9 ms·
Structured Procrastination (1995)
- dbacar 1y agoThis is gold, I will read it fully later .
- jclulow 1y agoI think basically everyone with ADHD discovers this eventually; e.g., > Sympathetic Procrastination Rotor: a technique for Time and Task Management. > To aid in the fight against procrastination, arrange all of your tasks in a cycle, such that the natural opportunity for procrastination is always another task on the roadmap. In this essay I will https://x.com/jmclulow/status/1390544792946237442 https://x.com/jmclulow/status/1390544792946237442
- emil-lp 1y agoI started writing a book as a form of procrastination, and after I had written the first (exceptionally bad) draft, suddenly finishing that book rose to the top of the list. Haven't worked on it since.
- ipnon 1y agoThis is a trick I use: Never release a finished product. All of my releases are WIPs. I feel like Zeno’s Software Engineer.
- eru 1y agoYou better never learn about limits.
- hshdhdhehd 1y agoZeno, meet Sisyphus
- taneq 1y agoGonna get that boulder to the top of the hill eventually!
- shermantanktop 1y agoYou’re already halfway there!
- hshdhdhehd 1y agoThat union man is going to be on strike for a long time!
- parpfish 1y ago“We’re gonna bump up up to 1.0.0 from 0.2.972 one of these days”
- Asmod4n 1y ago
- thenoblesunfish 1y agoKey strategy is to get a job in the past, as a professor, where you can get away with not really doing most things you "have" to do.
- siva7 1y ago> Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. This is also true from my observations but what this writing misses is another much more crucial aspect: People with severe, general procrastination problems have a high chance of having (usually undiagnosed) AD(H)D. This is a neurobiological disorder (more precisely, a spectrum), not something you can trick away by reading self-help books/writings. There is effective medication available for those patients.
- eru 1y agoAs far as I can tell, ADHD exists on a spectrum. And treatment is also multi-faceted. Meaning you might want to take your ADHD meds and do whatever exercises your shrink suggests, and in addition see whatever self-help essays work for you, etc.
- dashdashu 1y agoYou're right but being medicated is usually the first step. The starting line so to say from which you can then explore various other methods and see what can help mitigate symptoms
- eru 1y agoYes. The medication often works great, if you can get it to work for you. For some people that's less of an option. Eg the appetite suppression that comes with stimulants might be a welcome side-effect in adults, but it's usually a big no no in children.
- 4gotunameagain 1y agoAs exactly you pointed it out, it is a spectrum. Therefore some things work for some people, while not for others. Not everyone should take amphetamines to be more productive.
- 1y ago
- elcapitan 1y agoKind of fitting that this is currently #1 on HN
- CamelCaseName 1y agoWhat's more, it's been posted 40 times, the first being back in 2007!
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoAh yes, the "I'll read it later" flavour of procrastination. I don't read it later, HN is where I go to procrastinate, lol.
- tiniuclx 1y agoI too struggle with procrastination. I have a big personal project that is nearing completion & very important to me, but also turning into a bit of a slog. However, because I'm procrastinating working on said project, I managed to do many other things that are also important to me, such as writing more & sharpening some skills.
- codesnik 1y agoI'm doing the same, or at least trying to do it. Worst periods for me were when I had one clear, important goal, not particularly hard but hairy, and nothing else to do, sometimes because I myself cleared it up. I could spend months doing nothing useful, and end up very, very tired and burnt up. I also several times had a conversation with managers, whom I told that I'd rather work on something very urgent, or otherwise give me something NOT (really) urgent and a big murky area of things to clear out which no one else knows how to deal with. That something won't probably be done, but that area will be improved a lot in creative ways. Typical managers' responses have been trying to micromanage my time up to personal hourly schedules, morning and evening personal reports, and scold me if I did anything out of the order of the list of priorities they imposed on me. Exactly the opposite of what's needed for me to be productive. And of course "let's just try that, and I'm not asking." Next time I'll see such a response, I probably will quit on the spot; this is unbelievably cruel. But it looks like the secret of the author is: just work in academia.
- klabetron 1y ago> Next time I'll see such a response, I probably will quit on the spot; this is unbelievably cruel. Let me guess: you’d quit but your résumé’s out of date because you, like me, procrastinate updating it? (Sounds like a manager trying to manage you out; make things miserable enough for you that you’ll quit without having to go through the redundancy process…)
- Sammi 1y ago> Sounds like a manager trying to manage you out; make things miserable enough for you that you’ll quit without having to go through the redundancy process… Dammit, now I have to live the rest of my life thinking about that this might be a thing that's actually happening.
