Imagine yourself starting, not finishing | Hacker News Reader

Imagine yourself starting, not finishing

shyal.com

243 pointsshdc62 comments

Similar to the 15 minutes starting trick. If you don't feel like doing it, just do 15 minutes of it and you can stop. Typically you keep on going and it starts it up.

Another trick is leave a simple tasks or error (syntax error) in the last place you were working the previous day/night. You'll jump right back in and get up and in production mode the next day, easy task to knock out and get coding.

Sometimes having another fun project that you can work on while procrastinating or thinking about your main project is helpful to keep in production mode. Procrastination sometimes is a battle of how to implement something and you should switch to a prototype mode and try them rather than overthinking the possible solutions.

Sometimes all those fail and you need something like Rescuetime but that also makes the blocked sites more desirable.

A better idea to stop when you encounter a bug that you know or expect will be easy to fix. That way, you start with a sense of achievement first thing in the morning, which is exactly what you're looking for. Fixing a syntax error doesn't give me that sense of satisfaction, especially one I deliberately introduced.

I'm partial to TDD because it's great for that "simple task"/error-fixing mentality. About 30 minutes before leaving, I make sure I have a couple failing tests and leave them that way when I leave.

Whenever I get back to work, I can just jump in... any kind of work interruption benefits the same way.

This reminds me of a practice Ernest Hemingway supposedly used to maintain his productivity. He would purposely stop writing for the day when he was in a state of flow and knew what he would write next, so that it'd be easy to resume his progress when he came back to his desk the next day:

http://www.secondactive.com/2009/08/boost-your-productivity-...

> Another trick is leave a simple tasks or error (syntax error) in the last place you were working the previous day/night. You'll jump right back in and get up and in production mode the next day, easy task to knock out and get coding.

That's a great idea. I tend to get projects finished by the end of the day, which means I have to figure out what to do in the morning, which is always a little hard. I think I'll give that a shot.

Good tip, though I always feel a pang of irony when I learn something like this while procrastinating.

A good marketer puts the message where those who it can benefit will find it.

I've read that you should break up large tasks into their most atomic parts which are psychologically less overwhelming. So rather than write article, you might have, research subject (2 hours), brains storm bullet points of questions, write outline, ... At our company I constantly worry about us being over ambitious because when we are we don't get things done. Better to start with a small milestone where everyone can be on the same page, see and enjoy the result, and move on to the next thing when it's complete.

That's one of the reasons why I like the pomodoro technique. You can always narrow even the most complex issues into smaller pieces that can be accomplished in a short sprint.

Agreed. The pomodoro technique asks that no task is more than 7 pomodoros (sets of 25 minutes of focused work).

With this constraint, what once looked like an overwhelming and nebulous task now seems manageable and concrete.

A pattern I'm recently noticing for myself is that even if a task doesn't feel "overwhelming" or "nebulous" per se, it seems to be easier to motivate myself to knock out a small task than a large one.

Rinse a dish. Open a letter. Rename a variable. Root cause a bug. Rough out the skeleton for a feature. Write a unit test. Download an installer. Make a commit. Email someone.

I'm noting there's a difference between small tasks and a small task. Big TODO lists may not be nebulous - I find them quite handy for ensuring a complete and thorough job is done, and for project progress tracking - but they're still big, potentially overwhelming huge things. And if not overwhelming, something that I'm not going to finish today anyways - it won't hurt to wait until tomorrow...

Instead of more TODO lists, I should invest in having a TODO item.

Mindfulness (for 45 mins to 1 hr) helps a lot in combating procrastination. The catch is that if you are a procrastinator, you will procrastinate on trying to meditate also.

It is impossible to procrastinate if you practice mindfulness meditation for 45 mins to 1 hr.

There's plenty of good research in to the benefits of mindfulness meditation, but I've never seen anything go quite that far.

Edited it. Basically, for me at least, meditation creates a bias towards action. I feel procrastination relates to biochemistry (serotonin, dopamine etc) and somehow meditation kind of "fixes" the issue temporarily. If I stop meditating, I quickly revert back to the old me.

Beyond procrastination, for those of us that have trouble focusing, this sort of thing is no joke.

In 30 seconds, we can go from fully intending to do something that we should do to better ourselves to reading HN submissions and commenting on them.

I actually use HN frequently as a tool to concentrate better during work. I often juggle quite different tasks that I have to solve at work. To flush my mind and go from one finished thing to some completely unrelated next task, I jump to HN, read some things, then jump back to what I'm supposed to do. The important part is to have things actionable and with a definition of when they are 'done', so that you can close them and do the next task.

Internet is the greatest library that you will never read. Internet should be read-only.

A trick is to set yourself multiple tasks that are not exciting, so that you do at least one. If I tell myself, "I will edit all the photos I have been taking for almost a decade", I may not get around to it.

