Structured Procrastination: Do Less, Deceive Yourself, and Succeed Long-Term | Hacker News Reader

Structured Procrastination: Do Less, Deceive Yourself, and Succeed Long-Term

structuredprocrastination.com

323 pointsgmac79 comments

What I have found is that the subconscious will resist taking action on something perceived to be important until it's worked out an appropriate approach. As a result one can avoid doing things like planning and preparing and simply query the subconscious as to whether you're ready to work on something.

Yes has me start on it and either complete it or hit a snag. If it's a snag, then I'll analyze it briefly and then go back to procrastinating until the subconscious has worked out another approach.

No is perceived this as a feeling of "Nope." I've attuned myself to this feeling and have learned to listen carefully to it. Many, many times, especially with work tasks the reason for doing that particular task will have evaporated by the time I'm ready to do it.

Other times I find I needed to clear my mind before the subconscious can present to me the right way to go about it. So I'll read articles so as to purge my mind of the attachment (in the Buddhist sense) I'm feeling to the task.

Sometimes it takes days / weeks / months for this attachment to clear up. I have a task I've been wanting to do sit in my reminders for 2 months now. It will stay until I'm either comfortable removing it or actually doing it.

Your first sentence was really motivational for some reason. Or maybe I'm just rationalizing my procrastination by making it sound like some kind of cool async hyperthreading approach.

Honestly, this sounds like justification to go days/weeks/months just reading articles to me.

"Don't worry boss, maybe next week my subconscious will come up with a brilliant solution that will sink our competitors. You'll see."

A little planning goes a long way. You can avoid doing things like planning and wait days/weeks/months for your attachment to the task to clear up. You can also plan out what you'll need to accomplish a task and once you're done, your mind can essentially go on autopilot till you either hit a snag (in which case back to the drawing board you go for more planning), or finish the task.

You can trust your subconscious to show you the right way and hope it's correct, or you can plan the right way and have more of a guarantee that it's correct.

A matter of scale. Your subconscious isn't going to make big plans; but it can solve knotty problems. Its tactical. And of course once you come up with something, you can do all that planning-review stuff on the brilliant idea, confirm its really a good idea.

If you only have a single task to complete, then yes that's precisely justification to sit there and do nothing but collect a paycheck.

Hopefully your boss is putting multiple things in front of you that can be juggled so that as you put something in the background something can take its place.

I've solved some of the most challenging problems I've ever faced in my professional life this way. By focusing on something else, usually another task in an entirely different project or section or even just looking at Youtube I'll often have an epiphany about something in a completely unrelated task. I'll go to prove my assumptions and sure enough, problem solved. Much more efficiently I might add.

When I only have one major thing to accomplish this looks like I'm doing nothing because on the surface I'm not. I'm often here on HN reading articles or on other websites filling my brain with useless trivia but it doesn't mean my mind isn't churning through the plates I have spinning. I'll also often pull a task out of background, make more assumptions, prove them incorrect, then put the task back in background mode until that efficient answer comes. This is not every task mind you, some things I can solve immediately. For the things I can't, this model absolutely does work for me 100% of the time.

> A little planning goes a long way.

Planning can be accomplished like any other task in exactly the same way. "I need to plan the Xyzzy presentation, am I ready to do this?" <consult gut feeling> "Yes, let's give it a go. What sorts of information am I going to need?" And go about your plan.

"Planning" can be just the thing your subconscious has decided a particular task needs. At this point it's no longer a task, but rather a project, and gets 'filed' differently in my mind. For each project, the first thing I do is decide what constitutes "done" for that project. I may be ready for the task of making that decision or my subconscious might decide I'm not ready for even that step yet.

From the conception of done I can then create a road map from here to done. Road maps have tasks, each task gets accomplished individually in the same subconscious-driven fashion. The road map isn't typically written down, it exists in my mind 'somewhere'.

A lot of times, subconscious 'nopes' alert me to the fact that there's something wrong with the road map or the approach.

One of the keys to making this work is to prioritize learning. Every nope contains a lesson, one of the reasons I let things go as long as they need to is so that I can give the subconscious space to bring these lessons to awareness. I consider the lessons to be more important than task completion in all but truly urgent and pressing issues.

