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> From a distance, procrastination looks like a time management problem. There is growing evidence that it is rather an emotional management problem — a flight

> From a distance, procrastination looks like a time management problem. There is growing evidence that it is rather an emotional management problem — a flight response. It's eye opening how a lot of life struggles turn out to be an emotional management problem at their core: procrastination, addiction, stress. I wish I had that perspective earlier in my life. It completely changes the solution space from trying random productivity tools to focusing on one's emotions and possibly getting into therapy.

yowlingcat 6y ago
> I wish I had that perspective earlier in my life. It completely changes the solution space from trying random productivity tools to focusing on one's emotions and possibly getting into therapy. Hear, hear. For me, it was also figuring out how to cut out unneeded aggravations from my life.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  I think there's a case to be made for cutting out those things, especially ones that aren't directly visible, such as ambient noise. Many people think you get used to it, and maybe you don't consciously notice it anymore, but I think that the permanent background noise to which many people are exposed in cities contributes to their stress levels. Pretty much everywhere they go, there's constant noise: * random chatter / noises in the open office * AC hum / vibrations / etc at the office * traffic noise, while walking around or taking public transport * random traffic noise / honks / etc at home if the apartment is close to a street and badly soundproofed
  - yowlingcat 6y ago
    You read my mind! I moved out of a big city after lockdowns, and I realized that many of these little ambient noises or mental frictions which I had grown accustomed to -- it turns out that once I cut that out, it reduced my stress levels. I think there are a lot of parallels to draw from there to the workplace or other walks of life.
  - lolinder 6y ago
    Yep. I work with ear protection on (of the sort you'd use for mowing the lawn) most of the time for precisely this reason. I've found my anxiety levels are much lower after several hours of wearing them.
    - yowlingcat 6y ago
      Even before lockdowns, I found that my sanity levels went up significantly once I started moving to using Etymotic in-ear monitors. I used a fairly cheap pair for commuting and work [1]. The nice thing about them is that even if you don't have any music playing, they're effectively earplugs. And then if you do have music playing, you don't have to turn it up very loud to hear it well, so it's kinda a win win all around. [1] https://www.etymotic.com/consumer/earphones/mk5.html https://www.etymotic.com/consumer/earphones/mk5.html
- laurent92 6y ago
  > cut out unneeded aggravations Some people? There is a thin line between cutting out people who step onto you, and becoming misanthropic/associal. Since lockdowns I went from 60 friends to ~4, because I can’t stand them and I’ve come to realize their politics directly harm me. But now I’m alone. Working on this, but it is a very thin line.
  - morlockabove 6y ago
    You pay the price for your politics.
    - DaniloDias 6y ago
      I see you getting downvoted for a profoundly true statement. These are sad times.
    - lolinder 6y ago
      I don't know if this person is saying they disagree with their friends on politics or if the vitriol in their friends' political speech is harmful to them. If the latter, I sympathize: most political conversations today are so filled with hate that "direct harm" to listeners is not unreasonable to claim.
      - morlockabove 6y ago
        Most of the time, when someone's said something like "their politics directly harm me", it's something like "the policies implied by the positions this guy's professing (or directly advocated for) would have bad effects for me". Could be wrong, obviously- it's a pretty vague phrase. But I'm sympathetoc- if they hold a certain position, and cultivate a certain identity, and that makes certain other positions disgusting to them to the point they cut out friends- good for them, I guess, and I get that being alone isn't pleasant. But that's the price you pay for being the kind of person who responds that way. I guess presumably he would have gotten new, less offensive friends if the governments of the world hadn't made it illegal. (How'd he end up friends with these people in the first place?)
  - 6y ago
Bakary 6y ago
The corollary to that is to understand that when you soothe a negative feeling with a short-term coping mechanism (distraction, drugs...), you prime yourself to feel more of the same in the future. Exposure to the negative feeling and learning to deal with it gradually is far more beneficial as the body learns that it is not so effective. This is particularly applicable to anxiety-based issues such as OCD but it can help for a variety of problems
ottomanbob 6y ago
Figuring exactly this out in my early 20s. The problem is not the productivity framework, the problem is emotional.
kristiandupont 6y ago
Agreed. And furthermore, I am continuously realizing how much my bodily well-being affects my mental state. I am not suggesting that exercise is the cure for depression, but when it comes to a normal "feeling low", I find that the solution often relates to the body: move, stretch or relax. Same with sleep. If I can't fall asleep I often just need to make myself aware of where I have tension in the body (https://kristiandupont.medium.com/cant-sleep-ask-yourself-where-s-the-tension-aecab044a38f https://kristiandupont.medium.com/cant-sleep-ask-yourself-wh...) On a higher level, diet obviously means a lot and so does air quality. I put an Awair in my office recently and have realized that I wasn't airing out nearly enough. I was basically sitting in a cloud of CO2 which I now realize was also making me feel tired.