- magnusmundus 1y agoMobbing is probably older than resignation as a concept.
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- jbstack 1y ago> The procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important. This is the reason this method has never really clicked for me, despite coming across the concept in various procrastination blogs. It's the more important tasks that need doing the most, and this method aims to avoid doing those in favour of less important tasks. Yes, the article acknowledges this: > At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here. But the offered solution is to put fake important tasks to the top of the list: tasks which have deadlines and appear to be important but really aren't. I don't think the human brain is stupid enough to trick itself in this way. If I put a fake task at the top of my list, I'm going to know its fake (because I deliberately put it there for the reason that it's fake!), and it's going to be the actual important tasks which get neglected instead of the fake one.
- anon7000 1y agoI mean, the crux of the problem is you might have a problem space where everything has a very, very strict, tight deadline. It’s not gonna work for that. But this is simply not true in the real world. As the author notes, he has papers to grade and a mess of work to do in the evenings. These are important and have deadlines. But the reality of the matter is that procrastinating them really doesn’t hurt anyone that much, and the benefit of just spending time with students is incredible. If every problem is deeply important and has to be done yesterday, you wind up stretched very thin. It’s stressful! I don’t think this is about creating a fake task at the top. It’s more about recognizing that it’s very frequently ok to procrastinate important things if you get value from what you did instead, and aiming to maximize that value. You’re tricking yourself, but in a way that fits how some procrastinators think. As he says, it relies on some level of self-deception. And it should go without saying that there are obviously exceptions, and that it’s just one tool in the toolbox.
- jbstack 1y agoThe part I'm not convinced about is that the self-deception actually works. In order to achieve it, I have to go through the thought process of "I have papers to grade and a mess of work to do which are important and have deadlines, but actually if I don't do them it won't hurt anyone". Once I go through that thought process, I now know that the task isn't genuinely important. Writing it down at the top of some list doesn't change what I know. Somewhere else on that list is the real important task (the one that will cause harm if I don't do it) and my brain knows which one it is and will try to procrastinate it.
- tpoacher 1y agoI had fun reading this. Unfortunately the infinite list of tasks doesn't work for me, because in the end they fade into oblivion but are still somehow important to keep track of, putting them in some sort of no-man's land ...
- swiftcoder 1y ago> one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself This is wonderful framing. I love it
- s20n 1y agoAh yes, yak shaving <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving>
- boerseth 1y agoI swear this is how I've gotten good at most of my hobbies. Playing guitar for 20 years has gotten me to a great level for a hobbyist, but not at all because of any virtues like discipline, self control, or routine. Rather, every day whenever other more important chores or duties loomed, I'd notice one of my guitars laying around, in my couch or my bed or leaning next to my desk. And most times, I'd give in. There's always a new skill, technique, lick, or song that I'm working on, or something I've recently mastered that gives me joy to play. If anything I think discipline would have hurt my guitar skills over the years.
- Sammi 1y agoThis is why "follow you passion" is terrible career advise. If you make your passion your work then it stops being your "passion". Much better career advise I've heard is: What kind you shit are you much better at suffering than other people around you seem to be? Because work is work. There's a reason you get paid to do it. Sure it might be something that you are good at and care about, but if you need to work on it 8 hours a day, then you will inevitably start to feel the grind. This is why you get paid and go on vacations.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoThis is what software development is for me; "just learn coding lol" is terrible career advice because it's simply not for everyone, just like management or marketing isn't for me. I could do blue collar work, but preferably factory work.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoMan I wish I had a hobby like that instead of video games, lol. (I'm very much into video games that scratch the same itch as software development does, but with games they give more instant gratification and they present you the next objective in a fairly structured fashion, but often without pressure. I've binged Factorio, now I'm back on Rimworld, where my people just do the tasks they are supposed to and only procrastinate when I allow it and / or when they have a mental breakdown from seeing too many dead bodies)
- leventhan 1y agoMake procrastination your superpower.
- srean 1y agoOver the years I have become more or less convinced that I have adult ADHD. The overlap in symptoms are too difficult to leave unacknowledged. But, at the same time I have been procrastinating on getting myself diagnosed. Oh, well.
- siva7 1y agoThat's a classic pattern in adult ADHD. I had the same issue. Getting help is sometimes the most difficult step and it can change your life (and those of your loved ones) for the better.
