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Comment by hashberry | Hacker News Reader

I am a remote worker and suffer from chronic procrastination. "Understanding emotions" is an oversimplified solution because many are addicted to procrastination. It's like asking an alcoholic to understand the emotions of why he drinks. I have procrastinated as a student and my entire career and have always gotten away with it. I've been rewarded with praise of my great work, higher paying positions, and bonuses. I find myself enjoying waiting until the last minute and then using stress to help me succeed. It is a vicious cycle. I want to stop procrastinating but at the same time I like doing it.

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I think we have a lot in common.

The thing I sometimes wish for most is a 'hard reset'. When I was a lot younger I achieved this just by changing everything - cities, jobs, possessions, relationships. The resultant clear space was intoxicating as there was no 'cruft' of incomplete tasks nagging away at the edges of ether consciousness. As you get older this is virtually impossible or at least very difficult because of the people we share life with. Writing down endless lists can help to declutter the mind and allow focus - this is the core of the GTD strategy. However the things are still not done.

I also have been given rewards for procrastinated tasks, and some of my best work has been done last minute. Yet I recognise that perhaps that work would have been even better with more preparation.

So I'm currently without a great strategy, still getting work done but perhaps failing in other areas where other non-work goals are not necessarily being completed. I think decluttering (physical and mental) is the key but this in itself takes serious effort and can involve anguish (throwing things out and abandoning goals and tasks takes commitment)

Maybe procrastination ain't that bad. Maybe its the 8 hour day of continual focus, 5 days a week, for 2000 weeks that is unrealistic, give human nature.

Certain types of work are not as affected by procrastination.

Repetitive factory workers probably don't procrastinate near as much because once they learn the job, the decision-making aspect goes way down. Plus, they'll get fired.

addicted to procrastination.

Close. We're addicted to all manner of other things that give us that instant dopamine hit. When you ask somebody what do they do when they procrastinate, they rarely say they do something productive[0]. Instead, it's an activity that's designed to trigger that instant high: browsing the web, playing video games, eating, smoking.

My reward system is completely divorced from reality. I get rewards all the time for doing absolutely nothing. It's supposed to be, you do some work, you get a reward. You go fishing, dinner is your reward. You build a treehouse, the satisfaction of a job well done is your reward. But what do you do when you can get 100x the reward just clicking through hacker news?

I'm currently working on resetting my dopamine threshold by limiting my web browsing to 1 hour a day and meditating more. I'll be honest, it's not going well so far.

[0]: some do, but they don't consider their procrastination as a problem.

Instead of limiting your web browsing, I've found it to be more useful to eliminate certain sites. When things start going overboard for me I will stop visiting the web sites which are the biggest time wasters. The rest of the internet quickly loses its appeal, and though it is hard at first it is relatively easy to go cold turkey instead of trying to ration exposure.

Eliminating certain sites and eliminating the internet is basically the same thing for me. As a programmer, I'm always on the internet researching problems and solutions. I don't count that because it's not an instant fix, it's the work I put into getting the fix, which is solving my problem and seeing my program work.

I'm tempted to start consuming the internet solely through my kindle (again, just the instant fix sites: hn, reddit, facebook). It would slow my consumption way down and I'd only be able to use it when I'm not working. But, I need to find a way to stick to that and not also read HN and Reddit while I'm at the work computer. The only tried and true solution I've found for that is to get an accountability buddy. I tried to do that once in person with co-workers (I offered to give them $20 if they can catch me consuming caffeine), but in the end they were uncomfortable taking my money. The next step is researching those accountability buddy startups, where you give money to an organization you hate if you fail.

For me there are the sites I visit to solve programming problems, google, stackoverflow, etc... And then there are the sites where I waste time pretending I'm just indirectly improving my skillset, HN, slashdot (back in the day), reddit, etc... There is almost no overlap. I find eliminating the time wasters while keeping the professionally useful sites is not that much of a problem.

I'm trying the whole "surf less, meditate more" thing but I find motivation to meditate quite low on "good" days. When I feel like crap for having procrastinated, sure, give me some of that meditation, but on a day where I feel fine, I easily persuade myself I don't need it.

One thing I've tried to do is do household chores when I feel the procrastination urge. It's still procrastination but at least it's a bit more useful than playing video games.

I tried a lot of things and the only thing that seem to be working is putting all websites on HOST file (Win/Sys32/Driver/etc) and blocking them there. I block all addictive sites all week except Friday Night and weekend. It worked for 2 consecutive weeks. Today I got another laptop and can't do the blocking (don't have admin rights), so I'm back to surfing again.

This isn't directed at you specifically, more so people reading your post and relating:

Stop masterbating. It's creating a mess of your dopamine reward system and has left you unable to get anything done.

Well in this case are you really procrastinating? Clearly your brain is making relatively solid decisions, considering how your career is moving (upward).

In this situation I'd like to recall Bertrand Russel's great dictum: "Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time". :) Totally changed how I think about my "procrastinating" time when I read that.