So, I tell myself, "I will either edit photos, vacuum the house or read the iOS Human Interface Guidelines." Then I may bounce from task to task, but I will finish at least one. After a while, the irritation of leaving a task half-done drives me to complete the other tasks as well.

AKA "Productive Procrastination", a method that has helped many through history - http://chronicle.com/article/Productive-Procrastination/4493...

Thanks. I didn't know that term.

I prefer the 'dark playground'[0] explanation. It's more useful at understanding and coming up with different ways of dealing with it when those listed in the shyal article fail.

[0]: http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastin...

I completely agree with this. I find the best way to fight procrastination is to put all my willpower into just doing one task, no matter how small, towards the goal. That often puts me into a state of mind of doing many more tasks without needing willpower.

I use this trick all the time and it works great for me. Another one that I like to use is to think about my retrospective feeling about the thing after having done it. So, in the case of going to the gym, I think about the fact that after having gone to the gym, i've never regretted going. I've never come back from the gym and thought "man I wish I didn't just do that".

蛐出我們會」但是如果雙方在？這次真的做錯什麼為什麼還不是1女人婦科醫院檢查檢查的

A great tip.

Yet I'm keeping in mind that it isn't doesn't guaranteed to work for me. Everyone is wired different. I'm fallible and perfectly capable of misidentifying something as procrastination. I'm uncomfortable with "procrastination"s connotation of moral failing. One person's procrastination is another's Just in Time execution.

Great to-the-point article.

To add from personal experience, a similar method can be applied for daunting tasks. To give an example: If your todo-list seems overwhelming you may end up procrastinating or stressing out. The solution can be a variant of what's described in the article: Write a new list with only 3-5/fewer items and focus on those.

Anyone have the problem that instead of procrastination you start adding new features because that's more interesting/challenging than the drudge work that remains. So you're constantly doing a little drudge work and a little adding features and you get stuck in a Zeno's paradox of never finishing? :)

That's like myself and fiction writing. Easier to transcribe written notes, or re-read and edit, vs just plowing into new chapters and necessary dialogue builds, etc.

Definitely a different sort of procrastination.

ไวๆวหยไ ไยๆย ไยฟวๆหา แสฟยไ

國一個新人的喜悅？就——但 ऐआजच७ःतकेख

I liked the comparison with walking the solid board over high ground. This is something I actually use quite literally to fight my (light) vertigo. The other trick (maybe more important in that situation) is to avoid switching back and forth between looking at what's close and what's far away, because that's the part that irritates my sense of balance and then creates the vertigo effect. Not mixing up close and far away makes actually even more sense than the 'first step' metaphor in what the article is trying to say.

I seriously caught myself thinking: ok, sure... will try this... tomorrow! :)

Yet another article to beat procrastination. I like the idea of rewiring the limbic system though.

I've saved up a long list of them into a big project that I will definitely tackle one day. Definitely.

I just need to sort out the definitions and overlapping boundaries with habits, tasks and projects and what I should be documenting and not documenting, and how I should keep a record in terms of time-stamps and how to structure my information.

One day I will definitely do something.

ᏚᎤ ᎠᏆᎬ ᏓᎾᏓ

ज्ञऑअ

> to beat procrastination, a simple trick is to imagine starting the task as opposed to finishing it

You could also just start the task, basically accomplishing the same thing. Skip the imagining part if it is a distraction.

Akin to telling a depressed person to "stop being depressed."

Not quite. Granted, the act of starting to work on a task requires some effort. But assuming a procrastinator's task is within reach, it is in the realm his or her capabilities. The point is that if starting is the hardest part, you might as well start right away since you'll have to anyway. The earlier you start the less you'll suffer later. Starting right away could save yourself from having regrets. Like rushing a job, missing a deadline, doing a poorer job etc. Whereas you might not be able to control depression on your own with a single action or decision.

On similar topic, following video is very informational and entertaining. Especially last part the life calendar. Sometimes this life calendar motivates me procrastinate the procrastination :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU&feature=youtu.be.

Once you know this trick it's pretty easy trick yourself out of this trick. What has helped me is just preparing for the task, for example, getting up from the couch and cleaning up my desk, arranging my paper and pencil for notes etc.

With that title and URL I though it was going to be a thinly veiled attempt at the Shia LaBeouf equivelant of a Rickroll. The message turned out to be pretty much the same.

It's actually not that bad as far as baity self-help posts go. We changed the title to the weird trick, uh, mind hack. I think that helps a fair bit.

I say this on most threads about procrastination, but it's important to remember that chronic procrastination can be an indication of anxiety, not just a temporary state of mind. If you suffer from this kind of anxiety and not just a moment of distraction, you should see a professional, they really can help fix things long term and improve your quality of life.

As a procrastinator, I can tell you that mine has NOTHING to do with anxiety, or the fear of failure, or the scope of the task at hand. There is similar projection in this article, that anybody dealing with procrastination is struggling with overcoming fear.

