24 ms·

Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it

198 points by ahstilde 4y ago

tchelow 4y ago
I am currently procrastinating to start procrastinating.
ketanmaheshwari 4y ago
We need a "Tricks to remember tricks when we need it".
- tpmx 4y ago
  Print and frame. Hang on a wall in your office, near the workstation.
  - bil7 4y ago
    might actually work if you use identity based language, such as: My Rules: 1. When I feel like not working, I will commit to doing just 5 minutes of the task.
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    My home office is the last place you'll find those kitschy "Just Eat" and "Love" signs that are so popular with suburban housewives.
    - tpmx 4y ago
      Maybe those housewives figured out something you didn't. :)
- seb1204 4y ago
  Make it your passphrase
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    I don't even know what my password is anymore it's just faded into a sequence of movements and clickity clack sounds.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      One year in high school I was in a mild panic the morning after Christmas break because I couldn't remember my locker combination. On the way to school I was mentally preparing myself for going to the office and asking them to help me. Then when I got to school, as I was taking things out of my locker I remembered that I needed to go to the office so I could... hold on. My locker is open. I opened it. What was the combination again? Then I stood there probably looking like an idiot (mercifully I came in a bit early so it was a mostly empty hallway) spinning the dial around trying to recall what I just did a minute ago.
ziddoap 4y ago
The three 'tricks' to start working consist of: "just start", "start sloppy", and "start small". I get what they're going for, but it's sort of funny to me that the three 'tricks' to start working all amount to "well, start working".
- dentemple 4y ago
  Me: "I don't feel like working today." This article: "But have you tried... just working today? :)"
  - mikedelago 4y ago
    reminds me of the common advice for people with depression (that often comes from people without depression): "Well, have you tried not being sad :)?"
    - kayodelycaon 4y ago
      If I had a bullet for everyone person... well, I'd be in a lot of trouble. :)
    - 4ggr0 4y ago
      Or common advice when someone mentions that they're AD(H)D. "Just be structured", "try to focus more", "just write a journal", "Oh we all feel these things from time to time"
    - bergenty 4y ago
      Not in every case but many times it really is a valid approach. Perspective matters a lot for our mental well being. There are definitely people that get “addicted” to being chronically unhappy.
  - 88913527 4y ago
    Me: "I don't feel like going to the gym." 'Have you tried just going?' I'll tell myself I can do the most absolutely abysmal 3 sets of whatever lift, and I can walk out if I'm not feeling it. 99% of the time, I stick it through.
mvdwoord 4y ago
But what if I suffer from recursive procrastination? (Procrastiception?)
- mslupski1 4y ago
  this made me laugh way too much than it should, thank you. Think I suffer from the same thing, still trying to find the underlying pattern
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  You need to shift into structured procrastination [1]. Play your tasks off of one another. Beware that sometimes you are avoiding doing truly important tasks, but you'd likely be avoiding those anyway so you may as well make use of their existence. [1] http://www.structuredprocrastination.com http://www.structuredprocrastination.com
  - mvdwoord 4y ago
    Haha, my ex always burst out in laughter, whenever she visited my place and found it spotless. Just meant a deadline at work was coming up.. :) She was never wrong (on this).
- hinkley 4y ago
  Are you talking about when you figure out you can make task A less onerous and avoid task B entirely if you do this other thing first, and then you can't get yourself to start on Task C because there's no immediate payoff? Because if that's what you mean then I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about. Lovely weather we're having, right?
dentka69 4y ago
You can easily boil it down to "start working" what's the point of starting a website called "de procrastination" when the tricks are so naive?
- nicbou 4y ago
  The real tricks are in the course they sell
- honkler 4y ago
  how else would they make money?
nreece 4y ago
Here's one from Kevin Systrom (Instagram founder): "If you don't want to do something, make a deal with yourself to do at least five minutes of it. After five minutes, you'll end up doing the whole thing." https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/the-5-minute-hack-instagram-founder-kevin-systrom-uses-to-beat-procrastination.html https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/the-5-minute-hack-insta...
- alpaca128 4y ago
  That can work but unfortunately it's not very reliable. Sometimes it just takes a lot of motivation to keep going, especially if the task is cumbersome from the start.
- kayodelycaon 4y ago
  Narrowing the scope of what you need to accomplish is extremely effective. The best advice I've ever gotten for dealing with depression is to just do one thing at a time. For example, if I'm sitting in a chair and I need to do something, I only need to try standing up. I can always sit back down if I don't have the energy to start walking. Most of the time, I keep going. The times I don't, well, I know I tried. If you can define what trying looks like, then you know when you've tried your hardest and failed through no fault of your own. (For most people, it's a lot more than just five minutes!) Accepting failure makes moving forward in another direction a lot easier. Guilt isn't a good emotion to dwell on. The important thing with this advice is to remember you probably don't know your limit. Most people keep more energy in reserve than they realize and they can afford to spend that occasionally. This means the advice to push beyond your limit is really good advice for most people. But for many people dealing with chronic health issues, we already tend to push beyond our limits and hurt ourselves. Thus we need the opposite advice. :) Edit: I should clarify, by "dealing with depression", I mean trying to be productive when you are depressed.
