What do you do when procrastination becomes more serious and develops into life avoidance? (You procrastinate on everything, regardless of how you frame a task, regardless of the difficulty of it). In the extreme case procrastination isn't a obstacle to task competition but a learned habit of avoidance. It becomes an addiction in the same way that gambling, drugs, etc do. How do you beat an addiction whose very nature stops you from taking steps to beat it? Is it possible to quit procrastination cold turkey? If I want to stop smoking one way is to just stop and deal with it. If I want to stop procrastination do I have to be doing something productive 24/7? How do I attain the discipline for that?
I actually was at that stage a couple of years ago - I couldn't get anything done, which made me feel bad and depressed, which made me not get anything done. I couldn't even start doing something in a meaningful way.
It's such a bizarre thing to think back on that I can't even fully empathise with my former self..
This is what made me realise what was going on and rectify the situation, it all just "clicked". I had been doing this since early high school at the time.
The thing which really worked for me was realising that if I really work and try hard to work on something for even lie 10 minutes, I can get into a flow state and then it's easy. And from there it was just baby steps forward over a matter of a couple of months until I remember getting into a flow state all the time and thus my mind thinks of it as "easy" and it is.
This is exactly the same experience I had when I was younger and learning to feel confident talking to girls. It's really hard, but when I'd done it all the time for a while I have enough semi-recent memories of me doing the thing, that the thing seemed like an easy and normal thing to do.
There are many techniques that work. The one thing that does not work is relying on willpower. The two main ones that work for me are:
1) Make the path of least resistance the right one. Do a task together with others. Make it just a little bit harder to fall into procrastination. Split up the task into a five minute task and the rest, and do the five minute task. Once you get started it's often easy to continue.
2) Engage in conscious rational thinking. The main problem with procrastination is that you do it unconsciously. Try to form a mental habit where you evaluate what to do rationally. When you detect that you are going to procrastinate stop yourself and think on it for a minute. Is it really necessary to browse reddit, or can you bring yourself to do this five minute task and then browse reddit? Stop yourself and think that through and convince yourself, really convince yourself on an emotional level, that doing the 5 minute task first is what you want to do, not just what you feel you must do.
External pressures help. I've been trying to learn more about data science through MOOCs but starting a Masters degree is what really forces me to spend my time engaging with it rather than procrastinating. It's an extreme case but you can create external pressure for most things. For example if you're trying to stop procrastinating on a side project, set up a demo with someone in 2 weeks' time and you'll suddenly find it easier to focus.
They can but not always. I've used this tactic often, placing myself in difficult situations sometimes forces me to act when nothing else will.
One time I was out of work, all I had to do was make a few phone calls but I didn't. I kept putting it off until tomorrow; then tomorrow turned into next week, next month and so on...
To cut a long story short I stopped paying the rent thinking hassle from my landlord would force me into action. As luck turned out he had his own problems and collecting the rent wasn't a priority for him.
2 years later I was in a very embarrassing situation, as was he. It worked out OK that time but it shouldn't have.
If you suffer from procrastination FFS just accept you're acting out of fear and confront it. The longer you leave things the worse they get.
Fair enough, my advice and experience relate to things that aren't of such consequence as what not paying rent could cause.
"Just confront it" is something you have to figure out yourself as a procrastinator. You can read all the advice in the world, but you have to actually come to the realisation yourself that your only option is to "do things". Once you've done one thing you have a reference point to look back to.
I don't know if there is a way to be transformed overnight. But I have definitely achieved incremental improvement after reading a good book like The Procrastination Equation. You just keep iterating, like any skill.
> If I want to stop procrastination do I have to be doing something productive 24/7?
My instinct would be to do the opposite. Clear my schedule as much as possible and give myself only one, small thing that I need to accomplish for the day. From there, I'd build on each successful day and work up to the point where I'm taking on more satisfying expectations. If procrastination is my expectations of myself minus what I can get done, there's two ways to beat it...increasing action (your suggestion) or temporarily decreasing expectations.
To put another way, think about avoiding procrastination as a muscle, you can view becoming productive in the same way you'd view becoming strong. No one would suggest that a beginner go out and try to bench press 300lbs. Start with smaller weights and add weight as your strength increases.
One way of minimizing procrastination is to surround yourself with people who are more intelligent, more accomplished, and more success-driven than yourself. Being isolated (which was the case with me during my time at university), or associating with lazy, mediocre people, makes it easy to fall into the bad habit of idleness.
