5 ms·

I have a very different take than this author, and apparently many of the people in this thread. I absolutely love to procrastinate and it's very important to

I have a very different take than this author, and apparently many of the people in this thread. I absolutely love to procrastinate and it's very important to me. Actually I am procrastinating by writing this comment right now. Allow me to explain: When I program, or do math, it's very important to me to have a clear head; and I take procrastinating very seriously because I know if I don't do certain things then I will have a hard time concentrating when I sit down to work, and that will prevent me from going into "the zone", or achieving what some people call "flow". There is such a huge difference between not only the amount of work I get down, but the quality of that work, when I am in the zone as opposed to when I am not; and procrastinating is sort of a ritual for me. I have to have a clean room, I have to have my desk nice and tidy, I have to have a glass of water, or a cup of coffee, in the same place on my desk that it always goes, I need to open my notebook to review my notes from the day before, and so on. Maybe I'm slightly OCD, but I do these things on purpose as part of a ritual to get into the zone. If I have an urge to check HN, I log in and do it. Otherwise when I start working I have an awful nagging thought that won't go away saying "hey you know, there is probably something awesome on HN!" and the fact is I need that extra space in my brain to load up all the details of the code I am working on. Then I load up my music playlist, put on my headphones, fire up my code editor, and the next thing I know it's 4 hours later and my stomach is growling because I have completely lost track of time. Guess what? Time to procrastinate again, otherwise productivity starts trailing off, and the quality of the work suffers. Sometimes I keep coding anyway, but then I come back the next day and say to myself, "Jesus, what was I thinking when I wrote this crap! I wish I hadn't closed Eclipse before I went to bed, because now I can't ctrl-z out of this mess!" So it's actually a bad idea for me to keep programming when I start getting distracted by random things because then I have to waste a bunch of time the next time I sit down, just undoing a bunch of crap. I love procrastinating, and I don't consider it a form of laziness at all, but just for a different reason.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago
That doesn't sound like procrastination to me as much as it sounds like a ritual. I say that because the steps, even though completely unrelated to what you want to accomplish, are still moving you closer to accomplishing your goals. For those of us whose procrastination has had a negative impact, those steps invariably drive us further from what we want to accomplish.
bjeanes 14y ago
IMO, that's not procrastination. That's just guilt-free play. The key is that you are still getting things done that you need/want to do. You're just aware of when you need a break and are comfortable letting yourself do so. That's not the procrastination that the OP is talking about...
- calhoun137 14y ago
  You have a very valid point, and even though I call it procrastinating it's not the same. However, I am all too familiar with the procrastinating of the type described by the OP, as I have experienced it myself quite severely. I suppose the reason I made my comment is one day I realized that it was actually a positive thing to "procrastinate" for a non-trivial amount of time before I even start working; as long as I actually do start before it gets out of control. I suppose it was also helpful for me to get rid of the psychological baggage of feeling guilty about "procrastinating", and I wanted to give a word of caution about not over-compensating by going to an extreme of never taking a break, or taking too short of a break, because of feeling guilty or afraid of not being able to start working again if you do.
  - ZoFreX 14y ago
    I do this and call it "constructive procrastination". I quite often wash the dishes because I'm putting off writing some code, for example. In your specific case I think it's even healthier. I can't work well or think straight if my environment is cluttered, it feels like it's cluttering my head as well. Identifying things in your environment that affect your performance and taking control over them is KEY to productivity and happiness.
  - bjeanes 14y ago
    Thats awesome. I'm reading the Now Habit at the moment (mentioned by the OP) and that seems to be one of the main points. "Guilt-free play" is about doing the things you WANT to do when you want to do them, so you can focus on important stuff later. Guilt is a huge part...
Felix21 14y ago
I'm not sure you have experienced the kind of procrastination the op speaks about. You have a to-do list of 5 items for today and then a week later(with up to 11 hours of busy-work everyday), you're on item number 3. This kind of procrastination is a sickness and has causes a lot of emotional distress. You're reading hacker news(or even working on a less important project) full of guilt and indescribable negative feelings that you need to be working on the "important things", then you move to the important thing you need to be doing but you cant get it done cause there is this hyper-active force on the inside of you that just wont allow you to focus. Its a very sad-depressing place I hope never to return to.
- taproot 14y ago
  I have bouts of getting out of this cycle, but always seem to return, how did you get out?
  - Felix21 14y ago
    When i got into this cycle i was in a desperate place. I got out of my first startup because "Chinese importers" had driven prices down so much that I couldn't turn a decent profit. A few weeks later, i got in touch with my manufacturer about a new product for the iPhone 5 and as they were in the process of manufacturing my new product, i listed it on amazon for pre-orders. I was selling about 10 pieces an hour and had a few thousand pounds in my account after about 5-days, enough to cover my manufacturing costs. Then amazon reached out that my account had been blocked because it was somehow related to another account they have previously blocked and i cant continue to sell with them or open another account. They froze my funds and cancelled my account, so i had to refund all those pre-orders and at the time amazon was 99.9 percent of my sales(big mistake) After that disappointment, i was a bit depressed and decided to leave that business and come into web startups. I started learning how to code and while i do enjoy coding, its not something i really want to do as much as something i felt (at least at that time) that i had to do. I think it was this mental block + the mild(not clinical)depression that caused me to continue to procrastinate this way. I was like this for i think about 6 months.. it was bad. Along with a complete lifestyle optimization (i went in hard on reorganizing my life to be efficient), the big change came when i started working on another promising project - i now had something to look forward to and a hope to hold on-to and i think that's what really made the difference and got me "productive" again. I can send you details about my lifestyle optimization if you are interested.
Uncompetative 14y ago
I think that you make a very important point about discontinuity. It made me think about how I could reduce the inertia of refamiliarization when I resume editing some program after some interruption. I find that I can concentrate for about four hours before my ability to maintain a mental model of the salient aspects of whatever subsystem I am modifying break down and I start to make unconscious mistakes that I fail to notice due to the effort required to direct my little remaining drip of concentration on those aspects that were associated with the initial goal. I suppose one could estimate how much time it would take to make a given change and only attempt it if you knew that you had an ample block of time to complete it without pause, but I somehow feel that this is wishful thinking and that you don't necessarily know what you are getting yourself into when you resume editing some part of a complex system. Those prone to procrastination will find that the advice to "do a little every day" isn't all that helpful if the task requires the previous day's (partially unfinished) changes to be comprehended before you can pick up where you left off, mental model now reconstructed. There is also a temptation to rewrite this unfinised, untested, undebugged code as unentangled, "fresh", code is easier to write than that which is burdened with interdependencies, observed protocols, ceremony and context-dependent assumptions. Without refamiliarization there is a danger of blundering blindly into damaging changes with subtle, far reaching repurcussions, due to your naive comprehension of the system dynamic. Given that refamiliarization is exhausting, I wondered if there were remedies that could reduce the time and effort it required each day: * Allow the visualisation of the project with a number of domain specific Projectional Editors - derived from an Abstract Syntax Tree * Use SSA symbolic variables - imperative programs are hard to understand because they support the reassignment of named data cells * If you have to have state defer changes to a globally synchronised Superstep - also support the Command/Query Separation Principle * Use a live programming debugger to play with the system and refamiliarise yourself with its dynamical behaviour in a safe sandbox * It may help to use a language that scores well on the Halstead complexity measure to reduce overall development effort - Python * Use a WHY directed outline for code - that explains its goals through a folding text editor that supports literate programming * Avoid fragile base classes - there is very little point having encapsulation if you hack the heritage of an object's genealogy * Use Go style interfaces If all that fails: * Revert to the previous working version and redo up to the point of interruption or pause - as it's easier to write entangled stuff I welcome anyone's opinions on these suggestions, or suggestions of their own...

