The Psychology of Dreaded Tasks

Additionally..<p>1. Give yourself permission to just try, for a little while<p>2. use fear-setting for really tough moments<p>A technique that I&#x27;ve found helpful when dealing with anxious thoughts is I become mindful of the anxious feeling, realize what I&#x27;m feeling anxious about, and then give myself <i>permission to just try</i>, regardless of the outcome. I&#x27;ll explicitly granting myself permission to &quot;just try&quot; and even throw in &quot;just for a little while, see how things go&quot;. This at times has turned into a productive, multi-hour session.<p>Tim Ferriss talks about a technique use to confront fears, called &quot;fear setting&quot; [1]. Essentially, I put together a 3-column table and think through the worst that can possibly happen. It helps me think about risks and realize what I can handle. This helps to manage worry.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tim.blog&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;15&#x2F;fear-setting&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tim.blog&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;15&#x2F;fear-setting&#x2F;</a>

The best way I found of actually getting through the dread tasks is to cheat. Ask for help from someone else (presumably they do not have the mental block).<p>1. Identify the dread tasks.<p>2. Ask someone who cares (about you) to help you.<p>3. Do them together, with the other person not letting you get distracted.<p>For big tasks asking other people to help you chunk them also helps. After that avoid thinking about whole thing and just look at the small chunks.

In the &quot;Learning How to Learn&quot; course, that was mentioned in the MOOC-discussion a while back, they suggest tackling this by focusing on process over product and tying a reward to it:<p>&quot;I&#x27;m just gonna sit here and do taxes for 25 minutes and then eat some chocolate&quot; rather then &quot;I&#x27;m going to finish my taxes&quot;.<p>The reasoning is that by removing the pressure of completing the whole task you can sometimes convince yourself to stop procrastinating.<p>If that still doesn&#x27;t do it for you then at least you have the chocolate.

I must say, just last night I had a bit of coding to start and it seemed like I was being asked to kill a kitten or something, the thought was so incredibly depressing.<p>I forced myself, through the resistance, just to start.<p>I said I&#x27;d do it for an hour then I could stop. Note that this was beginning a new, big task. If I was in the middle of it I probably wouldn&#x27;t have had such a huge urge to resist it.<p>Anyway, once I started it was cripplingly painful for about 5 minutes. Then I couldn&#x27;t stop for the next few hours - I think because the thing I was working on was incrementally rewarding - every 5 minutes or so I could see the progress I was making.<p>Also, it helped a lot that I put on an interesting podcast that makes me feel great.<p>I suppose my point is that this guy is pretty correct, at least for me: it was pain I was avoiding, and just starting was the biggest hurdle.<p>I&#x27;m a bit ADD-ish, I think, so YMMV.

There is a point not addressed here. Some tasks are distasteful by nature, like cleaning manure out of horse stalls. It’s disgusting but I don’t have a problem with it. Other tasks are neutral by nature but infuriating by their very existence. Taxes fit into this category, even when owed a refund. Any kind of job&#x2F;school application or process that takes a lot more of my time than the person who will evaluate it. I know that negative thought will come, and I don’t want to have them. Also, there are arbitrary decisions to be made that are irreversible and can have huge negative consequences if done wrong. These are also avoided. The idea that a task is avoided because it is distasteful by nature is really saying something about the simplicity and inconsequentiality of it.

This is particularly hard for people with ADD. That said, I think it’s potentially dangerous to give advice that’s in any way titled the “Psychology of...” without actually basing it on evidence and the literature because people might confuse it for rigorous or clinically appropriate guidance. I recognize you couch this in your experience, but if you’re going to write about something that in anyway dovetails with a pathology, it could be helpful to include at least some even abridged literature review, since this will be viewed by thousands (given you’re a shoe-in for HN’s front page).

I&#x27;ve a theory for nasty work, the &quot;Bikini Wax Theory of Nasty Work&quot;. The theory goes like this, a bikini wax and nasty work are exactly the same because:<p>1 - Nasty work and bikini waxes are both painful to do.<p>2 - you must move decisively and quickly for both nasty tasks and waxes, getting it over as quickly and competently as possible.<p>3 - if you fail to execute #2 properly the results will be a bloody and even more painful mess, likely taking more time to achieve the desired results.<p>I&#x27;ve shared this theory with close colleagues. Nobody has told me I&#x27;m wrong to my face.

Some good mind hacks here, but I have to say that changing wording from &quot;do my taxes&quot; to &quot;organize my finances&quot; is not a way to reduce dread.<p>I have done my taxes about 18 times in my life. I have yet to organize my finances.

Does anyone else have <i>an absolute dread of FIXING &#x2F; REPAIRING something?</i> And a solution for this dread?<p>Sometimes I&#x27;m at a point where I would put my hand in a running blender together with a live kitten or something painful and horrible like that, just to get <i>NOT to have to FIX something that needs fixing</i> and instead to <i>START something new</i> or to <i>completely replace or refactor something</i> or to <i>buy something new and set it up in the place of the thing needing fixing</i>... anything, just <i>not repairing</i>, <i>not debugging</i>, <i>not fixing</i> or <i>not optimizing</i> one more little half&#x2F;broken thing.<p>The only thing I similarly dread is &quot;going the last mile&quot; from 80% to 100% and finishing any project&#x2F;task, but for this at least I have a big bag of tricks that works most of the time.<p>But fixing &#x2F; repairing instead of replacing something or starting with something completely new... This is HELL for me. Even visually, a blank piece of paper or a blank screen pumps me up with energy. But when I see something already half-working &#x2F; half-written but know that there are some serious bugs&#x2F;defects that I need to hunt down and repair somewhere in that. It sometimes fills me with so much dread that my subconscious makes me &quot;forget&quot; that that task exists, or forget what its components are so I end up miss-estimating by factors of up to 100x (with obviously horrific consequences for everyone&#x27;s budget and sanity).