Nice quote. I just looked it up and it looks like it's not Bertrand Russel's: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/11/time-you-enjoy/

Hum, interesting. I guess I always thought it was his because he actually developed very similar ideas in his essay "In Praise of Idleness"[1].

[1] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

I don't mean to sound flippant, but it seems like AD/HD to me. No real concern for due dates far off in the future: "Look, it's either due now or not now."

Describes me perfectly. :)

Wow, I have said almost exactly this before. "There are only two deadlines: today and not today."

That's a problem though isn't it? (Serial procrastinator here). When you've got non deadline based tasks (clean up your table), and personal goals (release that side project), the mantra of two deadlines really kicks you in the butt. Since there's only an imagined deadline, it's too easy for us to push it aside and say "I'll do it soon... Not now though"

Yep. ADHD is not a problem of perception, it's a problem of motivation. A problem of inhibition. "ADHD is a failure to direct behavior forward in time." "They are best thought of as executive deficits, not attention deficits."

For anyone who wants to really understand the disorder (even those who have it and think they have a good grasp on it) Dr. Russell A Barkley, PhD is a great place to start. In particular this video, "Essential Ideas for Parents": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCAGc-rkIfo

If you have ADHD I can't recommend his books enough.

I've tried to get around this by self-imposing deadlines. But it always works for a bit, and then it'll start slipping - I'll duly "catch up", but it slips again, and eventually gets to the point where everything's slipping faster than I can catch up, which is just depressing -_-

Seeing as they were self-imposed, the easiest 'solution' to the resulting 'depression' is just to lift them! Great! Oh, wait, we're back where we started..

I tried to enforce them once with a precommitment service (i.e. you set up a deadline and pay money if you slip). The first missed deadline stressed me, which made me miss more deadlines, which got me even more stressed, thus missing even more deadlines, up until the point my credit card started bouncing. And mind you, this was on trivial tasks - I just couldn't overcome the anxiety and make myself do them.

I ended up an order of magnitude more miserable and in a very bad financial position for half a year. I can see how it works for people with big tolerance for stress (apparently I'm not one of them), but it's a double-edged sword.

I've been wondering if I have AD/HD as I have several symptoms. I don't know if I should try to confirm it with a professional to try to do something about it or if I should just live with it.

It causes me problems with others as I work/communicate quite differently but I've learned to use it as a strength, as I tend to be really creative and to think out the box easily.

Core to treating the disorder is

1. understanding how it particularly manifests in (you, if you indeed have it), and 2. developing foundational patterns of action to support repetitive tasks and activities throughout your day.

Talking with someone who has expertise in diagnosing the disorder can be supremely helpful. If nothing else they'll help you narrow further where those effects are stemming from if not AD/HD, and if a diagnosis does make sense, they can help you start to build the structures and patterns in your life that can help alleviate those symptoms.

Driven to Distraction by Hallowell and Ratey was supremely helpful for me in understanding the deficit better and in helping to develop strategies to overcome / shore up some deficiencies in my day-to-day.

If it causes you problems, you should use whatever means available to you to end the interference, shouldn't you? For some, it's mindfulness. For some, it's medication. For some, it's exercise. Unless you're a doctor well-versed in medical disorders, you can't evaluate if medication would help. You can try mindfulness exercises and physical exercise routines, and if it doesn't stop the feeling that something about the way your mind works causes problems, why not see a doctor?

You have the time (doesn't feel that way, with all those DUE RIGHT NOW tasks I have that are way more important) to make the appointment (and why can't they just see me today, it probably won't take that long, it's just a questionnaire, right?), drive to the doctor (and deal with all those idiots on the road who clearly can't drive as well as I can, and where did they learn the rules of the road anyway?), wait in the waiting room (didn't I just fill out all this paperwork online like they asked, trying to be efficient? Why am I doing this again? I should tell them there are better ways of doing this! And that guy coughing over there, didn't he learn to cover his mouth? Ugh, figures, reading a trash magazine, probably doesn't know any better) and talk to the doctor (who I should totally tell about the nootropics I've been reading about to see if he knows about them too and can just give me some of those and send me on my way because I've got shit to do, and it ain't gonna do itself, and OH LOOK, THAT SQUIRREL JUST JUMPED TWO FEET IN THE AIR!). It can't hurt.

Note to the reader: the parentheses indicate my own thoughts when I did this years ago. I was told later by others I've met with AD/HD that they had the same exact thoughts, and it helped them to see a doctor. I was also told by others who didn't have AD/HD that I needed to grow up, suck it up, and just do it. To me, that clarifies the difference of someone with AD/HD and someone without. Either you can identify with every single one of those things in parentheses, or you think, "of course we all think some of those things, but we put our big boy pants on and get it done; it doesn't mean you have a deficiency in your neurochemistry, it just means you have to motivate yourself a bit more to get anything done."

Why would this be ADHD? I suffer from the same problem and yet when I'm doing something I like I can concentrate intently for hours if not days. I've worked 60 hour weeks for months when I'm invested.