- laurent92 6y ago
  CO2: Excellent point. After 4 hrs in 30m2, we bathe in 1100ppm. After a night, 1800ppm. Normal levels are 500-600. After living in Australia, I’ve always attributed their taller average to being more outdoors and having well-working ventilation standards for buildings. Low CO2 might do wonders for mental development.
- scaladev 6y ago
  You get used to it after a while. I've been living in an area with extreme levels of outside air pollution (think Mumbai or Beijing, but much worse) for many years, so my windows are almost always closed shut. I have a CO2 meter and it reports an average of about 2000 ppm. I feel fine, and don't feel any difference to the normal level of 440 ppm. I'm pretty certain it would show on objective cognitive tests, but personally I really don't feel any difference.
  - brainzap 6y ago
    WHAT???
  - hosteur 6y ago
    This sounds seriously unhealthy. Consider finding different place to live if at all possible. Air pollution is a killer.
admissionsguy 6y ago
> It completely changes the solution space from trying random productivity tools to focusing on one's emotions and possibly getting into therapy Same thoughts here. I suspect no tomato-based super-agile time management technique has ever turned an inefficient person into an efficient one, long term.
- tmotwu 6y ago
  Pomodoro works in theory but ultimately requires a lot of discipline because it's easy to just ignore the timer. Worse, maintaining half an hour of deep focus just doesn't work for some people, especially the types the article describes. Anyway, pomodoro's only advantage if you want to try to maximize the amount of productivity in a day without mentally bogging you down. What worked best for me is low-overhead simplicity. A notebook. Make it routine to realistically scope out, jot down, divide and conquer tasks. Just a few minutes every morning. No schedule. Take the task and work. Whenever your brain tells you to take a break, just take a break. But just keep on looking at what you aimed to accomplish for the day. That way, you're just mentally thinking about the tasks and not some stupid timer or how you planned it all out on a calendar. Ultimately, it's about managing emotions, but having this down helps because it clears your mind a little.
- Bakary 6y ago
  That sort of pomodoro stuff only works on unpleasant tasks that don't require too much thought or creativity
  - anaerobicover 6y ago
    I haven't found that to be true. I have used it successfully at various points to help me stay focused on art projects or other work that I was choosing to do that should have been "fun" but that I was still procrastinating over. The two GUI software applications I've made that I consider "finished" (out of a dozen-plus incomplete) have Pomodoro journal pages in one of my notebooks.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
odyssey7 6y ago
This idea rings familiar to me as someone who got into the stoicism trend, but then realized issues with it. The problem isn’t that your house fell down and you lost your job and now you can’t afford therapy, the problem is that you haven’t stopped to think how much worse it could be and how grateful you should feel about how things are right now. If we can reframe bad management and unfulfilling work into an employee’s emotional problem, then suddenly everything is easier, isn’t it? A good worker takes their medication before coming in, and goes to therapy to learn how to be better at following their manager’s instructions, and takes more medication in the evening to feel good after a long day’s work. Well, I guess there’s nothing new under the sun, these things have been happening to some degree for a while, and especially self-medicating with things like weed and alcohol when not working. Will having a majority-un-medicated workforce soon put a country at an economic disadvantage? Will the alternative become a cultural relic that some countries fight to preserve through regulation, the way France preserves its traditional cheeses?
- Bakary 6y ago
  The anglo-american repackaging of stoicism is precisely this: just a variation on hustle porn and blaming the individual. The same goes for mindfulness. Both of these industries (yes, they are industries) have been eagerly embraced by the private sector since they make fixing the mood of workers both a quantifiable goal and one where their own responsibility is no longer taken into consideration. In We by Zamyatin and Brave New World, the non-medicated elements of society eventually rebel against the new order. In our case, the scope of medication is already starting to show its limits so I don't think we will get to the scenario you describe. This sort of life is just too inherently unsatisfying to be masked by meds, not to mention that workers now can directly see just how poor they are compared to their masters and just how much surplus the masters capture.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    There’s differences between talk therapy and simply taking psychiatric medication, though.
    - 6y ago

yowlingcat 6y ago

> I wish I had that perspective earlier in my life. It completely changes the solution space from trying random productivity tools to focusing on one's emotions and possibly getting into therapy. Hear, hear. For me, it was also figuring out how to cut out unneeded aggravations from my life.

