How to minimize procrastination

What do you do when procrastination becomes more serious and develops into life avoidance? (You procrastinate on everything, regardless of how you frame a task, regardless of the difficulty of it). In the extreme case procrastination isn't a obstacle to task competition but a learned habit of avoidance. It becomes an addiction in the same way that gambling, drugs, etc do. How do you beat an addiction whose very nature stops you from taking steps to beat it? Is it possible to quit procrastination cold turkey? If I want to stop smoking one way is to just stop and deal with it. If I want to stop procrastination do I have to be doing something productive 24/7? How do I attain the discipline for that?

I've booked marked this. Will check out later.

One way of minimizing procrastination is to surround yourself with people who are more intelligent, more accomplished, and more success-driven than yourself. Being isolated (which was the case with me during my time at university), or associating with lazy, mediocre people, makes it easy to fall into the bad habit of idleness.

My experience shows that any kind of approach based on personal organization, use of productivity tools, time management methods, or attempts at habit formation using willpower will fail if there is no environmental pressure (in the form of friends and family, and not just institutions) to maintain a high level of personal productivity.

1. Go to HN to procrastinate.

2. Find article on how to not procrastinate.

3. Ack.

> How to minimize procrastination

http://i.imgur.com/aZ1zkNo.png

Oh. OK then.

The first talk under the Getting Things Done section mentioned something that's been a big help to me, but that I had never really thought about until he mentioned it. In a nutshell, it's that maintaining Inbox 0 forces you to make a decision on emails. Often the ones that will end up hanging around aren't anything that will require a lot of time to deal with or respond to, they're just the ones that require a decision that for whatever reason you don't want to make. Often though, you have all the information you need to make that decision, and putting it off doesn't help. Inbox 0 forces you to identify those situations, because you either need to deal with the email now, or explicitly decide when you will. Either way, it prevents you from just procrastinating on it because it's uncomfortable. Now that I think about it, I realize that has happened to me a ton since switching to Inbox 0, but I had never thought about it in those terms.

In general, by the way, I strongly recommend adopting a GTD system and sticking to it. Personally I use Evernote, based loosely on www.thesecretweapon.org. It took me a significant effort over a period of weeks to get it set up and make it a habit, but I literally can not imagine being able to do the things I do today without it. (If anyone's interested in setting something like that up, feel free to get in touch via my profile.)

Try meditation. If you can learn to focus on your breathing for 20 minutes, you can focus on anything.

If you want a good intro to guided meditation, check out the app Headspace.

I don't know what this is, when I visit it I get an empty UI with no indicators as to what I'm supposed to be doing.. no action buttons, nada.

Going to assume hn hugged it to death.

Not really impressed. Just a collection of other resources & articles about the topic.

Trying to do all of this at once will result in failure. Reducing procrastination boils down to changing your habits, which is _hard_.

One thing that's helped me is writing down what I do and observing it as a 3rd party. Writing the log daily is easy. Observing allows you to notice patterns over time, tweak a small habit, and observe if it's working. I wrote about it here - http://ctrl-c.club/~ksikka/articles/02-write-it-down/

TL;DR How to minimize procrastination - stop procrastinating.

By reading the article and the comments I procrastinated finishing a project for 30 minutes. What do i win?

The Pomodoro Technique, which is mentioned on the page, has been helpful to me when I need to concentrate on solo work privately. I'd recommend it. It's an effective technique, and the only one I've discovered that's been significantly helpful.

To summarize: When you start on a task, set a timer for 25 minutes. Work exclusively on that task for 25 minutes, then take a 5 minute break and repeat. That unit is "a pomodoro". If any interruption occurs during the task, either an internal interruption like you find yourself reading email instead, or an external interruption like someone comes to your office, then you cancel that task and reset the 25 minute timer. Keep a record on paper of each pomodoro completed successfully, and each that's interrupted.

One of the primary values of the Pomodoro Technique is that it helps you be realistic about how much useful, productive time you can commit towards your tasks. Upon trying the Pomodoro Technique, a number of colleagues and I have discovered that one's reserve of fully focused time is typically around 2-4 hours per day when first starting to use it. (The remaining time per productive day is typically lighter work, like communication and coordination, and interruptions of various sorts. It's still work, but it's not fully focused work applied to the task you've chosen.) Over time you can adjust your schedule and manage your commitments to squeeze out more solo focused time, if that's what you desire. Some types of responsibilities naturally involve interruption and are not well-suited to this kind of solo focused work; however, whether that's the case or not, Pomodoro can help you be conscious about how much time you actually have available.