> What I have found is that the subconscious will resist taking action on something perceived to be important until it's worked out an appropriate approach.

Yup, that's why whenever I get stuck on the high-level design, I'll often start doing some of the small sub-tasks for which I'm highly-confident will be a part of the end-solution, and for which I'm highly confident that I know the interface they'll need, no matter what high-level approach is taken.

That extra domain work on the sub-tasks often feeds back to helping with the high-level planning too.

This, combined with abstract non-functional high-level prototypes will attack the problem from both the top and bottom. Hopefully you eventually complete the task when you meet somewhere in the middle.

Agreed procrastination is just your brain telling you are not ready to start or that something may happen which makes the work not relevant. Procrastinating is always a very good idea. The trick is picking the right alternative tasks that are either higher value or will help you get ready. I find meditation works great. Just envisioning myself doing the task. It will often reveal the key parts my subconscious is worried about.

There's an old saying:

"If you want something done ask a busy person."

Busy people always come through for you. I used to think this was because they were super efficient, super disciplined.

But maybe your task is a welcome distraction from something even worse?

And besides, everything we do is a distraction from the most looming, vaguest, most intractable deadline of all.

The End.

You went too deep.

This actually makes sense. I seem to be more efficient at getting things done when I have multiple things to do, but can never get something done if it's one and only thing left. I get easily distracted by other things that keep me away from accomplishing that one task or goal.

It's a bit of selection bias though, isn't it? It seems like you're bad at only having one thing to do, but it's likely that by the time you only have one thing left, that very thing is what you've been putting off the longest. And you may have been putting it off for a reason (you don't want to do it, it's hard, it hasn't been thought out, etc.)

Could it be that we humans are afraid of running out of things to do? After all, if we finish that last task, it would seem that we no longer serve a purpose. As long as we have one task left, there is still hope that we can find more to do.

Of course, that is a poor way of thinking since all it does is make you lose your sense of purpose before you actually run out of tasks, but the human brain is weird like that sometimes.

It's probably not so much an innate fear of nothing to do, but a resistance to the mental costs of having a slow workflow.

Or maybe busy people often have trouble saying 'no'

Yes!

It may be they're super efficient, but more likely in my experience is that they're often super busy because they're bad at saying no.

I think most people are both, I certainly notice it as a developer, times when my head is in the right place and my productivity goes through the roof and then the downtimes where it can be half that. I think it does tend to coincide with how busy you are, if you have too much time to think that's all you tend to do, over analysing tasks rather than just getting on with it.

> I used to think this was because they were super efficient, super disciplined.

I also used to think this when I was working in hourly task units like software development or consulting. Then when I started managing people I realized that being less busy while being efficient and organized was better. Flexibility is a great asset. I am not talking about working 4 hours but having room to think outside your daily or weekly issues.

I'm a big procrastinator, but I finally found a way to get around it. Instead of thinking about the big tasks, I just allot myself a fixed amount of time that I'll be doing something, work on it steadily during that time, and quit at the end regardless of the state it's in. For some reason, it really makes it easier to face big important projects if I just say "I'm going to spend 8 hours putting up siding today, then I'm done" as opposed to "I need to get that siding put up..." I've used that trick to get tons of stuff done around my house as well as to write a book (which hasn't been published yet because I've been putting it off, so I guess there's still room for improvement).

I think what you're describing is something similar to pomodoro technique (http://pomodorotechnique.com/), only on bigger scale (8 hours at once). Maybe you will find it useful.

I tried pomodoro but never sat well with me. I can focus for 1-2 hours happily once I'm into something. I worked in a team where it was pushed as a mantra for working. The issue with that being is that everyone was on a different schedule. I actually considered it a way to attempt to kill social interaction within the team, say going for coffee together.

If it works for you, go for it, but I do not work in 25 minute chunks.

This is a bit like Raymond Chandler's process for writing:

> The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least when a professional writer doesn’t do anything else but write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window, or stand on his head, or writhe on the floor. But he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Write or nothing.

He commented somewhere that it works on the same principle as school - you can't force children to learn, but if you prevent them from doing anything else, the bright ones will learn just to stave off boredom.

