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Procrastination is not a time management problem, it is an emotion
- anonymfus 7y agoIt seems like proper title would be "Procrastination is not time management problem. It is emotion regulation problem" (no articles to fit into 80 characters limit). Currently submission title is "Procrastination is not a time management problem. It is an emotion".
- titanomachy 7y agoOr: Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIncidentally, if I'm to believe the video linked recently on HN - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCAGc-rkIfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCAGc-rkIfo - so is ADHD.
- pelagic_sky 7y agoI procrastinate because the task has no real personal value to me.
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- hashberry 7y agoProcrastination is an addiction because it offers relief from anxiety and instant gratification. Also, being a chronic procrastinator and a skilled developer is a deadly combination. I've been praised for my excellent work and rewarded with raises and bonuses, even though I often procrastinate until the very last minute. Tip: to make your git logs look socially acceptable to co-workers and management, don't commit at 3AM Monday morning, wait until 9AM.
- esolyt 7y agoI don't wait until 9am because my co-workers and my managers accept me the way I am. And I think that's how it should be. Ultimately, you create value to the company by getting stuff done, not by trying to fit in.
- lazyasciiart 7y agoI wait until 9am because I don't want to be part of a normative pressure to work all the time, especially when there are devs on the team who are junior to me and therefore might be more easily pressured.
- epicide 7y agoYep, somewhere along the way freedom of (or from) a schedule got butchered into the war on sleep.
- toomanybeersies 7y agoI don't really work outside office hours much, but as a personal policy, when I do I don't commit or push (which triggers CI builds). I don't want to build any expectation that I work outside the office, because I generally don't. I have my own things going on, and literally anything else takes priority over work outside work hours.
- bluntfang 7y agoI've been thinking about your tip a lot lately. I've started my first full remote job. The team is fairly distributed, but there is a home office. git commits are logged in slack as they happen. I've decided, that since I don't have an office to be in from a certain time and that I feel supported to work wherever and whenever I want, that I will not do this. I want to be able to start work at noon and work on collaborative work til 4pm, then live my life when most of the world is awake between 8am-noon and 4pm-8pm. I then want to work on non-collaborative projects from 8pm until I feel like I've accomplished enough for the day. Sometimes that 4am. It's not about proving that I'm doing work, it's more about knowing that it doesn't matter when and where I do my work. I will not be chained to a desk or schedule.
- maxxxxx 7y agoFor me it's an anxiety thing. There are certain things I just can't get started on although I clearly know that I can do them well and quickly. I also know that not doing them often causes me a lot of pain but I still won't do them. I don't understand it myself. It makes no sense.
- RickS 7y agoI can deeply relate to this. There are things that I'll put off for a week, sometimes for a sprint, and finally, in anguish, I'll do them and.... they take like 2 hours and are twice as easy as I anticipated. And you get finished and have this moment of disbelief like... why on earth did I just torture myself for a week over this? For nothing..
- bittercynic 7y agoSometimes you have to let a task ripen for a while.
- Insanity 7y agoI think that's what Larry Wall once described as his workflow. You get a problem, but you don't start working on it. Instead, you just procrastinate but slowly you'll think about the problem every now and then. You basically let it brew for some time, and at some point, the problem and solution will become clear. (I could misremember who said this). Contrast with the "Feynman approach" described by Gell-Mann: Write down the problem, think real hard, write down the solution EDIT: Formatting
- mntmoss 7y agoI've gradually unlearned the anxiety-driven procrastination habits that I picked up in school but it's taken almost as long as the time I spent in the system: * I now focus on developing my own feedback mechanisms rather than worry about assigned/external ones. If you have a large enough number of "required to succeed" and "instant fail if this occurs" signals, you can know roughly how well you are doing without anyone to guide you. * I focus on work as a cycle, rather than tasks to be cleared out. The converse of the procrastinating is the idea that if you rush around enough, you will open up time for something else, something better, but what that something is, is a big ??? The cyclical approach keeps me more grounded in hammering out a few hours of work on a regular basis, which is more sustainable. * I look for opportunities to use my "activated" levels of energy to chase after a thread of a problem. I often don't know how long anything takes, but what I do know is that I'm doing more if I periodically throw myself at the work and solve the things I can solve and use the rest to develop more feedback(if I failed: okay, why?) - and doing this cyclically makes it sustainable. I still have periods where my work energy is low, but the causes are typically more obvious: stress is up, I found a new game that captured my attentiom, etc.
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- tjkrusinski 7y agoYou can say procrastination is the result of the core belief that one is not capable or will not perform the given task well, or once you do that thing, what will you have to worry about then?