- srean 1y agoJust the thought that I have to (i) find a doctor and then (ii) speak at length about myself and symptoms, is a massive deterrent. Then there are worries that I might get dependent on the medicines and /or my tendency to form whacky spontaneous connections between things (a trait that I find amusing and unwilling to lose). I know. I know, these are excuses. Thanks for the push.
- siva7 1y agoThey are excuses and i had the same for a long time. Part of the reason for these delays are also the symptoms of the disorder which impairs functions responsible to be able to make changes.
- jonasdegendt 1y agoI suspect I have ADD as well and did the same thing for the longest time, that is putting off getting help, but I have an initial appointment tomorrow to either confirm, or rule out, a diagnosis. I ended up needing a nudge from someone else to finally get to it, so let this be a sign that you can do it too! ;)
- srean 1y agoGood job and all the best. I have found that having a compassionate partner who knows when not to take your (meaning mine) bullshit and when to yield somewhat, helps a great deal. I am very lucky in that sense, but wish she was stricter. So yes, non-judgemental but unyielding nudges help a lot.
- lucideer 1y agoI feel like this seemed a plausible strategy when I first read it as a serial procrastinator struggling through university 17 years ago. Now, after many years of applying stuff like this successfully for a couple months only to immediately regress at the first sign of life disruption, after an ADHD diagnosis & a bunch of therapy, this all seems like a fairly immature avoidant coping strategy in retrospect. I'm now fairly productive & don't procrastinate much (relatively speaking) and tbh I wish I'd read less of this crap in the past: I might've gotten help earlier.
- throwaway295729 1y agoI’m on the same boat. What do you think the root causes of procrastination were in your case?
- zachrip 1y agoThey did mention their adhd diagnosis..
- lucideer 1y agoADHD definitely doesn't help but I don't find there's a direct link between ADHD & why I procrastinate. The why is personal to me & unlikely to be the same for everyone but I find these kinds of tools & strategies are a means to ignore the why & "get by" without addressing any fundamental issues. One example (of which there are many) is that external validation as a motivator is a big cause of procrastination in some people - working on things "for others" hits on a lot of complex issues around personal insecurities & ego. The idea that your work will be seen & judged can be a big factor in pressures & subconscious negative emotions around doing the work. Addressing motivation properly involves addressing those insecurities, rather than just "getting on with it" & using a temporary strategy to get it done. That's an example, but it doesn't apply to everyone & it's never that simple for anyone.
- dceddia 1y agoI’m coming to see the root is usually some kind of avoidance, always emotional, often subtle. I think this actually is pretty universal but the specifics vary wildly. It’s taken a while to unpack this. For a long time, when I’d about of a task I was avoiding, I’d just get this wave of a feeling of “ughhh” and turn away. There’s something the feeling is trying to warn me about, and sitting with it can help figure it out and let it go. A lot of my own stuff stems from school I think. The funny thing is it’s often totally illogical. Like a sense of panic comes up - “oh no! Someone will be mad I haven’t started this yet!” - yes well wouldn’t getting it done avoid that outcome? “no but it’s too late! They’ll yell at me when I turn it in!”. My brain associated “doing the task” with “getting in trouble” in a weird way, and that emotional program runs whenever something vaguely similar comes up. The surface-level fear might cover up a deeper fear underneath too (something like, I won’t be ok, or good enough, or loved anymore). All this emotional stuff has been a recent focus of mine ever since finding Joe Hudson’s work. There’s a good playlist on procrastination that’s relevant here: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrbct081G13-ot5FviKz1btJwHdRLV6et https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrbct081G13-ot5FviKz1bt...
- d--b 1y agoIf this is your first time reading about structured procrastination on HN you're not procrastinating enough!
- owenpalmer 1y agoI felt this when I decided to do dev work while going to school. The structure of work was a break from the chaos of school, and the novelty of school was a break from the monotony of work. I want to understand the mechanism and purpose behind procrastination. It seems like there's a reason evolution chose for ADHD to exist. In my experience, sometimes the frustrating signal telling me not to do the superficially "productive" thing is a defense mechanism against doing meaningless shit. It's a voice screaming at you, informing you of your mortality.
- niek_pas 1y ago> It seems like there's a reason evolution chose for ADHD to exist. Well, evolution is not an actor. It didn't 'choose' anything. It's just that people (organisms?) with ADHD have not failed to reproduce in the past, so it still exists.
