Comment by kapep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kapep | Hacker News Reader

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[...] what procrastination looks like for most people:
- Think about working.
- Immediately feel the urge to procrastinate.
- Start beating themselves up with a bunch of negative self-talk for wanting to procrastinate (I’m such a procrastinator, why can’t you just stay focused?)
- Feel badly, including a bunch of negative emotions like shame and disappointment, on top of the already-strong urge to procrastinate.

- Procrastinate on something emotionally numbing.

Is that really how it works for most people? I (and I always assumed that's how it is for most people) often just rationalize procrastination ("My tasks are not that important/interesting, I'll do them later", "Reading just one more article is fine, then back to work") without any negative thoughts at that time. Sometimes I do some research and suddenly realize I ended up on StackOverflow or HN and think "wait a minute, that's not work any more". But that's ok if I get all work done.

I think that is the usual way of procrastination. What the article claims how most people procrastinate (negative thoughts, getting no work done) sounds like more extreme but rarer cases.

Anecdata: personally, procrastination and self-hatred go hand-in-hand.

While the BBC isn't the most authoritative source, this reminds me of this post from recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17878716

"Prof Tim Pychyl, from Carleton University, Ottawa, who has been studying procrastination for the past few decades, believes it is a problem with managing emotions rather than time."

Depends on the person. If I have the conscious frame of mind to realize I'm procrastinating and the thing that needs to be done is urgent, then the negative emotions hit me, but often I completely forget what I was supposed to be doing as I get entrenched in whatever I was procrastinating on, losing track of time to the point of asking "Wait ... when did Monday become Wednesday!?"

His description of procrastination lines up with my behaviour, that being said you might well be right, for me it takes constant mental effort/will power to stay focused on a particular task, even more so to begin a task, I don't know that this what most people experience.

I personally attribute this to anxiety/adhd where part of my brain wants to focus and get one thing done while the other is desperately concerned with trying to "keep an eye on everything at once". So there ends up being a deadlock between the two, in which case his strategy works for me, I do a little bit of everything because at least I get stuff done then.

The only thing that forces me to focus on a single thing for any length of time is a hard deadline and even that's no picnic it tends to leave me completely exhausted.

I suspect there are a number of behavioral patterns that outwardly appear as "procrastination" and so are limited together. When one person talks about procrastination, others assume it's the pattern or patterns they have personally experienced. This is the kind of assumption that leads to insultingly useless advice. Suggesting that a procrastinator "just do the work". Similar to the case of asking a depressed person "have you tried being happy?". There may be cases those approaches do help, but there are also many where they are very ignorant approaches.

>without any negative thoughts at that time.

You'd be surprised...

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