- arcticbull 7y agoThe latter rings true for me; I get a lot more done when I have a pile of stuff to do once I'm finished with the task at hand. If the task at hand is the only one left on my plate, I procrastinate, because what will I focus on after?
- friedman23 7y agoPersonally, I don't procrastinate on things I believe will pose a challenge. I procrastinate on the easy but tedious things.
- Swizec 7y agoPersonally I procrastinate on almost everything that doesn’t either shoot up the dopamines immediately or make the panic monster go away
- jcims 7y agoI always wondered why the panic monster was so great at marshalling concentration, and so bad at defending against the wave of shame that comes once the task is complete and you wonder why you waited so long (again!!)
- ahartmetz 7y agoRegarding the panic monster, I noticed that the only music that can make me focus better than no music is ominous music. Specifically A.n.k.h. - I wouldn't listen to it for pleasure.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoPanic monster is a tricky beast to use. In the early university years, looming deadlines could make me superproductive, though at an emotional cost. But after few years of using this, my mind became increasingly resistant, and now the deadline trick doesn't work anymore.
- abhi3 7y agoThe fact that Chronic procrastination = Likely ADHD i.e. an inherent neurological issue, needs to be propagated more widely so people can stop feeling guilty about it and not treat it like some emotional/moral/work ethic failure.
- nisa 7y agoI'm afraid I'm on undiagnosed adult ADHD, however it's difficult to get diagnosed here - expecially since I had no symptoms at a younger age - probably due to biking 3-5km to school every day and doing martial arts 2-3x a week - If I'm exercising regulary I'm procrastinating less after a few weeks - but as you can imagine I can't keep up the schedule...
- monodeldiablo 7y agoI think the guilt itself exacerbates procrastination. Perversely, I only stopped procrastinating once I stopped beating myself up about it. Now, I tell myself that some problems just need to marinate, or that I have some other need that I'm not addressing. I use procrastination as a signal that something else is wrong. It's been very helpful.
- jolfdb 7y agoInstead of punishing yourself for not doing something, take a moment to appreciate yourself when you do something. When I go to the gym, I used get annoyed at myself for not doing enough work. I didn't even go often enough in the first place. Now I say that any day I go is a good gym day, and I feel only good thoughts about going and exercising, and when I am not exercising I occasionally remember that if I do go I'll feel good, and that's motivating.
- thisisit 7y agoI remember something similar being discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17878716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17878716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19482238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19482238
- tyler109 7y agothx for sharing
- juskrey 7y agoIt is a filter against rotting in chronic/toxic/boring things. Too bad people are trying to kill this instinct and rape themselves instead of using it to their own benefit.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoFor me, I find procrastination to be the exact opposite. Say I have a big project I want to complete, and I know I'll feel happy, proud, and accomplished if I complete the project, but I get stuck or frustrated with some intermediate step. Then what I usually end up distracting me is chronic or boring things. I'll organize my email inbox, or watch a million YouTube videos I'm not all that into, etc.
- juskrey 7y agoYour body is much wiser - it rebels against your entrapment in "projects".
- TeMPOraL 7y agoMaybe yours. My body is as dumb as a rock. It resists "entrapment" in any and all useful activities, whether self-directed or assigned by others. It's a constant struggle against the cat-like instinct of "yeah, I'd love to do that... no, I'm not doing that".
- dunstad 7y agoIs that really the only way you could think of to describe this? Sexual assault is a horrible thing to go through, and I can't imagine it's a lot of fun to happen upon the idea in unexpected places like this. You could easily just replace it with fuck.
- juskrey 7y agoIt is the exact reason I have used the word with a self-assault meaning.
- 7y ago
- xt00 7y agoSome things that have helped procrastination for me are 2 things: 1) think about something to look forward to regarding the particular task — for example maybe just simply writing the email saying that it’s done is the only thing I can look forward to, the current thing is super annoying to do, or the food I’ll eat afterward. 2) second thing I do is when I sense that I’m not going to make progress on the thing, I just stop working on the thing and schedule it for later.. trying to do something for hours and not actually doing it is actually fairly stressful and wastes a bunch of time and emotionally you feel annoyed about it as well. This sounds like procrastination but I mean within a context where I actually attempt to do the thing at each scheduled time rather than sit there and play on your phone on top of your math book while you are supposed to be studying. I just say welp math ain’t happening right now. Schedule for later when I’ll be mentally prepared. I have definitely pretty much always thought procrastination is super emotional. Certain things you don’t want to do so you put it off. Once there is very little time left you know that you have forced yourself into a limited engagement on a thing you want to minimize your involvement with so you have made a reasonable decision to avoid dealing with something that could annoy you for an extended time.