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

That doesn't sound like procrastination to me as much as it sounds like a ritual. I say that because the steps, even though completely unrelated to what you want to accomplish, are still moving you closer to accomplishing your goals. For those of us whose procrastination has had a negative impact, those steps invariably drive us further from what we want to accomplish.

bjeanes 14y ago

IMO, that's not procrastination. That's just guilt-free play. The key is that you are still getting things done that you need/want to do. You're just aware of when you need a break and are comfortable letting yourself do so. That's not the procrastination that the OP is talking about...

calhoun137 14y ago
You have a very valid point, and even though I call it procrastinating it's not the same. However, I am all too familiar with the procrastinating of the type described by the OP, as I have experienced it myself quite severely. I suppose the reason I made my comment is one day I realized that it was actually a positive thing to "procrastinate" for a non-trivial amount of time before I even start working; as long as I actually do start before it gets out of control. I suppose it was also helpful for me to get rid of the psychological baggage of feeling guilty about "procrastinating", and I wanted to give a word of caution about not over-compensating by going to an extreme of never taking a break, or taking too short of a break, because of feeling guilty or afraid of not being able to start working again if you do.
- ZoFreX 14y ago
  I do this and call it "constructive procrastination". I quite often wash the dishes because I'm putting off writing some code, for example. In your specific case I think it's even healthier. I can't work well or think straight if my environment is cluttered, it feels like it's cluttering my head as well. Identifying things in your environment that affect your performance and taking control over them is KEY to productivity and happiness.
- bjeanes 14y ago
  Thats awesome. I'm reading the Now Habit at the moment (mentioned by the OP) and that seems to be one of the main points. "Guilt-free play" is about doing the things you WANT to do when you want to do them, so you can focus on important stuff later. Guilt is a huge part...