But when it's stuff I don't enjoy or I'm a bit down, it's a totally different ball game.

I also tend to not be concerned about dates far in the future because I secretly believe I can pull a rabbit out of the hat whenever I want and get the 1 month task done in a day, I'm that fucking good. Of course, I'm not.

ADHD is not something to be flippantly tossed around on not being able to do stuff until a deadline, that's just classic procrastination. I know you didn't mean to sound flippant, but you are being flippant and also I don't think it's a good idea to start conflating ADHD with procrastination.

I don't believe it was flippant, and as I said, didn't intend it to be. As someone with AD/HD, and who's studied it intently for many years trying to better understand how it may affect my autistic son (who is also showing signs of AD/HD) I can safely say that the kind of procrastination he describes is exactly the kind of procrastination that manifests in someone with AD/HD. Having that kind of insight lets me help my son learn coping strategies before it's too late to make those kinds of changes to his brain in any meaningful way.

Frankly, the description you have given is very similar to AD/HD, especially the "I'm that fucking good" part. Yes, I know you weren't bragging, but that sense of infallibility and the letdown that invariably follows when your abilities don't manifest ... I'm guessing it sours you to the project you're working on? Can't seem to direct yourself back to it to care again like you did when you were focused on it the first time? Anxious to find something else that's more interesting where you can prove what a rockstar you are? That rush when you pull that rabbit out of the hat, feels good, doesn't it? Dopamine is great, when you do something that creates enough of it that your brain feels rewarded. For many, it doesn't take much. For many people with AD/HD, the last minute YOLO cramming/programming/building/working session is what it takes to feel like we're doing anything worthwhile.

Are you self diagnosed? Because in my book none of that's AD/HD. That's called life.

No, I was diagnosed by two psychiatrists (I wanted a second opinion). That is sounds like "life" to you is the point - people without AD/HD make those kinds of judgments of those of us who DO have it.

EDIT: I guess that means either you don't have AD/HD, or just something else that inflates your sense of your abilities. Maybe you're just addicted to the rush of the looming deadline? I don't know. I'm not a psychiatrist.

You are right - diagnosing ADHD is for professionals as it can be complex to separate out from several other diagnoses. But lets look at what you just wrote:

- Lack of awareness or concern for timelines until immediate consequences loom.

- Inability to control focus if not emotionally invested. (So-called hyperfocus is much part of ADHD as is non-focus).

These are both things that would light up an ADHD scoreboard. They're almost direct quotes from the literature, and if you spoke to a group of ADHD people they would recognize them immediately.

People with ADHD have many explanations for "why" they are this way. A lifetime of rationalization does not make it not so. So perhaps talk to an ADHD specialist - it can make a huge difference in your life, and your loved ones.

Ask someone diagnosed in later life, say, over 40, if they would have preferred to not be rationalizing and suffering the consequences over the last 20 to 30 years.

Honestly, your description of yourself sounds like ADHD. Unfortunately, ADHD is a very poor name, because it really is not about an inability to pay attention. Hyperfocus is very common in people like myself who have ADHD. ADHD manifests itself as an inability to pay attention to things that are uninteresting or not engaging, an inability to change focus when appropriate, and difficulty with time perception and management.

Like yourself, until diagnosed, I would have never considered ADHD a possibility because I would regularly focus intently on a programming project or random wikipedia rabbit hole for hours and hours at a time, often skipping meals and staying up until the early hours of the morning. But it turns out these trances of hyperfocus are typical for many ADHD sufferers. There are different flavors of ADHD. I never experienced the hyperactivity that often leads to diagnosis in children.

Keep in mind that one of the requirements for diagnosis in the DSM is impairment in social, academic or occupational function. In my case, spurts of hyperfocus routinely kept me from maintaining healthy sleep, diet, and hygiene routines, and ADHD also prevented me from doing homework and chores that were uninteresting. Unfortunately, there are precious few people who are able to exclusively focus on whatever engages their fancy at the moment. For me, it was debilitating.

Check out the video brazzledazzle posted above. You'll learn ADHD is way more nuanced than the popular understanding.

It's not really an oversimplification. It's a compressed principle from which a lot of implications come out of it.

You don't use the same part of the mind that exercises intellectual understanding in order to gain emotional intelligence. For some, it's like an underused-mental muscle. It grows stronger with practice.

"It's like asking an alcoholic to understand the emotions of why he drinks."

That's a great question to ask!

Say you have a 10 days job, and you can only start it when you have just 2 days left. What will you be doing the first 8 days? Why don't you do some other productive thing during the first 8 days?

I guess, if you are like me, the problem is in your head and you are thinking about it all the time - until you achieve the clarity on what exactly to do OR you are forced to start since the time is fast running out. You may be browsing HN, but, the problem solving is happening in your brain as a background thread. ie., some amount of procrastination is required for some of us. But, it is debatable how much of this is necessary.

Please, don't ask an alcoholic about his emotions of why he drinks...please!

You've just described myself!

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