Strikes me you have three choices:

1. Force yourself to sit here and do nothing else until the task is done. The Chandler method, which requires a great deal of discipline.

2. Keep telling yourself "I'll start just after I check Hacker News / Twitter / watch one more episode on Casualty". This means you never achieve anything and feel forever guilty and worthless.

3. Put the task to one side for now and do something else enjoyable and marginally useful. You make progress in other tasks, feel valuable, and only a little guilty.

Structured Procrastination is the third option. If you can't manage Option 1 -- and who can? -- it's better than Option 2.

The trick for me is always just getting started. Once I actually get over the hump and start working, I generally find it's pretty easy to keep going. It's getting started without sidetracking myself that really puts up the biggest resistance.

That may not work for an author who's lacking inspiration, but in my case I found that when I sat down at the keyboard to work on my book, if I couldn't think of what to write I'd just start writing utter crap for a while until it started to flow a little better, then I was usually off to the races.

Note that Chandler's approach very specifically did not involve getting a task done. He was talking about writing novels over the course of months or years, not little things he was putting off.

Also it's a task where inspiration is involved, so if he forced himself to write every day no matter what, some of it would be worthless because the ideas weren't there. The point of his approach is to make habits that ensure you accomplish something in the long run, regardless of whether you get something done today or not.

"Timeboxing".

It can be effective.

The challenges for me:

1. Boxing sufficiently large chunks of time that I can actually work on a project. Task-switching has immense costs.

2. Actually having a path forward. If I've yet to find a good way to tackle a problem, or worse, if I'm stymied by having been mislead as to a possible pathway (a false Bayesian prior, or similar concepts in logic/truth), it can be quite frustrating.

Notice that this is just a short essay. A blog post, maybe. But it's also potentially a reason to search for available domain names; to actually register one (after exploring the compromises around what registrar to choose), to find a host (navigating the truly bewildering options), to decide whether wordpress might be the right way to go, and what theme, and what big header image. Plugins? And what if it really goes viral... surely we'd better have some ads in there to capture a bit of value from that, right?

All of this can be really quite educational. But in the end it's fairly impressive that it was ever done at all... which suggests that in fact it's not done; there are a ton of other plans for what should be here, and only because of those plans was the writer able to get this far.

You've essentially listed all the tasks that have been/are currently on my mental to-do list. I'm procrastinating by reading about procrastinating. On the plus side- I've now registered for and posted my first HN comment after lurking for the better part of two months. See: PROGRESS!

I remember stumbling on this site a while ago and the format [1] was completely different.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20150214165654/http://www.structu...

Yep I have seen that page 5-6 years ago too :)

Well this gave me a good laugh.

  Brilliant essays by John Perry, defending yet more life choices 
  generally seen as faults.

This is all well and good, except when you procrastinate over things you want to do. It also throws discipline into the wind in favor of just procrastinating.

It's true, some things you can put off, and nothing bad happens. Other things, you put off, you lose your job or your house. Ideally you can separate the two, but maybe not.

Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do, or don't feel like doing. And that's life. Rarely do things get better by procrastinating about them, though more often they get worse.

You are apparently not in the target audience of this article.

As someone who battles procrastination and other avoidant behavior, I was under the impression I was.

In that case I understood you wrongly, I read it as you being not a procrastinator. My apologies.

I feel like you might be ignoring the possible benefits of "waiting for inspiration" on some things. Usually, when I'm procrastinating, I'm just waiting for a time when I would enjoy the work. Without that, I often don't enjoy it.

Oftentimes I'll get out of bed with an unbearable drive to accomplish a single task that I've been putting off. And when this happens, I usually feel that I am more creative, dedicated, and much faster working. When you put that together, if you are trying to maximize work speed and creativity (ignoring deadlines), this kind of procrastination is optimal.

But ignoring deadlines to maximize speed and creativity is basically a way of maximizing personal fulfillment in the work. It certainly isn't maximizing any external factors.

Maybe it was just me but I couldn't find any juice on this essay.. The best I essay I ever read on procrastination was from mark Manson [1].

[1] http://markmanson.net/procrastination

Quote: "The more you care about the outcome, the harder it feels to achieve." This was great to read, thanks for posting it. It focuses more on anxiety. I agree it's more juicy but I think the original article talks about a slightly different topic.