  - actually_a_dog 4y ago
    I know you mean well by posting this, but this isn't going to help anyone with depression "deal with it."
zapzupnz 4y ago
The trick to not procrastinating is to stop procrastinating. I’d never have guessed!
- hinkley 4y ago
  Perhaps you would be interested in my manuscript on depression. It turns out that the trick is to stop doing things depressed people do, and start doing things that depressed people don't. I really think it's going to be a profound addition to the literature. I am thinking it's going to be a NYT best seller, but I can't seem to find an agent.
chimen 4y ago
I need quite the opposite
dboreham 4y ago
Another one I picked up from a guy on youtube: write the words "do it now" on paper in front of you (not type, not say, write).
- afhammad 4y ago
  you could end up in an infinite loop of writing “do it now” and never do “it”
  - drdeca 4y ago
    That a technique can possibly fail doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a decent chance of helping
j3th9n 4y ago
Procrastinate until you feel so bad about it that you fall into a depression. The only way to get out of the depression is to get started. It can take up to a few months/years, but it will get you started at some point. Works for me every time.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- chrsig 4y ago
  protip: if you develop a keen sense of anxiety, you can short circuit the depression. of course, as a side effect, you'll start to only work, being wonderfully productive as the depression wraps everyone around you in your irritability blanket and snuffs the life out of your relationships ...but hey, it keeps you productive
  - alivenotions 4y ago
    This used to work for me for the longest time until it slowly didn't. And then anxiety slowly kept building up since I stopped being as productive as before and it overwhelmed me to the point where I couldn't do any work.
    - chrsig 4y ago
      oh, it wasn't real advice -- i was just having a bit of a dark sense of humor about mental health. apologies if this wasn't as obvious as i'd intended. it does work, but as you note, it's not sustainable. It's horrible for the mind and body. please take care of yourself -- overwhelm is the pits.
      - alivenotions 4y ago
        Haha yeah, thanks! It just hit a bit too close to home as I'm going through this right now where thinking about work gives me the shakes and I can't seem to do any sort of long term deep work.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nnoitra 4y ago
There's no such thing as procrastination. There's definitely depression and the reason why many people "procrastinate" is because accomplishing tasks simply does not produce any feelings of reward in their brains. Otherwise the natural aspect of wanting to do work would have kicked in and with it the loop of work hard -> reward cycle. Every single thing I've learned about productivity is wrong. If you ever go down the rabbit hole of productivity or battling procrastination the odds are that something else is very wrong.
- chrsig 4y ago
  As a person on the extreme end of the ADHD spectrum, this is a interesting take to me. From a strict definition point of view: > pro·cras·ti·nate > /prəˈkrastəˌnāt/ > verb > delay or postpone action; put off doing something. I'm not sure if I agree with your assessment. That is, procrastination has no implication of why the action was postponed, merely that it is. Procrastination is a symptom of depression, ADHD, and other disorders that impact productivity -- the actions do in fact get postponed. The neurological process driving the postponement is irrelevant to the classification. I think perhaps a better phrasing may be "there's no such thing as laziness" -- laziness being an attributed cause of procrastination. There's generally a reason other than laziness, but society likes to dismiss those excuses and instead insist that the person themselves willfully choses to procrastinate. This is of course incredibly unhelpful in every regard, but society loves a good opportunity to shame people outside a standard deviation of typical.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    When you explain apologies to children, it often comes down to explaining to them that it doesn't matter what their internal narrative is, it matters what the other person's internal narrative is. Yes, you didn't mean to hit Sally with a stick, and yet here we are, with one crying child, and you, protesting your innocence. You need to apologize. Even if it was an accident. Similarly, you can avoid doing a task because you are mortgaging future you to deal with something you don't want to, or you can simply forget that it needs to get done. The motivation is different, but the outcome for the person who expected that you made a fancy dinner reservation you keep forgetting to make until after the last responsible moment is the same. I think in part this is a big factor of tension around The Last Responsible Moment with respect to Agile and YAGNI. People know themselves or their coworkers better than the author does. The last responsible moment is quite a bit earlier than you'd think, once you factor in not only queuing theory but also illness and distraction. You're not being responsible if you haven't accounted for predictable failure modes, Parkinson's Law, and some extra buffer into the equation for Hofstadler's Law, and then some extra buffer into the equation for <checks notes> Hofstadler's Law, and some extra buffer into the equation for Hofstadler's Law... For my money, you should tackle a task when it pisses you off. You will never be this motivated again. But I will qualify that advice by saying that one of my favorite passtimes is to invent Plan B and sometimes Plan C in my head, so at any given moment if you ask me to fix something, odds are at least 50/50 I have a coherent solution tucked away in the back of my head somewhere, instead of just throwing bullshit at the problem until it looks different, so YMMV.