- gyomu 1y ago> organisms with ADHD have not failed to reproduce in the past Yes, that's the real insight. You can be terribly unsuccessful by society's standards and yet immensely successful by evolutionary standards. If you're broke/in prison/homeless/addicted/(whatever else you want to include) with 6 kids, you're evolutionary more successful than someone who has it all put together with 0 kids.
- owenpalmer 1y agoThis is the bell curve meme. Evolution chose -> NOOOO, evolution doesn't "choose" anything -> Evolution chose Personification of natural selection is a common way biologists speak about evolution.
- marcosdumay 1y agoYes, we have an entire part of the language for talking about what actors do. And we have nothing at all to talk about how non-acting structures mold complex systems.
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- bradley13 1y agoAn old friend of mine had a saying: if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. Fits right in with this article.
- blinkingled 1y agoIf you truly enjoy the procrastination as opposed to fighting it or distracting to another thing - sooner or later you'll want to do the thing you were supposed to do. Try that out. There is a reason why you don't want to do something and that fundamentally has to do with your mental relationship to the task - the repetition fatigue, the way you think and feel about it etc. needs a reset and enjoying the idle procrastination time gives you that. IOW Zen mantra - when you procrastinate just procrastinate without resistance.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoThis is great if you have that freedom, but the person that wrote the article needs to do tasks for their job; other people depend on it. Same with me and my job, I am paid to perform a specific task at the moment. Same with people in a family situation, you can't procrastinate daily routines like picking your kids up from school... which leads to procrastinating about everything else because you have something coming up later so you can't hyperfocus on something else.
- blinkingled 1y agoYeah, what I do is make use of the freedom fully when I can and that way it's like I have fulfilled my quota for procrastination and it's easy sailing for the stuff then I need to do :D - complicated and works for me but YMMV. Feels intuitive to me lol.
- alexey-salmin 1y agoI like this approach, feels like something Mark Twain would've advised
- kaffekaka 1y agoI have found that when someone (someone else, not me) asks for help in the work slack and noone replies, the best way to get people engaged is to send a simple "hm..". This seems to trigger colleagues that are actually busy into being "the first to help". Like they don't want me to be the hero.
- maffyoo 1y ago+1 for a "this has been posted before" check https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Structured+Procrastination https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Structured+Procrastination
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- qwertytyyuu 1y agoI feel like anything that get onto that list is going get procrastinated on …
- techstrategist 1y agoThere's a great book about this, the author writes a bit at https://www.lichtenbergianism.com/ https://www.lichtenbergianism.com/ but a paper copy is much more useful imo.
- FranklinMaillot 1y agoAlso known as 'procrastivity'.
- cowpig 1y agoThis article had a debilitating effect on one of the most talented engineers I've ever met. A charismatic force of nature, whose impact was tragically chaotic. He read it as a teenager, and it became part of his personal philosophy. And so he used it to avoid feeling responsible for his own priorities, and struggled in every role he had for years. He routinely derailed projects and created chaos by switching away from projects as soon as they became mission-critical. And he demanded an infuriating amount of managerial attention. His absolute brilliance and charisma made this far worse, as his attitude was inherently culture-setting. The more impressionable employees around him would inevitably become worse than useless, while the more senior, mature employees ended up hating working with him despite his incredible impact on the thing he was paying attention to at a given moment. Be convinced of this article's ideas at your own risk.
- jaberjaber23 1y agomost people don’t procrastinate because they’re lazy, they procrastinate because their brain rejects meaningless work
- alganet 1y agoIt all comes down to doing things you don't want to do. Procrastination as a concept exists to trick you into thinking that you should want to do the thing you don't want to do. It's much better to just recognize that there's a lot of things I don't want to do, and there is no trick to make me like those things, and it will be miserable doing those things. Sometimes, I'll need to do things I don't want. No way out of it. In my opinion, it's also beneficial to keep it simple. Instead of playing a game of "if I finish this side project, I'll be able to show it to others, then maybe I'll be recognized, then...", just keep it simple: do you want to work on it or not (does it make you happy?), right now? Do you need to work on it (to pay bills, to support children, etc), right now? This way, you never procrastinate. You either succeeded at avoiding doing something you don't want to do, or you failed doing something you need to do.
- dadzilla 1y agoMy dad, John Perry, wrote this essay and followed it up with a book - The Art of Procrastination. I love to see the essay rediscovered & will share this thread with him.