When I was a little child I used to hate going for a bath, but really enjoyed being in the bath, and didn&#x27;t want to leave. I remember thinking to myself then, &quot;why do I hate getting in the bath when it&#x27;s so nice in it?!&quot;<p>I still don&#x27;t know why, and it&#x27;s still both amusing and puzzling when I encounter similar things with coding and other tasks as a grown up.

Essential reading on this topic: &quot;The War of Art&quot; by Steven Pressfield <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1936891026&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1...</a>

This sounds nice, but given that the title is &quot;The Psychology of Dreaded Tasks&quot;, I&#x27;m saddened there&#x27;s essentially no reference to psychological findings. The references to the brain in the article are completely unreferenced. They sound fine given what I know about predictive processing, but I can&#x27;t really tell whether they&#x27;re just a nice sounding story, or something scientific. There a lot of psychological work on procrastination (I&#x27;m not sure how much neuroscience there is, but there&#x27;s bound to be some).<p>This post would have been less impressive but more honest without the veneer of psychological authority.

I created a terminator script at work. It shutdowns my system if progress.txt is not updated in the next 3 minutes. If I am dreading any task, I launch this. All I have to do is make <i>any</i> progress and record it in the progress.txt file. It forces me to focus.<p>Shutting down the system is not a life threatening situation but it is annoying and a minor inconvenience. Especially since it takes a few minutes to restart the system and load all the applications.

Personal gripe, but he just had to mention coffee, didn&#x27;t he?<p>Are there any folks out there who like to get difficult things done without caffeine?<p>edit: I guess not.<p>edit #2: You&#x27;re sending me mixed messages, Hacker News.

I have been doing that for years form me and for others(managing people) so they do not procrastinate with the team like they will do if alone. I do that without telling them I am doing that.<p>I will add some things I consider very important:<p>Use paper, write things down. Dividing a big task means nothing if you have no external memory you could trust to free the brain short term memory but you could recover it later. Paper today is the cheapest and more advanced external memory there is.<p>You could also use a tape recorder if you prefer audio memory.<p>After creating small sub task(tactics) from your general strategic thinking, put a checklist square near it. When you finish the task, check it.<p>Every hour of deep work, mark it on a calendar like a prisoner does with sticks. This provides visual feedback for your brain of your accomplishments, specially with hard tasks that takes months to complete.<p>The word for managing to do dread task is &quot;reframing&quot; into something that is important and positive for you.<p>Of course if you have money and power you could delegate most of the dreaded task, like googlers do with most of their domestic chores.<p>There are more things but the important thing is that you need practice, practice and practice until you get it. And like in anything else you will learn it much much faster if you personally know someone who &quot;gets it&quot; and learn from this person directly.<p>I have met some &quot;naturals&quot; of this processes in my life but I am not. I developed this skill over a long period of time, making me super productive compared to when I started.

This article assumes you&#x27;re just going to follow the advice it gives. If you can in fact do that, you&#x27;re half-way there.<p>But some people have strong resistance to doing anything that will get them closer to the dread task, and will instead distract themselves (say with video games or any number of other distractions), or by doing some other less-dreaded task, etc.<p>There could be some underlying cause for such resistance which no amount of visualization, coaching, coffee, or workouts could touch.<p>This is where working with the right therapist might help. &quot;Right therapist&quot; being the key phrase there. There are so many different therapists out there, and so many different approaches to therapy too. What might work for one person might not for another.

&gt;&gt; Break down a big idea into small bits.<p>I&#x27;m not getting this. Of course you would start by breaking down the task. This is what you do with every task. You don&#x27;t just gulp down an entire task without planning ahead or thinking about steps. So this is no different than saying &quot;now start doing the task&quot;. It is silly self-encouragement, trying to trick your brain into thinking that you did something to alleviate the problem. You did not. You just started the dreaded task and made yourself focus.<p>I am tired of seeing these kinds of &quot;advices from experts&quot; online and in self development books.

The highlighted sections on this page drive me crazy. They really interrupt the flow of the text.

There are so many articles on productivity on the internet that I&#x27;m starting to wonder whether there isn&#x27;t a deeper problem at hand here.

Coffee will give you a boost for a limited amount of time, then you feel worse then before. I still drink coffee, but I don&#x27;t do the morning routine anymore. I have energy in the morning, the afternoon is when I need the boost.<p>Working out and the resulting endorphin rush is great, but once again that&#x27;s a temporary fix. You probably got a couple hours of the endorphin rush until you&#x27;re more tired than you normally would be. Don&#x27;t overdo the workouts, know when the best time for you to workout is, and get plenty of rest.

My instinct is always to talk about my goals for the reasons listed in this post. But research suggests that talking about goals makes it less likely that you&#x27;ll follow through: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;melissa-chu&#x2F;announcing-your-goals-makes-you-less-likely-to-ach.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;melissa-chu&#x2F;announcing-your-goals-makes-...</a>

I&#x27;m a big believer in attacking a big problem after a workout and a good coffee. Also set a time for it. &quot;8 am tomorrow, I&#x27;m doing this thing&quot;<p>After a work out, I can clean the entire house, pumping music in my ears, for example.

The idea of a prediction being painful matches my experience. I never thought of it that way, but now that I do, that makes things a lot easier. (I meditate, so just knowing about this helps me a lot).

I&#x27;m avoiding a dreaded task by being on hn right now...