I tend to think of my procrastination not as avoiding important work, but work that is of unknown difficulty. If I don't know how hard something is to do, then I can't predict how long it would take. I could budget 15 minutes for it and it could end up taking 4 hours.

That so very rarely ever actually happens, but that is the feeling I get when I stare at my TODO list. The solution is often to create a task just for analyzing the complexity of another task, to be able to break it up into sub tasks.

For example: "do taxes" might be broken into "find receipts", "print forms", "fill out form 1 worksheet", "complete form 1", "mail form 1", etc. The more detailed I can get it, the more space it takes in the TODO list, the more it blocks out other things, and the more it keeps the TODO list from stagnating--which is an important component of motivation for me.

The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don’t). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren’t).

I did this for years. #1 on my list was proving Fermat's Last Theorem. While I didn't do that, I got a thousand other things done.

Alas, someone else has proved Fermat's Last Theorem and now my task list looks like everyone else's.

Oh, come on, this list is still full: http://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems

If you need help picking, I'm definitely going to go with P =? NP. That seems likely to keep you busy for a long time....

Maybe I'll read this later.

Maybe I'll procrastinate tomorrow.

Thinking about this lately... I guess I'm not really a procrastinator.

What I am is always laser-focused on a project, and not at all impressed by all the other things that the world is trying do demand of me.

I'm certainly not averse to hard work. I often choose it. (And somehow the reward is intrinsic.) I'm averse to any work that doesn't seem to directly factor into the success of whatever it is I'm presently obsessed with creating.

I'm a 10x engineer for a very specific x.

There are other approaches that don't involve self-deception but instead work on your intuition about what you're best equipped to deal with at the time...

http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2015/5/21/the-final-...

I do this all the time. I find I have tons of energy to work on projects when I'm putting something else off.

In my experience, the side projects need to have one key trait, they need to be achievable in chunks of a few hours. I don't mind doing work multiple times in a week, but as soon as I'm expected to work on something 5+ hours in a single session I'll switch to do something else. Also, they need to be one off tasks, I don't like repeating myself.

Whilst this may annoy the non-procrastinators, it's just something I've worked out that works for me, though I never gave it a name before. I can still be very productive in short bursts.

To whomever wrote the article, thank you.

Structured procrastination appears analogous to the second-price auction, in which the winner of an auction pays the second-highest bid. This strategy leads the bidders to bid the true value of the auctioned item. One proof of this assertion can be found in the solution to an exercise in Game Theory Evolving: A Problem-Centered Introduction to Modeling Strategic Interaction (Second Edition), by Herbert Gintis.

It appears that structured procrastination is a two-player game that pits the present self against the time-inconsistent hyperbolically discounted future self. The success of this strategy depends on accurately ranking more important things to do. Presumably the rank of the second-most important thing accurately reflects its hyperbolically discounted value far enough in the future to avoid time inconsistency. An assumption seems to be that most important or interesting thing to do now is generally important or interesting for the wrong reason. Also, if the thing I happen to be doing isn't that important, the thing I should be doing can't be that much more important either.

This is really great stuff.

Now, I need to have my boss assign me to Hacker News reading duty, so that I can get my work done.

This sort of strategy has worked quite well for me over the years. It takes a bit of practice to get right, and probably isn't for everyone.

For me, it's mostly about knowing the things that I have to do, and just doing them whenever I feel like it. So long as I feel like it some time before the due date, it works out great! In the case where I never feel like it, then I force myself to start with sufficient time before the deadline and power through in one sitting. I find that so long as you know what I need to get done, and give myself enough lead time to stay ahead of my deadlines, it's a workable strategy.

I think I have the same problem.

For example I knew that I want to look for a new room. I couldn't start it because I did not know how much time it would take. This makes it really hard to start.

When I finally started I just said that I'll do it until 8 pm or something. This makes it easy to not stop cause "oh it's only 30 minutes I have to do this then I can go take a shower".

This is why I think techniques like pomodoro can really help someone. It's just hard to start something, and more you do it, more you know what's left. Usually this stops the fear for me.