boplicity 4y ago
I often give myself a clear task, and then set a 10 minute timer, and make myself focus for just 10 minutes. This is usually enough to get the ball rolling, and let me overcome the hump of not wanting to work. It's a simple little trick, but is usually enough to help me focus for much longer than 10 minutes.
- bratbag 4y ago
  I wish my subconscious was fooled so easily.
- dageshi 4y ago
  What usually happens with me is I do the thing for 10 minutes and then reach some logical breakpoint or a point that needs a context shift and I come crashing out of the "work zone" and back to square one where I don't want to do it any more.
huntr 4y ago
Articles about procrastination always fall into a "work when you don't feel like working" catch-22 that makes them hard to take seriously. I didn't cure my procrastination until I internalized a sense of professionalism. I go to work like everyone else who goes to work. When I'm at work I have an obligation to my employer, my family, and myself to do what I'm supposed to do as well as I can. This also makes it easy to indulge in what I want when I'm off the clock. If you can't get started, at least try and avoid distractions during your "professional" time. You can work or you can do nothing. That is typically uncomfortable enough to gain some forward momentum on a project.
marto1 4y ago
Here's my method: start by drawing on a piece of paper. Doodling helps with focus and is something you can’t really screw up. Do that for a while until your brain becomes more single-tracked. Helps me every time.
boredumb 4y ago
A lot of this stuff is great for when you're churning through some new features or a project you are invested in. Say for instance you have to find an issue in a legacy code base that is incorrect business logic and now you have to reproduce it, grok through tons of code, make some updates, rinse and repeat for a day or more. Just start? stop reading HN and go read the code. Start small? Open up my editor? Start sloppy? Dump some printlns? Anyway, time to go read* through some old cold fusion code I've been ignoring all morning. There is no magic to want to work which is why you are being paid to do it or there is some form of incentive. The only advice I'd give is pay attention when you drive under bridges and overpasses and remember you're only a few bad decisions away from meeting your new neighbors, drive home and remember you get paid to tinker on a computer, then get to tinkering.
- jewayne 4y ago
  I love the word "grok", but I don't think it means what you think it means.
bayofpigs 4y ago
chegra 4y ago
Hmm... I am big believer in mini-habits[1] and chaining habits. The way how I structure by day is to start off small with one habit then keep chaining it to other habits. For instance, I would start my day brush my teeth. It is a small easy habit to get going in the morning. Then, I will chain this habit to exercising. With exercising there are two versions... one I call my minimum and the other is my regular training regimen. My minimum is like 2 min or so of working out, something easy to do that can be replicated each day without any problems. Then, I chain my exercise routine with creating a todo list of the day. Which is chained to tracking my spending. My goal right now is to establish some evening habits. Right now I am little reckless with my evenings. 1. https://www.chestergrant.com/26-highlights-from-mini-habits-by-stephen-guise https://www.chestergrant.com/26-highlights-from-mini-habits-...
tchock23 4y ago
I recently came across an Aristotle quote that ‘happiness is a state of activity.’ I’m sure I’m missing the context and nuance, but I’ve started applying the quote to mean I can be happy in any activity, no matter how small or short in duration. Has been working for me lately to get me moving on projects I’ve procrastinated on, but YMMV.
m3kw9 4y ago
We are all used to working in the office where pieces of work is cut out for us and the accountability is built in. This is the main problem, it’s hard to create a system that can replicate office setting without a real business already in track. These trick will only duct tape the big problem in front of you.
andersource 4y ago
When I'm procrastinating hard on something, my best solution so far is to divide it to lots of tiny action items (~10 minutes each) and commit to doing at least one item every day. Sometimes that's enough to get me in the mood and I can satisfyingly cross out a dozen items in one go; other times I'm not in the mood, and after just a few minutes I can check the box for the day and move on. The knowledge that in the worst case I'm just literally 10 minutes away from feeling good takes the edge off a lot of causes for procrastination. Scroll HN for 30 minutes while agonizing on whether to commit to 3 hours of feverish debugging or just have a nice evening? No thanks, I'll just spend a few minutes setting up the debug environment in the most convenient manner possible, or find out just one tricky detail, and deal with the rest in the future. Of course, not all tasks can be split up like that, YMMV etc. Edit: if the task is big and just writing the todo list is too daunting, that too can be split up. Also, despite the simplicity, obviously some days will be missed, and that's perfectly fine. In my mind it's not even "at least one item a day" anymore as much as just making the smallest unit of work less painful than the baseline suffering rate of procrastinating on something.
winReInstall 4y ago
I bait and switch myself, i start working at something open source for me, then i switch once in the zone.
machiaweliczny 4y ago
The trick is to either: get rest or change job. I am always most productive after actively focusing on rest. Today I solved in 2h what I've been struggling last 2 days because I went sunbathing, swimming and to cinema over the weekend and work didn't feel daunting anymore. I could chose to work over the weekend and try to complete because it because it felt like I am behind schedule but that's not a healthy nor correct way.
