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Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate
- AngryParsley 15y agoThey forgot #7: Do not read articles of the form "n ways to do X". Also enable noprocrast on Hacker News, and use a time-tracking tool like RescueTime.
- X-Istence 15y agonoprocast doesn't work for me. I have Hacker News added to my "Top Sites" and Safari likes to refresh those every so often. When I did have it enabled I was locked out more often than not making it particularly useless for me. What I have found is that I have started finding a lot of the articles that make the frontpage are boring and I have naturally started visiting less and less.
- bitops 15y agoThat's funny, I've had the opposite experience with the lockout. I figure that if I set the refresh to be reasonably low, it turns into more of an odds thing whether or not I can read HN. And, after a while, I've stopped needing discipline to come looking here.
- run4yourlives 15y agoI'll read this later.
- squeee 15y agoBeat me to it!
- pbreit 15y agoI like Marc Andreessen's post on productivity, especially "structured procrastination" where procrastination is actually encouraged (there's a good chance that the things you procrastinate on aren't all that important). http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-personal-productivity http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-pers...
- vanni 15y agoI am working on a new way to fight procrastination: http://asaclock.com http://asaclock.com It is an elite anti-procrastination community for startup single founders and people working on side projects.
- mikeash 15y agoThe irony of seeing this link on HN nearly killed me.
- tmh88j 15y agoThe "startup kind of person" is ambitious so I'm not sure how many people that applies to. An ambitious procrastinator...is that an oxymoron?
- whateverer 15y agoMaybe you don't like being a procrastinator and you have yet to find a way to help it. Like people with ADHD, in which case it's likely that you got a bad hand dealt to you by genetics.
- timwiseman 15y agoNo...many ambitious people are also perfectionists, and perfectionists are often horrible procrastinators as they wait for things to line up perfectly or wait to refine it one more time before releasing, putting off the next phase over and over. Also, one very dangerous form of procrastination is doing real work...just work that is less important than what you should be doing. Paul Graham touches on this at http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
- greenxc 15y agoAmbitious people can often times be the worst procrastinators because they can have an over inflated idea of what they can get done in a given day putting too much on their plate and thus leaving off many things for later days (often times the things they dread most which keep getting put off)...
- phzbOx 15y ago#7 Don't write a blog post about ways to not procrastinate
- peterjmag 15y agohttp://xkcd.com/874/ http://xkcd.com/874/
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- antoinehersen 15y agoMy favorite way to procrastinate is to read online article about procrastination. I also bought a book about it, one of the few I never finished. If you procrastinate too much there is usually a reason for it, try to find out why, and what you can do about it. For me it is ambitious project that are ill defined. Breaking them in smaller task that can become daily achievements helps a lot.
- TillE 15y agoI still believe in Merlin Mann's "First, care." http://www.43folders.com/2010/02/05/first-care http://www.43folders.com/2010/02/05/first-care All these little tips and tricks are fine. But they're usually treating the symptoms rather than examining the cause.
- georgieporgie 15y agoFor as long as you know in your heart that what you're making or doing matters, and, consequently, for as long as you accept and embrace the immutable laws of scarcity, your options for maintaining focus will, like Frank's perfect answer, remain stunningly obvious. Those are very true observations, but the problem is, how do you care? We're told things like, "do what you love," and " follow your passions," but that's just not realistic in an adult, professional world. Writing code is awesome for the first 10% of a project. After that, it usually becomes a grind to complete all the uninteresting things.
- georgieporgie 15y ago7. Always have something worse to do. It's amazing how much you'll get done trying to avoid that one thing you're really, really dreading.
- s00pcan 15y agoSometimes I will actually clean stuff just to avoid working on something I hate more, and it's actually almost fun. So this is definitely true from my experience. It's also amazing what you'll get done when the power is out or you don't have internet, but that's almost impossible for me nowadays thanks to my smartphone.
- tagawa 15y agoReminds me of this well-written article/confession: http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-ProcrastinateStill/93959 http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-ProcrastinateStill/93959
- kevinh 15y agoWhen I was still in college, nothing got me more motivated to clean my apartment than having that big project that I needed to work on.
- thoughtsimple 15y agoArticle added to instapaper...
- highace 15y agoOne of the best ways I've found is to just start it! Tell yourself to just force out 10 minutes of whatever it is you're putting off. Once you've started, you'll want to see it through as much as you can. There's proven theory behind why that method works... something about unfinished jobs fatiguing the mind.
- ronmac 15y agoLooks like an insightful article. I'll read it later.
- ysilver 15y ago7. Effective stress management. Stress causes procrastination. Reduce stress to procrastinate less! It seems like this is what the author was trying to get at. My favorite stress management methods: exercise, meditate, socialize. Also, the first thing you do each day should be something low stress, achievable and important. ...gets you off on the right foot.
- greenxc 15y agoI absolutely love the first point that they make to not start out with a regular routine of reading news or checking your email because I think many people (including myself) do it as a habit and then get completely sidetracked from it (especially email) leaving everything else on a side-burner until later. I didn't even think about this point until reading this. If you do something you dont want to do first you will have more motivation to get it done so that you can get back to your regular routine. Since people are creatures of habit its quite a big motivator.
- digamber_kamat 15y agoOne Noble prize given for the research that said best way to achieve your goals is by working on a goal to procrastinate even higher goal. Secondly, I remember reading a research paper that said, whenever you have a task at hand which you want to procrastinate at least give it a start. Urge for postponing the task goes seriously down once you at least start doing it.