vladvasiliu 6y ago
I think there's a case to be made for cutting out those things, especially ones that aren't directly visible, such as ambient noise. Many people think you get used to it, and maybe you don't consciously notice it anymore, but I think that the permanent background noise to which many people are exposed in cities contributes to their stress levels. Pretty much everywhere they go, there's constant noise: * random chatter / noises in the open office * AC hum / vibrations / etc at the office * traffic noise, while walking around or taking public transport * random traffic noise / honks / etc at home if the apartment is close to a street and badly soundproofed
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  You read my mind! I moved out of a big city after lockdowns, and I realized that many of these little ambient noises or mental frictions which I had grown accustomed to -- it turns out that once I cut that out, it reduced my stress levels. I think there are a lot of parallels to draw from there to the workplace or other walks of life.
- lolinder 6y ago
  Yep. I work with ear protection on (of the sort you'd use for mowing the lawn) most of the time for precisely this reason. I've found my anxiety levels are much lower after several hours of wearing them.
  - yowlingcat 6y ago
    Even before lockdowns, I found that my sanity levels went up significantly once I started moving to using Etymotic in-ear monitors. I used a fairly cheap pair for commuting and work [1]. The nice thing about them is that even if you don't have any music playing, they're effectively earplugs. And then if you do have music playing, you don't have to turn it up very loud to hear it well, so it's kinda a win win all around. [1] https://www.etymotic.com/consumer/earphones/mk5.html https://www.etymotic.com/consumer/earphones/mk5.html
laurent92 6y ago
> cut out unneeded aggravations Some people? There is a thin line between cutting out people who step onto you, and becoming misanthropic/associal. Since lockdowns I went from 60 friends to ~4, because I can’t stand them and I’ve come to realize their politics directly harm me. But now I’m alone. Working on this, but it is a very thin line.
- morlockabove 6y ago
  You pay the price for your politics.
  - DaniloDias 6y ago
    I see you getting downvoted for a profoundly true statement. These are sad times.
  - lolinder 6y ago
    I don't know if this person is saying they disagree with their friends on politics or if the vitriol in their friends' political speech is harmful to them. If the latter, I sympathize: most political conversations today are so filled with hate that "direct harm" to listeners is not unreasonable to claim.
    - morlockabove 6y ago
      Most of the time, when someone's said something like "their politics directly harm me", it's something like "the policies implied by the positions this guy's professing (or directly advocated for) would have bad effects for me". Could be wrong, obviously- it's a pretty vague phrase. But I'm sympathetoc- if they hold a certain position, and cultivate a certain identity, and that makes certain other positions disgusting to them to the point they cut out friends- good for them, I guess, and I get that being alone isn't pleasant. But that's the price you pay for being the kind of person who responds that way. I guess presumably he would have gotten new, less offensive friends if the governments of the world hadn't made it illegal. (How'd he end up friends with these people in the first place?)
- 6y ago

Bakary 6y ago

The corollary to that is to understand that when you soothe a negative feeling with a short-term coping mechanism (distraction, drugs...), you prime yourself to feel more of the same in the future. Exposure to the negative feeling and learning to deal with it gradually is far more beneficial as the body learns that it is not so effective. This is particularly applicable to anxiety-based issues such as OCD but it can help for a variety of problems

ottomanbob 6y ago

Figuring exactly this out in my early 20s. The problem is not the productivity framework, the problem is emotional.

kristiandupont 6y ago

Agreed. And furthermore, I am continuously realizing how much my bodily well-being affects my mental state. I am not suggesting that exercise is the cure for depression, but when it comes to a normal "feeling low", I find that the solution often relates to the body: move, stretch or relax. Same with sleep. If I can't fall asleep I often just need to make myself aware of where I have tension in the body (https://kristiandupont.medium.com/cant-sleep-ask-yourself-where-s-the-tension-aecab044a38f https://kristiandupont.medium.com/cant-sleep-ask-yourself-wh...) On a higher level, diet obviously means a lot and so does air quality. I put an Awair in my office recently and have realized that I wasn't airing out nearly enough. I was basically sitting in a cloud of CO2 which I now realize was also making me feel tired.