- Freak_NL 1y agoDoes anyone know why the newest Firefox isn't showing the button for the reader view on this page? The shortcut doesn't work either. It seems to work fine on plenty of other articles on other websites. Normally I don't rely too much on that feature, but this website is hard to read as-is.
- FakeBlueSamurai 1y ago[dead]
- fedeb95 1y agoThis article seems great, I will finish it later.
- jackallis 1y agoif this article resonates with you, please go talk to a therapist to see if there is/are any underlying "issues" that is leading you to procrastinate; you might have ADHD. i am really tired of reading numerous artciles on how procrastination is matter of lack-of-will, not disciplined, time-waters to gets things done.
- vishkk 1y agoDidn't have vocab for it, but seems like I have been doing something similar. For example, having a JIRA ticket on my board that I don't want to do will make me finish all the other tickets. I will procrastinate till the last minute -- kind of pitting one ticket against all others for myself to get the stuff done.
- tomhow 1y agoWe've been procrastinating for years here... Structured Procrastination (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36433304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36433304 - June 2023 (1 comment) Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33515388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33515388 - Nov 2022 (4 comments) Structured Procrastination (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30292440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30292440 - Feb 2022 (37 comments) Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24884347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24884347 - Oct 2020 (9 comments) Structured Procrastination (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941717 - April 2018 (38 comments) Structured Procrastination: Do Less, Deceive Yourself, and Succeed Long-Term - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10151481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10151481 - Sept 2015 (79 comments) Procrastination and Perfectionism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287817 - March 2011 (29 comments) Structured Procrastination - "the art of making procrastination work for you" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=212590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=212590 - June 2008 (3 comments)
- beacon294 1y agoThis is a testament to ADHD in the software industry. The hallmark of ADHD is an "interest based attention system". If you have ADHD, it may be completely shocking for you to hear that most people prioritize "extrinsically", meaning, whether or not something is "interesting" is *not* primary information in their prioritizations. I never knew I had ADHD until I had a baby and had to start prioritizing tasks based on time. And guess what, I can't easily prioritize on time constraints. Which is one of the two fundamental prioritization dimensions, the other being space (eg you only need one auth backend, pick one). I can do space. Now I have no problem writing hours for each segment of a project and getting it within 100% error bars. Where my life breaks down is daily tasks. I used to have a 5-7 PM sink. If I had a good day, I wrapped at 5 or just kept momentum to 7 PM. If I had a bad ADHD day, I just worked to 7, manufacturing urgency. With a child you don't work til 7, so just lop off 10 of your 25-30 core productive hours for the week, unmedicated. I suspect as I adjust I will come to see 2-3 PM as "ahh this is urgent because at 5 PM, death". But, at least I am medicated now and can work consistently at 9 AM.
- SJMG 1y agoI assume you mean the sharing of the article, because the author was a philosophy prof. Do you have anything I can follow up on for, > most people prioritize "extrinsically" meaning, whether or not something is "interesting" is not primary information in their prioritizations. I would have thought the quest for dopamine was pretty universal and there's a good friend in my life who has a serious case of ADHD.
- beacon294 1y agoYes, this article is very helpful. The website is very noisy, maybe to keep hyperactive ADHD people around, but it's horrible for me. Try a reader mode: https://www.additudemag.com/secrets-of-the-adhd-brain/?srsltid=AfmBOoqZEXg577hJsmZmmXOszc2P1E_OxOE5ZfcPii-lzwK0aX3Cy4-C https://www.additudemag.com/secrets-of-the-adhd-brain/?srslt...
- beacon294 1y agoBy the way, the difference is not motivation by interest, but dependence on interest to initiate a task or even think about something.
- im3w1l 1y agoI got a perspective on procrastrination by playing chess. Sometimes in the past I would try to do something like write an essay, read a book or, program something. And I would get this heavy feeling in my brain. Thinking would be like running through molasses. No useful thoughts would pop out. I would have read the same sentence over and over, because as soon as I finished reading it I would have forgotten what I just read. And then I would drop what I was doing and "procrastrinate". Well, I started playing chess. And the same thing would happen, I would get this feeling. And I would start dropping pieces. I would play the opening out of order. I would try my very best to prevent these things and then run out of time. And it made me realize something - because chess is a microcosm model of thinking and knowledge work, more quantifiable and objective - it made me realize that I wasn't being lazy. I had in fact been completely correct when I thought to myself that I can't do this right now. It wasn't an excuse. But also it made me reflect on my "a-game". It's simply not possible to always be on your a-agame, and you have to plan around that. Somethings are acceptable to do at a lower standard. Maybe it's okay having half-understood the book? Also doing things at your "b-game" is still practice even if the work is garbage.