The Pomodoro Technique does not fight distraction directly. It's not like you're supposed to slap yourself when you cancel a pomodoro. Rather, you just keep track of it. This conscious awareness of your productivity engages a new part of the mind that helps rein in the short-term-rewards part. When you waste a day by doing work off and on while mostly procrastinating, it's sometimes easy to miss how much productive time you haven't spent. When you measure your productive time as "completed pomodoros", you can be realistic with yourself about your output, and make changes accordingly. It engages something new in your mind and enables metacognition that notices when you get distracted; when you are supposed to be completely focused on your task, and that notification pops up saying you have new messages, this metacognition will help remind you that you need to ignore it and turn it off, or else cancel the pomodoro. The long-term-rewards part of you that's powering the metacognition wants to complete the pomodoro. The act of recognizing those distractions will fight them. I suppose you could call it the Copenhagen Theory of Time Management. :-)

Somehow related, I've been looking to block certain websites on iOS for a while now and a free content blocker called "Refine" can do it easily.[1] You can enable just the custom list if you're already using a different content blocker.

This might be an idea to implement something like Stayfocusd, where you could define a list of sites to be blocked between a time period or certain days (if this is possible).

[1] https://appsto.re/si/Y5pt8.i

The best anti-procrastination advice I ever got was from http://productiveblog.tumblr.com/

Being on a mission minimizes procrastination. I'm on a mission to build my company Browserling to be a fantastic business. That leaves no time to procrastinate.

Procrastination pays: http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-03-22

Let me know if you have any feedback on how to improve it, or know of any better resources than the ones suggested.

I personally don't get why people talk that much about procrastination just to avoid the question: Am I using my time on things I'm actually interested in or do I just go on because I get paid too much to jump ship.

This reminds me, there's a good YT video about how to deal with procrastination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXsQAXx_ao0

;)

I'm trying to eliminate procrastination in my life. In the last three years, I had my ups and downs. I think that recently, I have positive progress. Here is some things/ideas/observations which helped me recently:

1. Core idea is that procrastination is unaware avoidance behaviour.

For example, I have great motivation to learn all algorithms in CLRS book. But at some point I got stuck on some proof, I tried to re-read it but got frustrated by some statement in the proof. On the next morning, I could watch Team Coco in Youtube and eat Pringles instead of attack that proof. Yes, I still love CLRS, but right now, I would like to watch Team Coco. And here is perfect example of my procrastination episode.

Core idea here is to realize that you entered unaware avoidance behaviour. And not just force yourself reading CLRS because next time your avoidance behaviour become even stronger. But you have to be brutally honest with yourself. Then, you can turn off any music, sit down, and enjoy total silence by doing 5-10 minutes of mindfulness meditation. After that, it's much easier to become more comfortable with your frustration on that proof in CLRS and start attacking it again.

2. I noticed strong link between quality of sleep and procrastination. Better your sleep, less chances for procrastination episodes. After many years of wrong sleep schedule (2 am - 11 am), I started follow very strict sleep schedule (9:30 pm - 6 am), after two months of such schedule, I noticed substantial positive progress in my daily productivity.

3. No caffeine, no red-bull, no coca-cola, no concentrated tea anymore. Instead of fixing my sleep schedule and doing physical exercises, I consumed coffee and red-bulls. It gave me fake feeling of alertness. But in fact, I was just dizzy and my focus ability was completely evaporated.

Now, I don't even eat a chocolate. There is nothing better than good healthy sleep and being productive by 8 AM (i.e. 2 hours after I woke up everyday).

4. No music while your reading and coding anymore. I listened music all the time for years. Even when I really tired of music, I couldn't code in total silence.

Mindfulness meditation helped me to see beauty of silence and white noise (especially coming from nature outside of my window like slight sound of trees because of small wind).

I couldn't say I become perfect. But I substantially decreased procrastination in my life.

I hope these advices could help somebody to overcome procrastination.

P.S. By the way, note that I didn't use statement "fight procrastination". If you try to fight it, you make your procrastination stronger next time. You have to be honest with yourself and being aware about your weaknesses!

i procrastinate so much, i read the first section then clicked the "save to pocket" icon from the chrome toolbar. i'll get to reading it. eventually...

Bookmarked, I'll read that later.

Read HN less?

The way I solved my procrastination problems is that I do at least one thing per day towards my goal. More often than not, this puts me in a mental state that leads me to doing many things. I find that simply starting a task is the most difficult step.

If you procrastinate a lot, it usually means that you really want to do something different with your life. Go find out what it is, rather than submitting yourself to all sorts of masochist self-discipline schemes.