The Now Habit (2015)

Procastination is created by anxiety emotion, if you want to get deeper it is easily explained in this animated movie:

https://archive.org/details/understandingstressesandstrains

Anxiety makes impossible for you to concentrate as it makes your attention to focus on the thread, like an herbivorous animal will stop eating for focusing on the lion.

It is an emotional block equivalent to pushing the brakes while the accelerator pedal. A car that could go to 200, will only go to 10. If you push harder, you break the car. If you know what procastination is,and know how not to block, you can at 200, and enjoy it!!

Anxiety is extremely useful for humans, this baby has none of it. Without the glass wall it will be a good idea that parents have it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSlrDi9So9w

Nowadays, the more relevant cause of anxiety is other humans, as we have exterminated most of the other predators, in circumstances like war. E.g Recently in Syria, you(or your family members) could die every single day, beheaded after being raped.

It in interesting that in the modern world, in peace, when most problems are not death threats, we increase the sensibility of anxiety making abstract things like not entering University, losing a job or a partner or just being humiliated while giving a speech or rejection, as "live threatening", causing procastination.

Techiniques such as Unschedule are at best just hacks that are effective only in the short term. The only way to permanently beat procrastination is to persist on work you don't want to do until it becomes a habit. Along with the usual techniques of splitting a task into sub-tasks, removing distractions, starting immediately, etc., making yourself accountable goes a long way in crushing procrastination. Read more at https://procrushtinate.com/guide.html

I think there’s an argument to be made that your personality is made of habits. If you’re trying to change how you act or think in some domain of life, but you sometimes feel locked in a stalemate with your own mind, do consider taking a look at Fiore’s book.

If you’re familiar with Thinking: Fast and Slow, you could consider this book a how-to guide for using System 2 to change System 1 processes.

Although I haven't become a super productive person yet (lol), I started to think of strategies that suits my own style and I'm putting them on practice at small steps. It seems to be working.

Besides, the chapter regarding dealing with procrastinators is a must read for team managers in general.

Someone bought me this a a gift, I can't remember who. I read it and, although it has some interesting ideas, it felt like there was no enough content and it repeated the same points over and over to fill space.

I didn't like how it was written. This is the only self-help book I have read, so I don't know if it is following some conventions of the genre (is this a genre?).

Overall I liked some of the core ideas, but not reading the book.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007A4SDCG/

I've been in that position with bad management where finishing a project quickly would get you a look like, "Is that all you're going to do? I thought I figured out how to make you productive, but I guess I have to try again." With the wrong kind of management, finishing a project puts a cap on the credit you get from it, and finishing a project quickly can create an impression that you're getting nothing done. A three-week project is worth 50% more than a two-week project, a system that requires constant patching in production gives you a constant flow of achievement, etc. Good management with strong technical chops will remember the systems you built that are humming along problem-free. Good management with strong technical chops will not base their estimations of difficulty entirely on how long you take to build something and how much trouble it is afterwards. Good management will appreciate you not adding functionality of uncertain value to the codebase. Bad management can make engineers reluctant to wrap up work too quickly lest their work be perceived as lower quality than it should be, and engineers can always find ways to gild the lily if that's what management demands. Especially coming up towards review time, if you have no chance to add an extra line to your accomplishments after completing your current project, it is tempting to find a way to add an extra week to inflate your achievement —- if that's how your management thinks about it.

The opposite problem (with the same kind of bad management) happens when they ask you to incrementally add more and more functionality to a system, but because they keeping using the same label for each additional increment of work, they end up feeling that you took forever to complete a single simple project. The worst form of this is when they don't let you deploy the system. A few years back I spent the bulk of two quarters adding new capabilities to a system that was never used. (It was deployed in production, but for business reasons related to the customer it was built for, it was idle. Another maddening factor was that I was building on a codebase that had been half-completed by two developers who were writing Scala for the first time, but that's a different story.) Good management would apologize for wasting my time. Bad management blamed me despite their ongoing direction to continue the work. (When you hear someone say they want developers who are "entrepreneurial," that means you're supposed to go outside the process to talk to product teams, because management is going to get the business priorities wrong, and it's your ass on the line when they do.)

Bottom line, when you find a great manager, do your sanity a favor and stick with them as long as you can! There's enough wrong with you already without your manager compounding the problem.

>Imagine the concrete goal and the rewards. Let it pull you towards it. Don't think about the long way till the goal, think about the way you've already behind yourself.