rrradical 4y ago
I think there's room to be a lot smarter here. For example, is the thing you're trying to do a single time task or a habitual task? If it's a habitual task, e.g. practice guitar or write my novel or get 1 hr of code review done, then the best thing to do in my experience is to associate the habit in your brain with a dopamine hit. For example, as you sit down to do code review, have a cup of coffee or maybe a sugary drink. Or as you sit down to practice guitar, have a twitch stream on. After 5 or 10 minutes, let your focus switch move over to the activity and turn off the video and continue the task. But the point is, after weeks of this, the beginning of that activity will be tied to a dopamine hit for you. And then you won't dread the activity (but actually look forward to it!)
lazyant 4y ago
Something that can help is "greasing the path" to the task so you make it easier to start. Say you want to go to the gym tomorrow. Instead of thinking "I'll see tomorrow when I can go", you can block time in your calendar, get your gym bag ready by the door, text a friend to go together at an agreed time, etc.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Some of the tools I create for work are about fighting my own procrastination, half of the rest are about fighting the procrastination of others. If your partner won't go to the gym, you can't make them, but you can make sure their gym clothes got washed. If your coworker won't do things, you can't make them, but their boss can, and that's easier if you've made the task more straightforward.
racl101 4y ago
Another trick: your boss threatens you with job loss.
honkycat 4y ago
Here is the only thing i have found that works: 1. Do less. For me, this means playing fewer video games, watching less television, and going to bed earlier. There is a ton of other knock-on stuff that I can add to this, but doing less is the first thing. If your job eats every waking moment of your time and is paying less than 200k, it is time to find a new job... or move to a new city that isn't stupidly expensive. Other things I do: 1. Keep track of time. No goals. Only time. 2. Get up early and do it.
yupis 4y ago
One of the best resource and text about procrastination that I have read. Life-saving!
zackmorris 4y ago
Some thoughts since I should have started working an hour ago.. right now the only thing working for me is to "practice" what I have to do since I no longer derive satisfaction from most of what I have to do each day to survive. I tell myself that I'm practicing doing chores so that I don't devote conscious attention to them, I pretend at going to work, going through my mountain of mail to pay bills, etc etc. I just remembered where I was going with this: the practicing helped me remember learning certain tasks like brushing my teeth. So now I replay good memories of a task as I perform it instead of concentrating on the task itself. The higher the percentage of time spent NOT thinking about what I'm doing, the easier it is to start the task next time. Maybe this doesn't make sense if you don't struggle with anxiety or haven't burned out yet. But for people who have, changes happen in the brain where it's hard to forget what happened, so you come out of the experience a different person, disillusioned. The games help overcome the mental logic that (often correctly) predicts bad outcomes after years of negative reinforcement loops. Spending more time daydreaming helps restore the feeling of novelty and being young.
- kortex 4y ago
  Wow, this is exactly the comment I needed right now! I've long connected the source of procrastination with some kind of avoidance/learned helplessness behavior, but haven't been able to make much progress towards actually doing anything about it. "Just start doing it, even if it's only a tiny bit or done poorly" doesn't work when the stimulus of "start it" is exactly what is causing feelings of distress. I really like the idea of "practicing in order to devote less consciousness to it". I think this works well for a lot of low-thought tasks that aren't very mentally stimulating. Not sure about those where it requires conscious effort (paying taxes) but it's certainly a new avenue I haven't tried before.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
paxys 4y ago
Here's a better tip – get diagnosed and take antidepressants. All of the "just do it" bullshit motivational speeches in the world aren't going to work until you get to the root cause of the issue.
personjerry 4y ago
That other front-page article about "insight porn" was referring exactly to this clickbait. > 3 Tricks on how to get it done! 1. just do it 2. just do it messy 3. just do it small
wizofaus 4y ago
How about "start by helping another colleague" - it often feels like there are different reward systems in my brain for stuff I do "for myself" vs what I do "for others" - even if ultimately I'm just comparing two things the company that pays me wants me to do. I struggle far more with motivation on the "for myself" part, but if a colleague needs help with something I'm more than happy to jump in and provide it, and the act of doing so can be a pretty good impetus helping you refocus on your own tasks.
intelVISA 4y ago
I always assumed work procrastination was the standard response if you're fairly divorced from the positive outcome of said work. For a majority of people working hard enough to stay employed is the goal; why would you exert yourself to make a corp more money?
- mehphp 4y ago
  I mean, that happens but I exert myself to make myself more money. So far that has worked well.
mehphp 4y ago
One of my favorite quotes is “motion precedes emotions”. i.e. don’t wait around until you feel like doing something, just start and it’s likely that you’ll continue to want to so said thing. Works for both work and exercise for me.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
I try to get lots of sun and sleep.

