A Universal Law of Procrastination (2016)

Let me share a tip that might work for you as well then: some times you will procrastinate heavily because you're have a hard problem with no solution in sight. You'll want to make some semblance of progress, but you just can't sit down and concretely work on it. It's by design! Your subconscious keeps working in the background, thinking outside the box until one day out of nowhere you get the solution right before your eyes.

I'm not sure it's possible to think outside the box if you're not procrastinating, since you need other types of unrelated input for your brain to make a different type of association and reach a conclusion from another perspective.

I'd like to read more about this phenomenon but has been one of my best tricks up my sleeve in my career. Recently I've been trying to write down a complex piece of code, the corner stone of my application critical to the whole business. I've spent weeks on that problem, tried and failed to design a working solution, spent hours reading papers during working time instead of writing anything, browsing HN mindlessly, until after 2 months, out of the blue at 4am looking at cat pics on reddit I found the answer. And I'm now enjoying this newfound wave of productivity until my next hard problem.

EDIT: I think it's called the Eureka effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_effect

EDIT 2: other things I found that help the Eureka effect:

* taking a shower

* walking

* mindless consuming (watching a movie, browsing youtube or reddit)

* reading a book

* sleep deprivation

I listened to this podcast recently, which was very good:

https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/beat-procrastination...

There are two psychologists being interviewed, and they talk about different reasons people procrastinate:

* Fear of failure: If you think you will fail outright or, more probable, not meet your own standards of perfection, you put off working on this uncomfortable item. It's easier to flee to something else. If you don't even try, you can tell yourself the day before the deadline that you could've done it, had you just started earlier, and so on, tricking yourself into feeling more competent than you are.

* Fear of success: If you're known as the person who gets things done, you'll be handed more difficult tasks. You might be promoted into a position of more responsibility, closer to where the decisions are made, which might not suit you. You might get people to supervise, which you're not interested in. You might make you're colleagues, or family, or friends jealous of your success, which is why you self sabotage your tasks and don't perform to your full potential. They talk about someone being the first from their family going to the university: if they succeed, they won't be able to get advice from their parents on how to finish a report, their brother might not think that problems in academia are real problems compared to being a construction worker, and so on.

* Fear of loss of control: If your manager or spouse tells you to do something and you do it, you hand over control of your time to someone else. By procrastinating, you're saying "I decide when and if this gets done", which is a confidence boost. Not doing something is a way of asserting control in a passive aggressive way.

* You may come from a family that over and over told you that you suck and is a failure, so why even try doing anything that's hard?

* Or you were teased as a kid when you were successful in school or in sports, so you sabotage you're own work to avoid imagined further abuse.

* Or you might have been praised as being super smart and competent, so as soon as something requires any effort, you avoid it to not look stupid or incompetent. Perhaps you don't know enough about the task you're supposed to do, or you don't know why you're supposed to do it, but instead of acknowledging that and asking for help, you put the task off.

* Or you might be really bad at predict how long things will take. Perhaps you have an idealized view that a task shouldn't take a competent person more than 30 minutes, so when you're still not done after 3 hours, the task has suddenly become a huge burden and pushes other tasks into the future. Or you might have a weakness (writing clear emails, making phone calls looking for information, and so on) that you don't acknowledge to yourself, so that it gets you into trouble because you put off that email or phone call instead of approaching the problem in a different way that utilizes your strengths or by asking for help.

They also talk about the difference between procrastinators who wait until the very last second and then work furiously (this is me), pulling all nighters (like last night) to finish doing stuff for work that they were supposed to do a long time ago. Since you don't have enough time to do a perfect job, you just have to deliver something, usually the first draft, but since that's accepted by your boss and colleagues, you keep doing it. Another type of procrastinator is the one who sees the deadline pass and still do nothing. These people might have bills that go unpaid for no real reason, and will pay unnecessary late fees on stuff. They might even put off filling out forms that will get them money back for taxes, and other beneficial stuff, even though it's hard from the outside to understand why someone would do that.

So that are a bunch of reasons why someone might procrastinate even though a deadline is fixed. In the podcast they talk about the difference between procrastinating and putting things off, where the latter might be a good thing to do, but procrastination that ends up hurting you or making your life difficult is something to try to look into and fix. Interestingly enough, they talked about how no pomodoros or GTD systems can help you if you procrastinate for deep psychological reasons, because you'll just ignore the systems anyway. For me, these system only work for a day or two, never long term.

In the podcast, they talk about facing your fear. When you say that tasks appear to big, or perhaps are too undefined, there's fear connected with facing the task since you don't know what is required of you and if you can do it. Divide and conquer sounds like a good approach, also giving yourself just 5 minutes to really think about the problem without making any judgments on your own capacity or worth. I usually avoid thinking about tasks because I'm afraid that I've already put it off for too long, so now it might be too late. I might have to involve other people to help me out, which I'd have to do close to the deadline, which is embarrassing because I would have to admit I've put it off when I should have been working on it. But spending 5 minutes to clarify the task and write some notes about what I already know and what kind of output I have to produce usually helps make the task feel a lot more manageable and less scary. Another option is to tell yourself you're going to work on finishing the task for 10 minutes, and then you stop and evaluate how you feel. If you've put something off, you expect to feel horrible, but usually you're instead invigorated by finally having started on the task and will keep on going.

What has helped me is the idea of 3 MITs, Most Important Tasks, that you identify each morning. I write down three things I want to achieve that I think I can manage during that day, even if it's less than what I would like to finish. If I do them, I let myself procrastinate by reading Hacker News or Reddit with a lot better conscience, because I've usually delivered some tangible result to a colleague that day. This is also very nice when working from home, and I'm usually more productive from a task perspective when I work from home and can focus on my MITs without interruptions instead of being at the office with my colleagues.

Just a word to the wise.

Even if you have a proposal 95% complete months early, there's no real benefit to submitting it, and some value to waiting - to polish, or perhaps to amend the proposal for a changing world. I've certainly seen professors go back and rework proposals at the last minute because someone else had published related work they needed to account for.

The other issue that came to mind is that people finish work near deadlines with procrastinating, because work takes time. If there are two proposal deadlines per year, and the average person takes ~6 months to write a proposal, you'd see a normal distribution ramp-up of submissions, and never see the declining count because those people missed the deadline.

This is affecting my life really bad. I've been trying to fight this for years with next to no success. If I pass the optimal time to start a task I find it almost impossible to start after that point. Say, sometimes I know that if I do it a bit faster and maybe sloppier I can still make the deadline but for some unknown reason it's so hard to do it and I go back to procrastinating.

Another similar problem I have with procrastination is "soft deadlines". When something has a deadline but it's not the end of the world if the deadline is passed (say you can still accomplish the task 2 days later and it'll be ok) I find it incredibly hard to do it after the soft deadline. You have no idea how many troubles I collected this way since I kept procrastinating sending important documents to people, government etc... If I send them the day they're due everything is fine; if something comes up, say like scanner breaks, I forget etc... it takes months for me to send that document.

Young professors and grad students are often really busy during work hours, and don't necessarily know all their deadlines well in advance. If you give them a six-month window to write a proposal, they'll probably work on it incrementally while fitting in as many other deadlines as they can.

Obviously procrastination happens, but it's also possible to get last-minute submissions from good time management; people use the full time available to create more space to get other work done.