While I can certainly force myself into doing things better as I'm older and sick of the failures that procrastination leads to, I've not heard much useful advice for plain ol' (non-anxiety related) procrastination, where the person simply has inertia at rest and is disinterested at all levels from disrupting that. Stuff like the pomodoro method is probably the most relevant.

Yep, I made the comment to call out anxiety as a factor many people are unaware of. It does not mean everyone who procrastinates has clinical anxiety, but if one finds themselves often unable to make progress or having a decreased quality of life from failures, it doesn't hurt to get a professional opinion.

Well, the statement "but it's important to remember that procrastination is a form of anxiety" is much more absolute than that. Putting people under broad umbrella terms certainly can be counterproductive to dealing with individual issues.

That wasn't my intention. I've edited the original comment.

As a pedantic as I am :-), editing "procrastination" into "chronic procrastination" while leaving it absolute simply gets into the technical definitions of the terms (especially "anxiety"), and how agreeable the formal psych terms are to the common populace.

In general lay terms, "anxiety" is associated with fear-type responses, not disinterest. A lack of stress indicators would tend to indicate a lack of anxiety. A begrudging compliance when breaking through procrastination is not overcoming anxiety, but overcoming disinterest. A post-response to getting something done being "Fine, it's done, did I really have to do that?" is not indicative of overcoming fear or anxiety, because fear and anxiety are about future unknowns and would be relieved ex post facto, while procrastination still is disgruntled at having had to do it. I would present all of these as informal disagreements to blanketly equating even chronic procrastination with anxiety, as the latter tends to be understood.

Of course, that's in full acknowledgement that behavioral medicine tends to use ridiculously broad terms that tend to lead to overdiagnosis and overmedication issues we're currently dealing with (especially in schools), and they might use "anxiety" far more broadly than I am above.

Regardless of the semantics of how procrastination is defined, any behavior that affects your quality of life is one which is worth discussing with a professional to get actionable third party advice.

I have to do laundry this weekend, and it is a very easy task: I just have to gather my cloth, go into the basement, put them in the machine and after two hours hang them up to dry. I don't fear the task. It is not giving me anxiety. I still read reddit and hacker news instead of doing it.

Not to try and armchair psychologist here but one of the things that reddit and hn have going for them is that there is no commitment there. Laundry is a whole damn thing, you've gotta be there in an hour or two to hang stuff up, then you eventually have to take it down, and you probably want to fold it (even if you don't (like me) some part of you says you're supposed to)... None of this hard and there lots of non active time but it's still committing to a course for the next X hours. Refreshing your email doesn't commit you to anything.

and again, not saying I know you or that you have anxiety but: it's inside that instinctive avoidance of commitment that the anxiety can hide without ever making you actually aware of itself.

I can see what this guy means because i basically procrastinated myself out of a degree once.

Sitting down to do study my worst subjects reminded me of how much less I knew than I needed to - so I procrastinated by studying my best ones instead.

That was definitely an anxiety thing, and some well time counseling might have been life changing. It's a different thing to your laundry though, which is probably more about wanting to keep doing reddit than wanting not do laundry...

Time management counseling helped me a lot. The laundry example is a small one but often all those small things build up into a larger issue that consumes you, so it's worth treating those as important as any, unless it's just that one thing :)

Along the line, what will a professional say?

Depends on the person you see and your particular issues.

For me I did a lot of time management exercises like making an inventory of where I spent time in any given week and then planning the next week and seeing if I met my planned goals. That exercise is also good at showing you how much free time you actually have.

For me I often avoided starting tasks because I wouldn't have enough time to finish it before something else required my attention. Planning in advance shows that I usually do have the time, and if I didn't, I could plan to work on things in the slots where I did.

There are a lot of things they could say though, for me my ADD and poor behaviors when I was younger meant I needed a few things rebooted :)

A lot of people are unable to recognize anxiety when they have it, even chronically. I'm not saying you do, everyone is different, but it takes a professional to give such a diagnosis, so if you find yourself procrastinating very often it probably wouldn't hurt to get a professional opinion.

Interesting idea, would you be able to expand or point to any interesting reading about this?

To be a bit more concrete, this site has some nice bits of advice for things like time management and avoiding perfectionism: http://ub-counseling.buffalo.edu/stressprocrast.php

Most universities have exceptional resources available, even one on one counseling with qualified professionals, for free. More people should take advantage of these resources, but I assume people associate a stigma with mental health care.

My specific point is that you should see a doctor/therapist to adopt a plan for addressing the anxiety and other effects caused by it.

"tldr: to beat procrastination, a simple trick is to imagine starting the task as opposed to finishing it"

- Isn't mean not to plan ahead of what do, which means not able to finish the task effectively. Of course it is better than postponing the task.

TLDR: Imagine yourself starting, not finishing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com