- danielfalbo 1y agoHow do we know it's from 1995? > Site designed by the author's granddaughter, who did the work while avoiding the far more weighty assignment of her literature test. Impressive for 1995, he must've thought her HTML and how to use a computer first HTML 2.0 came out in 1995
- danielfalbo 1y agoupdate: the HTML doctype string is > <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> that's HTML 1.0
- Scarblac 1y agoXHTML 1.0, the attempt to write HTML in XML. It came out in ~2000 and was a thing for some time while HTML 4 was also around.
- dadzilla 1y agoHeh, that's my daughter - mostly self-taught with just enough misdirection from me to keep her guessing. The essay was from 1995, but was just in a listserv. The webpage was done in the early 2000s.
- tolerance 1y ago- This year's submission as of the time of this comment has ~38 references to “ADHD” (not counting multiple references in a single comment). - The 2022 submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30292440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30292440): 6 - 2020 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24884347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24884347): zero - 2018 contains a single reference to “ADD”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16948527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16948527 - 2017 contains neither “ADHD” nor “ADD” but a single reference to “ADDeral”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13618985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13618985 - 2015 has no references but I thought this comment was funny: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10163857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10163857
- hungryhobbit 1y agoNever in my life have I wanted a single line of CSS more! To the author: humans with large monitors can't read text that spills across those entire monitors! Add a max-width: 1000px or something.
- ishouldbework 1y agoCan you make the browser window smaller?
- jimnotgym 1y ago(1995)
- Rendello 1y agoNew enough to have Google Ads embedded! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45492546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45492546
- ahaferburg 1y agoI'm wondering why Firefox on Desktop won't offer Reader mode on this page. The F9 shortcut doesn't work either. Does anybody know? Is there a content length threshold? The text doesn't seem that short to me.
- tiagoafpereira 1y agoTry https://www.structuredprocrastination.com/index.php https://www.structuredprocrastination.com/index.php instead. Just stumbled on it by chance when I clicked the side bar menu.
- roncesvalles 1y agoAs someone who procrastinates, I've intuited this exact thing over time. I need a dozen open threads at once -- unfinished software projects, unfinished books, work projects, areas that I'm just thinking about, topics to learn. At any given time I might pick up any of those threads and make progress on it. Maybe I might spend a few days on it, maybe a few minutes. But over the long term, I do finish them. It helps to maintain extensive and detailed context notes so that doing this context-switching is easy. Many great individual works in history were not produced in a "straight line" by the creator just sitting down and powering through them. They were produced as I described, in disconnected sprints over years and decades.
- dang 1y agoRelated. Others? Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33515388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33515388 - Nov 2022 (4 comments) Structured Procrastination (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30292440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30292440 - Feb 2022 (37 comments) Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24884347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24884347 - Oct 2020 (9 comments) Structured Procrastination (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16941717 - April 2018 (38 comments) Structured Procrastination: Do Less and Deceive Yourself - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13617083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13617083 - Feb 2017 (78 comments) Structured Procrastination: Do Less, Deceive Yourself, and Succeed Long-Term - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10151481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10151481 - Sept 2015 (79 comments) Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2514972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2514972 - May 2011 (2 comments) Procrastination and Perfectionism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287817 - March 2011 (29 comments) Anti-Akrasia Technique: Structured Procrastination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=939656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=939656 - Nov 2009 (4 comments) Structured Procrastination - "the art of making procrastination work for you" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=212590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=212590 - June 2008 (3 comments)
- kanodiaayush 1y agoOkay so how are we to do the actual hardest thing on our list? All else is resolved (let's say) (I genuinely agree). I just want a nice complete framework to remember this article and what's missing is how to get the top item/hardest thing done.
- jll29 1y agoI've been using what the OP discusses for several years now, and it works. In particular, as a scientist I can report that the brain is particularly creative when it is expected to work on something else; it comes up with very interesting and original research topics that are worth being captured in writing (to be executed later on). The main task can be attacked (better) with Structured Procrastination by making a TO DO list on which we divide it into many small tasks. During procrastination, picking and completing a small task from the list is typically possible, and relatively effortlessly so.