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Comment by TheSpiceIsLife | Hacker News Reader

Procrastination keep coming up here, and elsewhere, and I keep thinking:

Look, I regularly work 10 hour days five days a week and a 6 hour Saturday. If something needs to ship, I'm here till it ships. I voluntarily agreed to all this, and keep agreeing to it.

If I get home and sit in front of a screen and read HN and watch old Star Trek episodes, who cares?

I could be doing more? My only regret is I wished I'd worked more?

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We often work very hard when someone else is depending on us but let ourselves down when we set our own goals.

Many of us have goals around personal projects and errands that we keep putting off since the due dates are arbitrary.

Working a six day week certainly makes for less available time to get other things done.

Very astute comment about external motivation versus internal motivation. The fact that someone else is depending on me will spur me to push through a task, particularly if it is for someone close to me (e.g. my daughter). However, in a small percentage of cases for work clients, I can experience mental resistance, almost like a internal rebellion, that will cause me to procrastinate. Happens even if the client is very nice and I like them, which makes me feel all the more guilty. Luckily, it is not the norm, or I would be out of a job pretty quickly.

I mean I guess it's only procrastination if you are actively avoiding a task that you deem important and are constantly entering a loop of regret and remorse for delaying the task or work associated with it.

Like homework or chores or in my case small steps to study for an exam I have to pass in order to keep my job.

Very YMMV?

That's not procrastination, procrastination is when you avoid completing a task even though it doesn't benefit you to avoid completing it. For example, if a feature is supposed to ship in 3 weeks and you spend all 3 weeks "researching" libraries and on the last day you write some really bad code with no tests, that's procrastination. If you had just spent all 3 weeks writing the code and iterating on it using the tools you know you would have completed the task but you avoided completing the task for ____ psychological reason. A better name for procrastination is "task avoidance."

There's a more in-depth coverage of this in the book "Still Procrastinating" by Joseph R Ferrari (the top researcher on procrastination).

Sadly familiar. I realize I am unhappy when I am on my own time and work makes me feel fulfilled. I wish it weren't true.

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