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Comment by treehau5 | Hacker News Reader

But if I put big seemingly important but not really important things at the top and then work on the bottom ones, I will know that I am doing this, and resent myself. That's the biggest issue with my procrastination: my self loathing.

(Ironically, here I am, reading this article about how to do the things I am suppose to be doing with at least 5 things that need to be done before this week is over)

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I agree that the article's problem is that it depends on deceiving yourself, which, as you said, your ego always ends up paying the price for.

For me, the most helpful thing has been to become more aware of the fluctuation of my own energy/motivation levels, and managing them instead of thinking I should be super-motivated all the time. My subconscious knows which tasks will be a pain to get through and I know I'll tend to procrastinate on those things. So I have to make sure I seize those hours when I have high energy and get the tougher things done. Then when I have less energy later I won't feel bad spending that time doing smaller things or even chilling. Hopefully this creates a virtuous cycle of confidence, which results in progressively more energy and motivation in the future.

One of the big premises of GTD is to organize tasks by contexts. A key feature of that is to keep a list of important but easy / low energy tasks in advance so when you're in this state you know exactly what you can do to be productive without having to think about it.

I manage my procrastination by taking on more tasks than I can handle, and then letting the seemingly really important ones wait while I finish less important stuff. As an example, my apartment was never so clean as when I was working from home on a side job, because I would wake up in the morning and immediately clean it as a way of avoiding the side job.

I get that part. What I don't get is how you deal with the fact that you know you are just scheming yourself?

If the placebo effect can work, even when the recipient knows it's a placebo, then maybe our capacity for self-deception is more powerful than you think.

For me, the guilt comes from knowing I -could- do more, but never doing as much as I could theoretically do if I did not procrastinate, rather than the self-deception itself.

And I don't think the self-deception for me is on purpose. It just happens to my natural, procrastinating self.

You were already scheming, slacking off and feeling bad about it. Now you get some useful work done on the side.

I think the self that you are scheming will see what you are doing, admire you for it, and agree to play along. You're both participating in the con because you both get what you want.

Granted, this feels insane as I type it, but it also sounds like it might work quite well :)

Procrastination involves constantly telling yourself that you'll start the important thing, right after this one short little other thing.

So the thing we're fighting is also self-deceivement, and that doesn't make it easy to beat.

> by taking on more tasks than I can handle

In contrast to your experience, I've found this to be an exceptionally poor strategy during uni. It led me to stay up late and wake up early trying to get things done, then to fall asleep in lectures (I once had a professor throw chalk at me). It led me to ruin relationships as I imposed stress on others by failing to deliver on things. Doing this to people is a really shitty feeling.

The combination of sleep-deprivation and self-loathing made it very easy to fall into the escapism and thus more procrastination.

The trick is to eventually start the more important stuff. If you never get anything done then it all falls apart.

sleep-deprivation is the method I used when I was a bit younger. It shuts down cravings, because the only craving I'd have now is to sleep, made me dumb, but this allowed me to go through some really mundane but unavoidable and long-overdue task. Then 12-hour sleep and I'm back again to collecting new task debt.

> It shuts down cravings

People are wildly different. It always exacerbated my cravings for news, sugar, etc.

>That's the biggest issue with my procrastination: my self loathing.

And to self medicate, you'll do immediate gratification stuff - more procrastinating. It's a vicious loop and goes hand in hand with many negative habits.

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