My experience shows that any kind of approach based on personal organization, use of productivity tools, time management methods, or attempts at habit formation using willpower will fail if there is no environmental pressure (in the form of friends and family, and not just institutions) to maintain a high level of personal productivity.
This is me. What's the reason behind this? Is this because it gives me the "I'm doing something productive" feeling while simultaneously doing nothing productive?
Lots of JS nowadays will have continuous and ongoing activity, keeping the CPU spinning even on tabs that are not in the foreground and actively being used.
The first talk under the Getting Things Done section mentioned something that's been a big help to me, but that I had never really thought about until he mentioned it. In a nutshell, it's that maintaining Inbox 0 forces you to make a decision on emails. Often the ones that will end up hanging around aren't anything that will require a lot of time to deal with or respond to, they're just the ones that require a decision that for whatever reason you don't want to make. Often though, you have all the information you need to make that decision, and putting it off doesn't help. Inbox 0 forces you to identify those situations, because you either need to deal with the email now, or explicitly decide when you will. Either way, it prevents you from just procrastinating on it because it's uncomfortable. Now that I think about it, I realize that has happened to me a ton since switching to Inbox 0, but I had never thought about it in those terms.
In general, by the way, I strongly recommend adopting a GTD system and sticking to it. Personally I use Evernote, based loosely on www.thesecretweapon.org. It took me a significant effort over a period of weeks to get it set up and make it a habit, but I literally can not imagine being able to do the things I do today without it. (If anyone's interested in setting something like that up, feel free to get in touch via my profile.)
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You are right, at a first glance it's just a list of resources. It's designed to break down 'how to minimize procrastination' into a subset of jobs, and then matching them with the best resources to solve them. Users can challenge the subset of jobs, and resources to achieve them. This way it will become easier to tackle procrastination over time.
Trying to do all of this at once will result in failure. Reducing procrastination boils down to changing your habits, which is _hard_.
One thing that's helped me is writing down what I do and observing it as a 3rd party. Writing the log daily is easy. Observing allows you to notice patterns over time, tweak a small habit, and observe if it's working. I wrote about it here -
http://ctrl-c.club/~ksikka/articles/02-write-it-down/
The Pomodoro Technique, which is mentioned on the page, has been helpful to me when I need to concentrate on solo work privately. I'd recommend it. It's an effective technique, and the only one I've discovered that's been significantly helpful.
To summarize: When you start on a task, set a timer for 25 minutes. Work exclusively on that task for 25 minutes, then take a 5 minute break and repeat. That unit is "a pomodoro". If any interruption occurs during the task, either an internal interruption like you find yourself reading email instead, or an external interruption like someone comes to your office, then you cancel that task and reset the 25 minute timer. Keep a record on paper of each pomodoro completed successfully, and each that's interrupted.
One of the primary values of the Pomodoro Technique is that it helps you be realistic about how much useful, productive time you can commit towards your tasks. Upon trying the Pomodoro Technique, a number of colleagues and I have discovered that one's reserve of fully focused time is typically around 2-4 hours per day when first starting to use it. (The remaining time per productive day is typically lighter work, like communication and coordination, and interruptions of various sorts. It's still work, but it's not fully focused work applied to the task you've chosen.) Over time you can adjust your schedule and manage your commitments to squeeze out more solo focused time, if that's what you desire. Some types of responsibilities naturally involve interruption and are not well-suited to this kind of solo focused work; however, whether that's the case or not, Pomodoro can help you be conscious about how much time you actually have available.
The Pomodoro Technique does not fight distraction directly. It's not like you're supposed to slap yourself when you cancel a pomodoro. Rather, you just keep track of it. This conscious awareness of your productivity engages a new part of the mind that helps rein in the short-term-rewards part. When you waste a day by doing work off and on while mostly procrastinating, it's sometimes easy to miss how much productive time you haven't spent. When you measure your productive time as "completed pomodoros", you can be realistic with yourself about your output, and make changes accordingly. It engages something new in your mind and enables metacognition that notices when you get distracted; when you are supposed to be completely focused on your task, and that notification pops up saying you have new messages, this metacognition will help remind you that you need to ignore it and turn it off, or else cancel the pomodoro. The long-term-rewards part of you that's powering the metacognition wants to complete the pomodoro. The act of recognizing those distractions will fight them. I suppose you could call it the Copenhagen Theory of Time Management. :-)
I found the Pomodoro technique as a life saver as well. The ability to focus also improved immensely with practicing daily meditation for 15 minutes. Both are now daily habits.
Somehow related, I've been looking to block certain websites on iOS for a while now and a free content blocker called "Refine" can do it easily.[1] You can enable just the custom list if you're already using a different content blocker.
