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A major technique mentioned by the author is omitted from the article’s headline: co-working. She writes about benefitting greatly from logging on to a muted Zo
by aalam 5y ago
A major technique mentioned by the author is omitted from the article’s headline: co-working. She writes about benefitting greatly from logging on to a muted Zoom room with hundreds of other people to work at a set time. It’s interesting how this is effective for some people; for another anecdote, blogger Alexey Guzey wrote about a similar system [0] with a smaller group.
Psychiatrist Dr. David Burns writes at length about more techniques on addressing procrastination (called “do-nothingism”). He has a chapter on the subject in his book “Feeling Good,” and he wrote a similar passage online in an article for his podcast [1]. The methods he writes about that work best for me have been breaking down tasks into sequence of simple steps. This helps greatly for straightforward tasks, though it is less effective for difficult tasks that involve uncertainty and learning. These harder tasks require persistence and preferably time.
Separately, a personal technique I use is to really sell myself on the value of completing a task. The phrase, “discipline matters more than getting motivated” is thrown around a lot on the web, and though it has merit, I find motivation crucial to sustaining projects in the long-term (and also figuring out when it’s worthwhile to exit from a method or approach).
[0] https://guzey.com/co-working/ https://guzey.com/co-working/
[1] https://feelinggood.com/2017/09/18/053-ask-david-i-dont-feel-like-doing-it-quick-cure-for-procrastinators/ https://feelinggood.com/2017/09/18/053-ask-david-i-dont-feel...
- rdw 5y agoThere's a startup using a similar principle to address a related challenge: getting and staying focused on a task. I tried it and it was surprisingly effective. https://www.focused.space/ https://www.focused.space/ (Disclaimer: I know one of the founders)
- vidarh 5y agoWith respect to breaking down tasks, a trick that sometimes works for me is that of I don't want to pick any tasks of my to-do list, spend 5-10 minutes to break up existing ones. That way you don't need to break them down at the start, and you break them down to the point where you're comfortable doing them, when it's time to break them down. It gets harder and harder to procrastinate when the tasks are smaller and smaller.
- hnick 5y agoI saw a girl on Twitch doing her PHD studies. The entire point was music and silence and everyone comes together to study with the stream on. Every 20 minutes or so (pomodoro technique) she catches up on chat messages and does some community interaction for the break, then right back to it. A bit weird but seems like it'd be really effective for some people.