- chrshawkes 7y agoSo true to the second point. I've discovered that recognizing when to give it a break is a hugely important skill to have and one that that took me a long time to develop as a software engineer/entrepreneur.
- linux_devil 7y ago"Maybe whatever fresh-faced grad student built this on their summer internship flubbed the feature engineering, modeling autorespond as a library of independent phrases rather than a library of choices." Whats wrong with a fersh-faced grad student trying to build a new feature if at all he/she is trying to do so?
- bashwizard 7y agoWater is wet.
- christefano 7y agoWebsite is giving an error 500. Perhaps this is a popular article? Fortunately it's in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20190522001001/https://cognitiontoday.com/2019/05/you-procrastinate-because-of-emotions-not-laziness-regulate-them-to-stop-procrastinating/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190522001001/https://cognition...
- m12k 7y agoMy favorite tool/trick against procrastination is pomodoro technique: Work 25 minutes continuously with no interruptions, then take 5 minutes to relax/do other things, e.g. answer texts - then rinse and repeat. Do this 6-8 times and you'll have done more than most people do in a full work day. When I first heard of it I was very skeptical of it, because I know that as a programmer I need hours of uninterrupted focus, so purposely interrupting myself every 25 mins seemed counterproductive. But it turns out, most of us get micro-interruptions all the time, and they're much easier to ignore if you know that in at most 25 mins, you'll have 5 mins to deal with them. That way you don't create 5 mins of interruption, you batch the already existing interruptions together and timebox them. And 5 mins isn't enough to get you out of 'the zone' as long as you keep the breaks mentally 'light' - and going for a little walk really is healthier than just sitting all the time. And now for the real kicker: I found that I always procrastinate the most in the beginning of a project, where everything is vague and there's not yet a list of nicely broken down tasks to execute. And that makes sense cf. the whole 'procrastination is emotional' perspective that the article talks about, because completing tasks gives you a dopamine kick as a reward, but with no easy tasks in sight at the start of a project, it just feels like wandering the desert. It feels unpleasant and unsatisfying to grapple with that vagueness and trying to fit that 'too large' problem into your head so it can be broken down into bite size tasks. So you put it off until guilt or panic about a looming deadline becomes bigger than the pain of doing the work - it's the classic 'put off homework until the day before it's due' from school. A situation like this is where pomodoro technique really shines - I may not have small easy tasks to give me periodic dopamine kicks, but every 25 mins, I still get one for having completed a pomodoro without letting myself get distracted. And I even get to celebrate with a little break. Or to put this in other terms, at the beginning of a project, you cannot measure or reward results like you would prefer (because results are still a ways off - it takes too long to break down the initial vagueness, you don't even know what a result looks like or how hard it is to achieve yet), so you should measure and reward effort instead. And each pomodoro becomes a measure of effort that you can reward. It really does work for me - I often stop doing them later in the project, when I have a nice list of tasks to execute, and I don't do them at all for small easy projects. But whenever I realize that I dread some task or I begin to procrastinate, I pull out the pomodoros and soldier through that way.
- vborovikov 7y agoThere are three tricks I've found work best to stop procrastinating. 1. Ovsiankina effect. The effect states that an interrupted task, even without incentive, values as a "quasi-need". It creates intrusive thoughts, aimed at taking up the task again. [1] 2. Structured procrastination. [2] 3. Concentrating on the steps to complete the task, not your feelings and emotions about completing it. Action vs. state orientation. [3][4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovsiankina_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovsiankina_effect [2] http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ [3] https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_1668041 https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_1668041 [4] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jopy.12140 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jopy.12140
- jacobedawson 7y agoI found Nassim Nicholas Taleb's take on procrastination in Antifragile interesting - he likens procrastination to a natural defense: "Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity." He goes on to make the point that he use procrastination as a filter for his writing - if he feels strong resistance to writing a certain section he leaves it out as a service to his readers - why should they read something that he himself didn't particularly want to write? Instead of fighting procrastination as though it is an illness, maybe we should learn to understand it's utility: "Psychologists and economists who study ‘irrationality’ do not realize that humans may have an instinct to procrastinate only when no life is in danger. I do not procrastinate when I see a lion in my bedroom or fire in my neighbor’s library. I do not procrastinate after a severe injury. I do so with unnatural duties and procedures."
- nisa 7y agoYeah, I'm still alive - but the amount of late-fees, insane interest rates and chronic struggle to have a flat and something to eat each months that could be solved with a lot less money and pain if I hadn't procrastinated on solving these problems earlier is not exactly nice also. Also procrastinating going to the dentist cost me... What I want to say: It's a nice quip at society - but utterly useless for the chronic procrastinator.