198 points by ahstilde 4y ago

tchelow 4y ago

I am currently procrastinating to start procrastinating.

ketanmaheshwari 4y ago

We need a "Tricks to remember tricks when we need it".

tpmx 4y ago
Print and frame. Hang on a wall in your office, near the workstation.
- bil7 4y ago
  might actually work if you use identity based language, such as: My Rules: 1. When I feel like not working, I will commit to doing just 5 minutes of the task.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  My home office is the last place you'll find those kitschy "Just Eat" and "Love" signs that are so popular with suburban housewives.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    Maybe those housewives figured out something you didn't. :)
seb1204 4y ago
Make it your passphrase
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  I don't even know what my password is anymore it's just faded into a sequence of movements and clickity clack sounds.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    One year in high school I was in a mild panic the morning after Christmas break because I couldn't remember my locker combination. On the way to school I was mentally preparing myself for going to the office and asking them to help me. Then when I got to school, as I was taking things out of my locker I remembered that I needed to go to the office so I could... hold on. My locker is open. I opened it. What was the combination again? Then I stood there probably looking like an idiot (mercifully I came in a bit early so it was a mostly empty hallway) spinning the dial around trying to recall what I just did a minute ago.

ziddoap 4y ago

The three 'tricks' to start working consist of: "just start", "start sloppy", and "start small". I get what they're going for, but it's sort of funny to me that the three 'tricks' to start working all amount to "well, start working".

dentemple 4y ago
Me: "I don't feel like working today." This article: "But have you tried... just working today? :)"
- mikedelago 4y ago
  reminds me of the common advice for people with depression (that often comes from people without depression): "Well, have you tried not being sad :)?"
  - kayodelycaon 4y ago
    If I had a bullet for everyone person... well, I'd be in a lot of trouble. :)
  - 4ggr0 4y ago
    Or common advice when someone mentions that they're AD(H)D. "Just be structured", "try to focus more", "just write a journal", "Oh we all feel these things from time to time"
  - bergenty 4y ago
    Not in every case but many times it really is a valid approach. Perspective matters a lot for our mental well being. There are definitely people that get “addicted” to being chronically unhappy.
- 88913527 4y ago
  Me: "I don't feel like going to the gym." 'Have you tried just going?' I'll tell myself I can do the most absolutely abysmal 3 sets of whatever lift, and I can walk out if I'm not feeling it. 99% of the time, I stick it through.

mvdwoord 4y ago

But what if I suffer from recursive procrastination? (Procrastiception?)

mslupski1 4y ago
this made me laugh way too much than it should, thank you. Think I suffer from the same thing, still trying to find the underlying pattern
bigDinosaur 4y ago
You need to shift into structured procrastination [1]. Play your tasks off of one another. Beware that sometimes you are avoiding doing truly important tasks, but you'd likely be avoiding those anyway so you may as well make use of their existence. [1] http://www.structuredprocrastination.com http://www.structuredprocrastination.com
- mvdwoord 4y ago
  Haha, my ex always burst out in laughter, whenever she visited my place and found it spotless. Just meant a deadline at work was coming up.. :) She was never wrong (on this).
hinkley 4y ago
Are you talking about when you figure out you can make task A less onerous and avoid task B entirely if you do this other thing first, and then you can't get yourself to start on Task C because there's no immediate payoff? Because if that's what you mean then I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about. Lovely weather we're having, right?

dentka69 4y ago

You can easily boil it down to "start working" what's the point of starting a website called "de procrastination" when the tricks are so naive?

nicbou 4y ago
The real tricks are in the course they sell
honkler 4y ago
how else would they make money?

nreece 4y ago

Here's one from Kevin Systrom (Instagram founder): "If you don't want to do something, make a deal with yourself to do at least five minutes of it. After five minutes, you'll end up doing the whole thing." https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/the-5-minute-hack-instagram-founder-kevin-systrom-uses-to-beat-procrastination.html https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/the-5-minute-hack-insta...

alpaca128 4y ago
That can work but unfortunately it's not very reliable. Sometimes it just takes a lot of motivation to keep going, especially if the task is cumbersome from the start.
kayodelycaon 4y ago
Narrowing the scope of what you need to accomplish is extremely effective. The best advice I've ever gotten for dealing with depression is to just do one thing at a time. For example, if I'm sitting in a chair and I need to do something, I only need to try standing up. I can always sit back down if I don't have the energy to start walking. Most of the time, I keep going. The times I don't, well, I know I tried. If you can define what trying looks like, then you know when you've tried your hardest and failed through no fault of your own. (For most people, it's a lot more than just five minutes!) Accepting failure makes moving forward in another direction a lot easier. Guilt isn't a good emotion to dwell on. The important thing with this advice is to remember you probably don't know your limit. Most people keep more energy in reserve than they realize and they can afford to spend that occasionally. This means the advice to push beyond your limit is really good advice for most people. But for many people dealing with chronic health issues, we already tend to push beyond our limits and hurt ourselves. Thus we need the opposite advice. :) Edit: I should clarify, by "dealing with depression", I mean trying to be productive when you are depressed.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  I know you mean well by posting this, but this isn't going to help anyone with depression "deal with it."