laurent92 6y ago
CO2: Excellent point. After 4 hrs in 30m2, we bathe in 1100ppm. After a night, 1800ppm. Normal levels are 500-600. After living in Australia, I’ve always attributed their taller average to being more outdoors and having well-working ventilation standards for buildings. Low CO2 might do wonders for mental development.
scaladev 6y ago
You get used to it after a while. I've been living in an area with extreme levels of outside air pollution (think Mumbai or Beijing, but much worse) for many years, so my windows are almost always closed shut. I have a CO2 meter and it reports an average of about 2000 ppm. I feel fine, and don't feel any difference to the normal level of 440 ppm. I'm pretty certain it would show on objective cognitive tests, but personally I really don't feel any difference.
- brainzap 6y ago
  WHAT???
- hosteur 6y ago
  This sounds seriously unhealthy. Consider finding different place to live if at all possible. Air pollution is a killer.

admissionsguy 6y ago

> It completely changes the solution space from trying random productivity tools to focusing on one's emotions and possibly getting into therapy Same thoughts here. I suspect no tomato-based super-agile time management technique has ever turned an inefficient person into an efficient one, long term.

tmotwu 6y ago
Pomodoro works in theory but ultimately requires a lot of discipline because it's easy to just ignore the timer. Worse, maintaining half an hour of deep focus just doesn't work for some people, especially the types the article describes. Anyway, pomodoro's only advantage if you want to try to maximize the amount of productivity in a day without mentally bogging you down. What worked best for me is low-overhead simplicity. A notebook. Make it routine to realistically scope out, jot down, divide and conquer tasks. Just a few minutes every morning. No schedule. Take the task and work. Whenever your brain tells you to take a break, just take a break. But just keep on looking at what you aimed to accomplish for the day. That way, you're just mentally thinking about the tasks and not some stupid timer or how you planned it all out on a calendar. Ultimately, it's about managing emotions, but having this down helps because it clears your mind a little.
Bakary 6y ago
That sort of pomodoro stuff only works on unpleasant tasks that don't require too much thought or creativity
- anaerobicover 6y ago
  I haven't found that to be true. I have used it successfully at various points to help me stay focused on art projects or other work that I was choosing to do that should have been "fun" but that I was still procrastinating over. The two GUI software applications I've made that I consider "finished" (out of a dozen-plus incomplete) have Pomodoro journal pages in one of my notebooks.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

odyssey7 6y ago

This idea rings familiar to me as someone who got into the stoicism trend, but then realized issues with it. The problem isn’t that your house fell down and you lost your job and now you can’t afford therapy, the problem is that you haven’t stopped to think how much worse it could be and how grateful you should feel about how things are right now. If we can reframe bad management and unfulfilling work into an employee’s emotional problem, then suddenly everything is easier, isn’t it? A good worker takes their medication before coming in, and goes to therapy to learn how to be better at following their manager’s instructions, and takes more medication in the evening to feel good after a long day’s work. Well, I guess there’s nothing new under the sun, these things have been happening to some degree for a while, and especially self-medicating with things like weed and alcohol when not working. Will having a majority-un-medicated workforce soon put a country at an economic disadvantage? Will the alternative become a cultural relic that some countries fight to preserve through regulation, the way France preserves its traditional cheeses?

Bakary 6y ago
The anglo-american repackaging of stoicism is precisely this: just a variation on hustle porn and blaming the individual. The same goes for mindfulness. Both of these industries (yes, they are industries) have been eagerly embraced by the private sector since they make fixing the mood of workers both a quantifiable goal and one where their own responsibility is no longer taken into consideration. In We by Zamyatin and Brave New World, the non-medicated elements of society eventually rebel against the new order. In our case, the scope of medication is already starting to show its limits so I don't think we will get to the scenario you describe. This sort of life is just too inherently unsatisfying to be masked by meds, not to mention that workers now can directly see just how poor they are compared to their masters and just how much surplus the masters capture.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  There’s differences between talk therapy and simply taking psychiatric medication, though.
  - 6y ago