art":<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-War-Art-Through-Creative/dp/1936891026" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/The-War-Art-Through-Creative/dp/193689...</a><p>Instead of overanalyzing procrastination, he identifies the invisible but real force of Resistance and how to deal with it.<p>EDIT: grammar
In my case procrastination is/was a symptom of perfectionism. This article was an eyeopener for me: <a href="http://coastalcenter.org/overcoming-perfectionism/" rel="nofollow">http://coastalcenter.org/overcoming-perfectionism/</a> .
I find some of this advice to be really silly.<p>Telling someone with procrastination issues to "Just get started" or in other words "Stop procrastinating" seems as effective as telling someone with a smoking habit to "Just stop smoking".
What's bizarre about procrastination is how much it derives from irrelevant past experiences (negative ones) that, in truth, have little or nothing to do with the activity being procrastinated. Some failure or embarrassment that is hardly related to the activity at all gets dredged up, not always consciously, and becomes paralytic.<p>In the process of <i>doing</i> work, people are generally happy and can even get into a flowful state. That's even true for most people with mood problems-- if they can get themselves there. But the anticipation of work or change or even playful activity like exercise is often an anxiety-ridden negativity-fest. Cleaning an apartment isn't so bad; but the anticipation and feeling of having to do it brings forward all those negative emotions like, "how the fuck did I get to age <X> and still have to do my own cleaning? Why can't I get my goddamn shit together and take ownership of my career?" It's much easier to just do the damn cleaning: even high-status, rich people have to do it sometimes, it's not a big deal. But the mental and social prison of "having to" clean makes that menial task 10 times worse than it really deserves to be.<p>I think that people have to reprogram themselves to "just do" instead of fussing about how their work will be evaluated and how long it will take and what might go wrong. That kind of nonsense makes it hard to do anything.<p>My suspicion is that procrastination (like depression) was adaptive to our primordial existences as pack animals in hierarchies that were brutally enforced. Depression (low libido, physical lethargy) is an adaptation to low status and scarcity-- inappropriate to modern life, but it probably helped our ancestors survive periods of transient low status. Procrastination also seems to be something that we evolved to defer ambitions (especially while young, and unable to succeed in a physical fight) during periods of low status so we could survive into better times. It's the "I'm not ready to do that" reflex. It's incredibly maladaptive to modern life-- in which social status is mostly undefined and a little <i>internal</i> confidence can go a long way-- but given our "winner-take-all" society in which most people lose, it's not surprising that it's at epidemic levels.
Funny how this is the latest research findings. It seems so obvious. I guess we all are so distracted, numb and unconscious we don't even know ourselves anymore.<p>EDIT: I'm pointing the finger at myself as well.