zapzupnz 4y ago

The trick to not procrastinating is to stop procrastinating. I’d never have guessed!

hinkley 4y ago
Perhaps you would be interested in my manuscript on depression. It turns out that the trick is to stop doing things depressed people do, and start doing things that depressed people don't. I really think it's going to be a profound addition to the literature. I am thinking it's going to be a NYT best seller, but I can't seem to find an agent.

chimen 4y ago

I need quite the opposite

dboreham 4y ago

Another one I picked up from a guy on youtube: write the words "do it now" on paper in front of you (not type, not say, write).

afhammad 4y ago
you could end up in an infinite loop of writing “do it now” and never do “it”
- drdeca 4y ago
  That a technique can possibly fail doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a decent chance of helping

j3th9n 4y ago

Procrastinate until you feel so bad about it that you fall into a depression. The only way to get out of the depression is to get started. It can take up to a few months/years, but it will get you started at some point. Works for me every time.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chrsig 4y ago
protip: if you develop a keen sense of anxiety, you can short circuit the depression. of course, as a side effect, you'll start to only work, being wonderfully productive as the depression wraps everyone around you in your irritability blanket and snuffs the life out of your relationships ...but hey, it keeps you productive
- alivenotions 4y ago
  This used to work for me for the longest time until it slowly didn't. And then anxiety slowly kept building up since I stopped being as productive as before and it overwhelmed me to the point where I couldn't do any work.
  - chrsig 4y ago
    oh, it wasn't real advice -- i was just having a bit of a dark sense of humor about mental health. apologies if this wasn't as obvious as i'd intended. it does work, but as you note, it's not sustainable. It's horrible for the mind and body. please take care of yourself -- overwhelm is the pits.
    - alivenotions 4y ago
      Haha yeah, thanks! It just hit a bit too close to home as I'm going through this right now where thinking about work gives me the shakes and I can't seem to do any sort of long term deep work.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nnoitra 4y ago

There's no such thing as procrastination. There's definitely depression and the reason why many people "procrastinate" is because accomplishing tasks simply does not produce any feelings of reward in their brains. Otherwise the natural aspect of wanting to do work would have kicked in and with it the loop of work hard -> reward cycle. Every single thing I've learned about productivity is wrong. If you ever go down the rabbit hole of productivity or battling procrastination the odds are that something else is very wrong.

chrsig 4y ago
As a person on the extreme end of the ADHD spectrum, this is a interesting take to me. From a strict definition point of view: > pro·cras·ti·nate > /prəˈkrastəˌnāt/ > verb > delay or postpone action; put off doing something. I'm not sure if I agree with your assessment. That is, procrastination has no implication of why the action was postponed, merely that it is. Procrastination is a symptom of depression, ADHD, and other disorders that impact productivity -- the actions do in fact get postponed. The neurological process driving the postponement is irrelevant to the classification. I think perhaps a better phrasing may be "there's no such thing as laziness" -- laziness being an attributed cause of procrastination. There's generally a reason other than laziness, but society likes to dismiss those excuses and instead insist that the person themselves willfully choses to procrastinate. This is of course incredibly unhelpful in every regard, but society loves a good opportunity to shame people outside a standard deviation of typical.
- hinkley 4y ago
  When you explain apologies to children, it often comes down to explaining to them that it doesn't matter what their internal narrative is, it matters what the other person's internal narrative is. Yes, you didn't mean to hit Sally with a stick, and yet here we are, with one crying child, and you, protesting your innocence. You need to apologize. Even if it was an accident. Similarly, you can avoid doing a task because you are mortgaging future you to deal with something you don't want to, or you can simply forget that it needs to get done. The motivation is different, but the outcome for the person who expected that you made a fancy dinner reservation you keep forgetting to make until after the last responsible moment is the same. I think in part this is a big factor of tension around The Last Responsible Moment with respect to Agile and YAGNI. People know themselves or their coworkers better than the author does. The last responsible moment is quite a bit earlier than you'd think, once you factor in not only queuing theory but also illness and distraction. You're not being responsible if you haven't accounted for predictable failure modes, Parkinson's Law, and some extra buffer into the equation for Hofstadler's Law, and then some extra buffer into the equation for <checks notes> Hofstadler's Law, and some extra buffer into the equation for Hofstadler's Law... For my money, you should tackle a task when it pisses you off. You will never be this motivated again. But I will qualify that advice by saying that one of my favorite passtimes is to invent Plan B and sometimes Plan C in my head, so at any given moment if you ask me to fix something, odds are at least 50/50 I have a coherent solution tucked away in the back of my head somewhere, instead of just throwing bullshit at the problem until it looks different, so YMMV.