PG on procrastination: http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

I used to procrastinate on Quora and now I do it on HN. It has done wonders for my writing, my awareness, and my education. As a side effect, I now have far better plans for the projects on my todo list that I haven't been able to do because of all this procrastinating. But if it's making me smarter, I have just justified further not being able to help myself not be able to help myself.

For those who procrastinate at the gym enjoy the side effects of being fit and healthy. It's when it's work that we start experiencing sacrifice. There is only joy in procrastination. The author of this essay procrastinates by writing brilliants essays.

I did read somewhere that efficient workers sleep a lot and work a lot less. Those who have experience being their most efficient selves work towards that state of mind by sleeping and being lazy. And when they work, they get shit done. At the end of the day, it may very well be a tortoise vs hare race, where those that keep working slowly but surely catch the hares that only work sporadically. But for the same amount of work, the hare gets a life.

I've found the Getting Things Done method of putting only the "next physical action" on your to-do list to be very helpful. "Write a Masters Thesis" sounds much less daunting when you focus on the NPA which might be something as non-threatening as, "Go to the store and buy index cards."

Archive.org mirror from Aug 29th: https://web.archive.org/web/20150829043424/http://www.struct...

I've been using this system for years.

I'm pretty sure that deep-down I learned programming to distract myself from writing a novel I intended to write. Now I'm learning electronics to distract myself from programming. Imagine all that we could accomplish if we only procrastinated more!

I'll read this later.

My music teacher once told me that I'd start practicing more when school started up again in the fall. He said it's a common way to avoid doing homework. IIRC he was right.

I learned about "productive procrastination"[1] at least a decade ago and as a result learned to embrace my procrastination tendencies as long as (a) I am actually being productive at something and (b) there isn't something that must actually get done right now.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=productive+procrastination+-procra...

A simple todo list system that I love, and that is built on the idea of structured procrastination, is Mark Forster's "Final Version Perfected" system. It is described here: http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2015/5/21/the-final-...

> Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important.

Or the opposite. Because the subconscious figured out there is something more important to do than what you were doing.

Ignoring the pull of the subconscious is equal to self sabotage.

I like that the article is about hacking your bad habits, but at the end of the day procrastination is exactly that - a bad habit. It isn't who I am, and so I think the best way to fight it is to replace it with a better habit...

Wow, I'm going to do this as soon as possible. This seems great. Let me read the comments on the article first though. But then I'm really going to do this.

Just fucking do the work. If you spend as much time working as you trying to "hack your brain to be more productive", you would have been more productive.

Overthinking about thinking can lead to neuroticism.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10142283

http://www.amazon.com/Do-Work-Overcome-Resistance-Your/dp/19...

Do you have any anecdotal success stories to share related to having read _Do_The_Work_?

Yeah, I stopped thinking about my projects when I wasn't working on them (letting my mind relax while exercising, cooking, etc), then when I have spare time I stretch for a few minutes sit down and start working.

I shipped 2 games + 1 update to Apple last month.

also an interesting read: http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastin...

> Just fucking do the work.

If it was that simple, everyone would just do that.

"Just x" usually indicates someone doesn't understand why others have problems with x.

> If it was that simple, everyone would just do that.

It's not that simple; but it's also why not everyone is uber-successful.

All this reading is why I procrastinate in the first place! It's like trying to find a solution to a problem that does not exist.

I take it as more positive than normative.

In other words: here is a description of how it turns out I get (certain) things done; and not: here is a recipe for getting things done.

(It occurred to me to post it this morning because I spent half an hour making a 'retina'/hi-dpi version of the HN voting arrow and emailing it in, on the off-chance it might get used, in preference to about 14 more pressing tasks).

Procrastination isn't just a bad habit it's a form of anxiety. Keep that in mind. It's not just something you can will away.

I found this interesting and wanted to add it to my pinboard, but I had already added it in March 2013. I guess I should read it.

Thus began the Day of Unproductive Hackers, as the number of cat photos on the internet grew by a significant 1%.

It took me about an hour and a dozen sessions to get through this article.

This is NOT the right advice for anyone trying to finish a PhD.

You just gave me an excuse for not doing my work and feel good about it by doing something else instead of just reading random posts on HN !

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