This might be an idea to implement something like Stayfocusd, where you could define a list of sites to be blocked between a time period or certain days (if this is possible).
I still procrastinate even when I've got my use of reddit, twitter and facebook down to basically nothing.
Just HN is enough to kill off most of the productive work time, so if you spend time on the other sites I just don't see how a functional work life is possible.
Being on a mission minimizes procrastination. I'm on a mission to build my company Browserling to be a fantastic business. That leaves no time to procrastinate.
I don't have your Dilbert-fu, but there is another, I think more recent, comic in which Dilbert is triumphant about how his boss's poor leadership, which resulted in a project's requirements changing, and in the project's final cancellation, didn't affect him because he simply didn't work on the project.
I am surrounded by expert Dilbert-ers! That's not the one that I had in mind, but I agree that it is quite similar. Probably, like all serial cartoonists, Adams consciously or unconsciously winds up ringing changes on a few common themes.
haha, nice point. It's designed so that other people can challenge the structure and the resources in it. So when you come back to it it will always be better.
I personally don't get why people talk that much about procrastination just to avoid the question: Am I using my time on things I'm actually interested in or do I just go on because I get paid too much to jump ship.
I'm trying to eliminate procrastination in my life. In the last three years, I had my ups and downs. I think that recently, I have positive progress. Here is some things/ideas/observations which helped me recently:
1. Core idea is that procrastination is unaware avoidance behaviour.
For example, I have great motivation to learn all algorithms in CLRS book. But at some point I got stuck on some proof, I tried to re-read it but got frustrated by some statement in the proof. On the next morning, I could watch Team Coco in Youtube and eat Pringles instead of attack that proof. Yes, I still love CLRS, but right now, I would like to watch Team Coco. And here is perfect example of my procrastination episode.
Core idea here is to realize that you entered unaware avoidance behaviour. And not just force yourself reading CLRS because next time your avoidance behaviour become even stronger. But you have to be brutally honest with yourself. Then, you can turn off any music, sit down, and enjoy total silence by doing 5-10 minutes of mindfulness meditation. After that, it's much easier to become more comfortable with your frustration on that proof in CLRS and start attacking it again.
2. I noticed strong link between quality of sleep and procrastination. Better your sleep, less chances for procrastination episodes. After many years of wrong sleep schedule (2 am - 11 am), I started follow very strict sleep schedule (9:30 pm - 6 am), after two months of such schedule, I noticed substantial positive progress in my daily productivity.
3. No caffeine, no red-bull, no coca-cola, no concentrated tea anymore. Instead of fixing my sleep schedule and doing physical exercises, I consumed coffee and red-bulls. It gave me fake feeling of alertness. But in fact, I was just dizzy and my focus ability was completely evaporated.
Now, I don't even eat a chocolate. There is nothing better than good healthy sleep and being productive by 8 AM (i.e. 2 hours after I woke up everyday).
4. No music while your reading and coding anymore. I listened music all the time for years. Even when I really tired of music, I couldn't code in total silence.
Mindfulness meditation helped me to see beauty of silence and white noise (especially coming from nature outside of my window like slight sound of trees because of small wind).
I couldn't say I become perfect. But I substantially decreased procrastination in my life.
I hope these advices could help somebody to overcome procrastination.
P.S. By the way, note that I didn't use statement "fight procrastination". If you try to fight it, you make your procrastination stronger next time. You have to be honest with yourself and being aware about your weaknesses!
i procrastinate so much, i read the first section then clicked the "save to pocket" icon from the chrome toolbar. i'll get to reading it. eventually...
I do wonder if bookmarking apps are one of the underlying causes of 'link hunting' i.e. the journey you go on every time you click a HN link.
You bookmark a page cause you don't want to lose it, but then you want to read more pages to bookmark those because you're worried that if you don't bookmark them you'll never find them again.
I'm going to bin my pinboard add-on for a week and see if that helps.
The way I solved my procrastination problems is that I do at least one thing per day towards my goal. More often than not, this puts me in a mental state that leads me to doing many things. I find that simply starting a task is the most difficult step.
If you procrastinate a lot, it usually means that you really want to do something different with your life. Go find out what it is, rather than submitting yourself to all sorts of masochist self-discipline schemes.
Of course, but there are things that can't be avoided like seeing your doctor about that pain you've been feeling/paying bills/finding a job/finishing that task your boss asked you to do/doing house work etc. Procrastinating can appear in various different areas of life, not just in those related to following your dreams and passions.