boplicity 4y ago

I often give myself a clear task, and then set a 10 minute timer, and make myself focus for just 10 minutes. This is usually enough to get the ball rolling, and let me overcome the hump of not wanting to work. It's a simple little trick, but is usually enough to help me focus for much longer than 10 minutes.

bratbag 4y ago
I wish my subconscious was fooled so easily.
dageshi 4y ago
What usually happens with me is I do the thing for 10 minutes and then reach some logical breakpoint or a point that needs a context shift and I come crashing out of the "work zone" and back to square one where I don't want to do it any more.

huntr 4y ago

Articles about procrastination always fall into a "work when you don't feel like working" catch-22 that makes them hard to take seriously. I didn't cure my procrastination until I internalized a sense of professionalism. I go to work like everyone else who goes to work. When I'm at work I have an obligation to my employer, my family, and myself to do what I'm supposed to do as well as I can. This also makes it easy to indulge in what I want when I'm off the clock. If you can't get started, at least try and avoid distractions during your "professional" time. You can work or you can do nothing. That is typically uncomfortable enough to gain some forward momentum on a project.

marto1 4y ago

Here's my method: start by drawing on a piece of paper. Doodling helps with focus and is something you can’t really screw up. Do that for a while until your brain becomes more single-tracked. Helps me every time.

boredumb 4y ago

A lot of this stuff is great for when you're churning through some new features or a project you are invested in. Say for instance you have to find an issue in a legacy code base that is incorrect business logic and now you have to reproduce it, grok through tons of code, make some updates, rinse and repeat for a day or more. Just start? stop reading HN and go read the code. Start small? Open up my editor? Start sloppy? Dump some printlns? Anyway, time to go read* through some old cold fusion code I've been ignoring all morning. There is no magic to want to work which is why you are being paid to do it or there is some form of incentive. The only advice I'd give is pay attention when you drive under bridges and overpasses and remember you're only a few bad decisions away from meeting your new neighbors, drive home and remember you get paid to tinker on a computer, then get to tinkering.

jewayne 4y ago
I love the word "grok", but I don't think it means what you think it means.

bayofpigs 4y ago

chegra 4y ago

Hmm... I am big believer in mini-habits[1] and chaining habits. The way how I structure by day is to start off small with one habit then keep chaining it to other habits. For instance, I would start my day brush my teeth. It is a small easy habit to get going in the morning. Then, I will chain this habit to exercising. With exercising there are two versions... one I call my minimum and the other is my regular training regimen. My minimum is like 2 min or so of working out, something easy to do that can be replicated each day without any problems. Then, I chain my exercise routine with creating a todo list of the day. Which is chained to tracking my spending. My goal right now is to establish some evening habits. Right now I am little reckless with my evenings. 1. https://www.chestergrant.com/26-highlights-from-mini-habits-by-stephen-guise https://www.chestergrant.com/26-highlights-from-mini-habits-...

tchock23 4y ago

I recently came across an Aristotle quote that ‘happiness is a state of activity.’ I’m sure I’m missing the context and nuance, but I’ve started applying the quote to mean I can be happy in any activity, no matter how small or short in duration. Has been working for me lately to get me moving on projects I’ve procrastinated on, but YMMV.

m3kw9 4y ago

We are all used to working in the office where pieces of work is cut out for us and the accountability is built in. This is the main problem, it’s hard to create a system that can replicate office setting without a real business already in track. These trick will only duct tape the big problem in front of you.

andersource 4y ago

When I'm procrastinating hard on something, my best solution so far is to divide it to lots of tiny action items (~10 minutes each) and commit to doing at least one item every day. Sometimes that's enough to get me in the mood and I can satisfyingly cross out a dozen items in one go; other times I'm not in the mood, and after just a few minutes I can check the box for the day and move on. The knowledge that in the worst case I'm just literally 10 minutes away from feeling good takes the edge off a lot of causes for procrastination. Scroll HN for 30 minutes while agonizing on whether to commit to 3 hours of feverish debugging or just have a nice evening? No thanks, I'll just spend a few minutes setting up the debug environment in the most convenient manner possible, or find out just one tricky detail, and deal with the rest in the future. Of course, not all tasks can be split up like that, YMMV etc. Edit: if the task is big and just writing the todo list is too daunting, that too can be split up. Also, despite the simplicity, obviously some days will be missed, and that's perfectly fine. In my mind it's not even "at least one item a day" anymore as much as just making the smallest unit of work less painful than the baseline suffering rate of procrastinating on something.

winReInstall 4y ago

I bait and switch myself, i start working at something open source for me, then i switch once in the zone.

machiaweliczny 4y ago

The trick is to either: get rest or change job. I am always most productive after actively focusing on rest. Today I solved in 2h what I've been struggling last 2 days because I went sunbathing, swimming and to cinema over the weekend and work didn't feel daunting anymore. I could chose to work over the weekend and try to complete because it because it felt like I am behind schedule but that's not a healthy nor correct way.