- mjburgess 7y agoI think "procrastination" means a different thing when you're able to write a large number of books, etc. At that point you're not a procrastinator, just a productive person who doesn't like to do particular things.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIf Taleb's procrastination works as a negative feedback loop, preventing him from wasting time, then good for him. This is not how procrastination looks like for those who struggle, though. For us, procrastination runs on a positive feedback loop - the pain you seek to avoid by delaying a task is increased the longer you avoid that task, locking you into a spiral of anxiety, out of which you usually break in two ways: either you flake on the task, or the "pain buffer" overflows and you find enough energy to complete it in a half-assed way. Rinse & repeat.
- dcsilver 7y agoI really feel I can make a helpful contribution on this topic. This article correctly asserts that procrastination is an avoidance mechanism for tasks that illicit an emotional response, but then tells you to figure out what that is by yourself. Good luck with that. So the problem is only partly identified to the reader. If this article at all interested or struck a chord with you then I strongly recommend an old-school procrastination book called The Now Habit by Niel Fiore to get a more complete explanation. Like many commenters that chime in on these procrastination threads, I am a chronic procrastinator, and feel like it’s really held me back in life. I was completely convinced of having undiagnosed adult ADHD for several years (didn’t want to go onto stims, though) - until Fiore’s book threw a spanner in the works and identified some reasonably serious unresolved psychological issues from my childhood - the source of the emotional response identified in this article. In my case it’s to do with putting impossibly high expectations on myself, but there are other common examples explored in the book. I was absolutely not expecting that and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s obvious in retrospect, and now I’ve correctly identified the thought patterns that sit just below the surface of conscious cognition I can catch myself in the act. It’s helped enormously.
- MrP 7y agoI was "cured" of my procrastination when I "discovered" the best way to not having things I hate to do in my to do list was to do the things. It sounds silly because it is. Just do it now.
- hvidgaard 7y agoThis is beautiful. If you have a thing that takes some manageable effort, and that is important enough to do. Do it at the first time you to not have anything more important to do. It is nothing else but a different mindset. It sounds easy, because it is once you get going.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoWhat you both describe sounds like a switch flipping in the brain. It's the holy grail of those struggling with procrastination - and the unsolved part is coercing the brain to flip that switch, to internalize that realization. I envy those who've done that by accident.
- MrP 7y agoYou're absolutely right, it's like a switch flipping in the brain. Maybe a way to get there, or to try to explain it in a different way would be: You have to hate "having the item in your todo list" more than "doing the task". I know I do. It's annoying to "carry" that todo item in my head all the time, with its danger of forgetting it, or the need to note it down somewhere, then remember to check the somewhere... So I know I'l feel liberated when I do it. Yes, on the face of it this applies much better to "pay that bill" than to "write a book". But you'd be surprised. Soon you won't think of yourself as a procrastinator, you'll feel like someone who takes charge and does stuff. You know what people like that do, apart from the small stuff? The big stuff. Good luck!
- TeMPOraL 7y agoDid try that very early on (spoiler alert: it didn't work), and it's curious what mechanism my brain developed to neuter this trick. One, in line with what GTD book teaches, writing down a task is very liberating experience - indeed, the act of writing a task down feels almost like doing it, so it drains the pressure to actually do it. Two, once the mental weight of a full todo list reaches a certain stage, I instinctively shy away from looking at it. The degree to which this happens subconsciously is probably worth a paper in a psychology journal; I'll instinctively stop opening my TODO files, my Org Agenda, and if I write the tasks down physically (e.g. on whiteboard), after a while my eyes will just gloss over it and essentially ignore its presence in the room. To combat this, I started cycling through TODO stores - every other month or three I jump between .org files, bullet journal, issue tracker tickets, whiteboard, notebook, paper calendar, electronic calendar. The "freshness factor" seems to be working somewhat, but I still can sometimes go two days before realizing I have an organizer open on my desk with tasks already late.