Felix21 14y ago

I'm not sure you have experienced the kind of procrastination the op speaks about. You have a to-do list of 5 items for today and then a week later(with up to 11 hours of busy-work everyday), you're on item number 3. This kind of procrastination is a sickness and has causes a lot of emotional distress. You're reading hacker news(or even working on a less important project) full of guilt and indescribable negative feelings that you need to be working on the "important things", then you move to the important thing you need to be doing but you cant get it done cause there is this hyper-active force on the inside of you that just wont allow you to focus. Its a very sad-depressing place I hope never to return to.

taproot 14y ago
I have bouts of getting out of this cycle, but always seem to return, how did you get out?
- Felix21 14y ago
  When i got into this cycle i was in a desperate place. I got out of my first startup because "Chinese importers" had driven prices down so much that I couldn't turn a decent profit. A few weeks later, i got in touch with my manufacturer about a new product for the iPhone 5 and as they were in the process of manufacturing my new product, i listed it on amazon for pre-orders. I was selling about 10 pieces an hour and had a few thousand pounds in my account after about 5-days, enough to cover my manufacturing costs. Then amazon reached out that my account had been blocked because it was somehow related to another account they have previously blocked and i cant continue to sell with them or open another account. They froze my funds and cancelled my account, so i had to refund all those pre-orders and at the time amazon was 99.9 percent of my sales(big mistake) After that disappointment, i was a bit depressed and decided to leave that business and come into web startups. I started learning how to code and while i do enjoy coding, its not something i really want to do as much as something i felt (at least at that time) that i had to do. I think it was this mental block + the mild(not clinical)depression that caused me to continue to procrastinate this way. I was like this for i think about 6 months.. it was bad. Along with a complete lifestyle optimization (i went in hard on reorganizing my life to be efficient), the big change came when i started working on another promising project - i now had something to look forward to and a hope to hold on-to and i think that's what really made the difference and got me "productive" again. I can send you details about my lifestyle optimization if you are interested.

Uncompetative 14y ago

I think that you make a very important point about discontinuity. It made me think about how I could reduce the inertia of refamiliarization when I resume editing some program after some interruption. I find that I can concentrate for about four hours before my ability to maintain a mental model of the salient aspects of whatever subsystem I am modifying break down and I start to make unconscious mistakes that I fail to notice due to the effort required to direct my little remaining drip of concentration on those aspects that were associated with the initial goal. I suppose one could estimate how much time it would take to make a given change and only attempt it if you knew that you had an ample block of time to complete it without pause, but I somehow feel that this is wishful thinking and that you don't necessarily know what you are getting yourself into when you resume editing some part of a complex system. Those prone to procrastination will find that the advice to "do a little every day" isn't all that helpful if the task requires the previous day's (partially unfinished) changes to be comprehended before you can pick up where you left off, mental model now reconstructed. There is also a temptation to rewrite this unfinised, untested, undebugged code as unentangled, "fresh", code is easier to write than that which is burdened with interdependencies, observed protocols, ceremony and context-dependent assumptions. Without refamiliarization there is a danger of blundering blindly into damaging changes with subtle, far reaching repurcussions, due to your naive comprehension of the system dynamic. Given that refamiliarization is exhausting, I wondered if there were remedies that could reduce the time and effort it required each day: * Allow the visualisation of the project with a number of domain specific Projectional Editors - derived from an Abstract Syntax Tree * Use SSA symbolic variables - imperative programs are hard to understand because they support the reassignment of named data cells * If you have to have state defer changes to a globally synchronised Superstep - also support the Command/Query Separation Principle * Use a live programming debugger to play with the system and refamiliarise yourself with its dynamical behaviour in a safe sandbox * It may help to use a language that scores well on the Halstead complexity measure to reduce overall development effort - Python * Use a WHY directed outline for code - that explains its goals through a folding text editor that supports literate programming * Avoid fragile base classes - there is very little point having encapsulation if you hack the heritage of an object's genealogy * Use Go style interfaces If all that fails: * Revert to the previous working version and redo up to the point of interruption or pause - as it's easier to write entangled stuff I welcome anyone's opinions on these suggestions, or suggestions of their own...