rrradical 4y ago

I think there's room to be a lot smarter here. For example, is the thing you're trying to do a single time task or a habitual task? If it's a habitual task, e.g. practice guitar or write my novel or get 1 hr of code review done, then the best thing to do in my experience is to associate the habit in your brain with a dopamine hit. For example, as you sit down to do code review, have a cup of coffee or maybe a sugary drink. Or as you sit down to practice guitar, have a twitch stream on. After 5 or 10 minutes, let your focus switch move over to the activity and turn off the video and continue the task. But the point is, after weeks of this, the beginning of that activity will be tied to a dopamine hit for you. And then you won't dread the activity (but actually look forward to it!)

lazyant 4y ago

Something that can help is "greasing the path" to the task so you make it easier to start. Say you want to go to the gym tomorrow. Instead of thinking "I'll see tomorrow when I can go", you can block time in your calendar, get your gym bag ready by the door, text a friend to go together at an agreed time, etc.

hinkley 4y ago
Some of the tools I create for work are about fighting my own procrastination, half of the rest are about fighting the procrastination of others. If your partner won't go to the gym, you can't make them, but you can make sure their gym clothes got washed. If your coworker won't do things, you can't make them, but their boss can, and that's easier if you've made the task more straightforward.

racl101 4y ago

Another trick: your boss threatens you with job loss.

honkycat 4y ago

Here is the only thing i have found that works: 1. Do less. For me, this means playing fewer video games, watching less television, and going to bed earlier. There is a ton of other knock-on stuff that I can add to this, but doing less is the first thing. If your job eats every waking moment of your time and is paying less than 200k, it is time to find a new job... or move to a new city that isn't stupidly expensive. Other things I do: 1. Keep track of time. No goals. Only time. 2. Get up early and do it.

yupis 4y ago

One of the best resource and text about procrastination that I have read. Life-saving!

zackmorris 4y ago

Some thoughts since I should have started working an hour ago.. right now the only thing working for me is to "practice" what I have to do since I no longer derive satisfaction from most of what I have to do each day to survive. I tell myself that I'm practicing doing chores so that I don't devote conscious attention to them, I pretend at going to work, going through my mountain of mail to pay bills, etc etc. I just remembered where I was going with this: the practicing helped me remember learning certain tasks like brushing my teeth. So now I replay good memories of a task as I perform it instead of concentrating on the task itself. The higher the percentage of time spent NOT thinking about what I'm doing, the easier it is to start the task next time. Maybe this doesn't make sense if you don't struggle with anxiety or haven't burned out yet. But for people who have, changes happen in the brain where it's hard to forget what happened, so you come out of the experience a different person, disillusioned. The games help overcome the mental logic that (often correctly) predicts bad outcomes after years of negative reinforcement loops. Spending more time daydreaming helps restore the feeling of novelty and being young.

kortex 4y ago
Wow, this is exactly the comment I needed right now! I've long connected the source of procrastination with some kind of avoidance/learned helplessness behavior, but haven't been able to make much progress towards actually doing anything about it. "Just start doing it, even if it's only a tiny bit or done poorly" doesn't work when the stimulus of "start it" is exactly what is causing feelings of distress. I really like the idea of "practicing in order to devote less consciousness to it". I think this works well for a lot of low-thought tasks that aren't very mentally stimulating. Not sure about those where it requires conscious effort (paying taxes) but it's certainly a new avenue I haven't tried before.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

paxys 4y ago

Here's a better tip – get diagnosed and take antidepressants. All of the "just do it" bullshit motivational speeches in the world aren't going to work until you get to the root cause of the issue.

personjerry 4y ago

That other front-page article about "insight porn" was referring exactly to this clickbait. > 3 Tricks on how to get it done! 1. just do it 2. just do it messy 3. just do it small

wizofaus 4y ago

How about "start by helping another colleague" - it often feels like there are different reward systems in my brain for stuff I do "for myself" vs what I do "for others" - even if ultimately I'm just comparing two things the company that pays me wants me to do. I struggle far more with motivation on the "for myself" part, but if a colleague needs help with something I'm more than happy to jump in and provide it, and the act of doing so can be a pretty good impetus helping you refocus on your own tasks.

intelVISA 4y ago

I always assumed work procrastination was the standard response if you're fairly divorced from the positive outcome of said work. For a majority of people working hard enough to stay employed is the goal; why would you exert yourself to make a corp more money?

mehphp 4y ago
I mean, that happens but I exert myself to make myself more money. So far that has worked well.

mehphp 4y ago

One of my favorite quotes is “motion precedes emotions”. i.e. don’t wait around until you feel like doing something, just start and it’s likely that you’ll continue to want to so said thing. Works for both work and exercise for me.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

I try to get lots of sun and sleep.