- beaker52 7y agoI've long known my procrastination is born out of anxieties centered around the task or myself. But I'm so kind to myself that I forgive myself for procrastinating before I've even done it - a great example of the many ways/excuses to defeat most anti-procrastination techniques I've come up with :))) I even wonder how much my propensity toward picking up new hobbies (which usually involves spending decent amounts of money aka "shopping") before getting bored, selling everything (which I usually put off until I physically can't accommodate more stuff) and repeating the process is actually just me avoiding doing life stuff like saving for a house and being a responsible adult. I eat takeaway because I "don't have time" but then I don't actually get things I need to do done AND find myself becoming more and more unhealthy. I often get asked "what have you done today?" and it's quite frequent for me to not really even know (or care to admit). Interestingly, I went away on holiday the other week - when I arrived home, before I even paused (shoes still on), I immediately started doing things I'd been putting off for months, like I had an urge despite there being no more time pressure than at any point in the past 12 months that I had regularly ignored. Procrastination, and being with it, is a large part of my life. I find it incredibly interesting but if I could pay a large sum of money to take it away in an instant, I'd hand over the cash immediately. (And thus, this is another example of my aversion to difficult work)
- cheerlessbog 7y agoReturning from the holiday meant you had avoided your usual procrastination cues -couch, TV, phone, schedule. The key to defeating your procrastination may be to progressively build up a habit of doing work you prefer to avoid by setting up regular cues. Eg to build a gym habit I set out my gym clothes each night. Then after a week of that I began to put them on before getting in the car to work. Then after a few days I drove past the gym in the way to work. Then went in for 1 minute and so forth. I know this sounds absurd. With these tiny steps I built a habit of the gym that is now 1 hour five times a week. Now I am building a habit of keeping my kitchen clean with the same progression of micro cues. You could imagine similar steps involving preparing your desk, later just sitting down at it, and so forth,all with cues like your first coffee, or you finished dinner etc. The formula is regular cue + micro progression to build a habit. Eventually it is mentally easier to maintain the habit than to break it. Another tip, if you absolutely do not want to fulfill the habit on a particular cue, complete as many micro steps as you can, eg if I have an injury I will still go into the gym for a shower and to change before work.
- tempodox 7y agoOne could also argue that procrastination is time management (vs a time management problem). Just not the one with the best reputation.
- menacingly 7y agoThis is a good article, but is it not simply finding a more polite (and perhaps, for the sake of publishing, novel) way to say procrastination is caused by insufficient will? "People procrastinate or avoid aversive tasks to improve their short-term mood at the cost of long-term goals." This description is true, but is it not also true for virtually every case where you would typically use the term "willpower"?
- decasteve 7y agoOn top of the suggestions in the article, a good diet and a regular routine of intense exercise helps me. If I have a consistent balance of diet, exercise, sleep, meditation, and some alone/solitude time in nature, I am most productive and unlikely to procrastinate.
- byteface 7y agoa useful tool for people that might be in here... http://www.stayfocusd.com/ http://www.stayfocusd.com/
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoSame Gentle had an interesting observation about procrastination: https://samgentle.com/posts/2016-09-16-what-changes https://samgentle.com/posts/2016-09-16-what-changes follow up: https://samgentle.com/posts/2019-01-29-the-leverage-instinct https://samgentle.com/posts/2019-01-29-the-leverage-instinct
- bougiefever 7y agoI like the list of things you can do to combat procrastination. It's all good to understand what drives it, but even better to know tactics that work to help you overcome it.
- ivanhoe 7y agoWhat is a laziness then? Does it even exists as "just being lazy", or it's all a spectrum of anxiety issues?
- ravenstine 7y agoI find myself procrastinating the most when I know what what I'm doing will likely be interrupted, even if it's hours down the line. For instance, even if I can work on a certain thing for 3 hours, when I get word that I'm probably going to have to work on something else for the rest of the day, chances are I'll take those 3 hours less seriously because I know that, when I come back to the task the following day, I'll have to mentally start over. Even if I consciously try to push through it, the back of my mind keeps shouting "What's the point?"
- jolfdb 7y agoYes yes yes. The treatment for this is to split your work into smaller tasks so you feel you can hit a milestone before the interruption.
- inlined 7y agoI’m grumpy about the aside that some medical conditions cause procrastination yet refusal to list them. They don’t need to diagnose readers to just list common issues for which the DSM lists procrastination. That might encourage more sympathy when we see others procrastinating.
- inlined 7y agoA quick search would suggest that ADHD would call this a sign and procrastination can be a side effect in major (clinical) depression, bipolar disorder, monotropism, Aspergers spectrum disorders, and non-categorized issues with shame and low self-esteem (at least that one is covered in the article).
- agumonkey 7y agoThis is why I love production work (food, manufacturing), no analysis paralysis ever.
- wallace_f 7y ago>when people believe that their bad mood is unchangeable, they do not engage in frivolous procrastination or acting on other impulses to engage in other activities This is so simple, but also so enlightening. Unfortunately for me, it means removing most of the instant gratification from my life, such as video games, social media (incl. HN), etc.
- atian 7y agoProcrastination is against energy expenditure. Energy expenditure is degenerative in nature.