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Comment by mnky9800n | Hacker News Reader

I find that a lot of my procrastination comes from the anxiety of the thing I want to start doing not being completed. Literally, because I am worrying that the thing I want to work on is not already completed, I procrastinate from doing it. This is obviously counter productive and creates a feedback loop.

Something I'm bad at but seems to work is to have a conversation with myself that sort of comforts me about the anxiety and says "hey, what does this todo list look like? does it really matter that everything won't be completed today? You've spent years on this project so why would it be done today? Okay now go and address this one thing you have to do."

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Another source for me is things that I want my "ideal self" to do, but I don't enjoy in reality. Like finishing a project. Once you have enough those on list you feel constantly bad and start using procrastination as an easy escape. It has been good to just terminate projects that don't really excite me anymore. When the "I'm feeling bad about not doing x" disappears, the amount of procrastination seems to shrink also.

I'm usually very scared of "breaking" something and if there's nothing there to break in the first place, why would I create something that will potentially break at some point.

I'm getting better at knowing that this is my issue though and just think to myself "If I break it, I can go back a few steps or just fix the problem as it comes".

That can be another productivity killer. You inherit some app to maintain/modify, and you're afraid to touch it. So you essentially fork the code, start making small tweaks to reassure yourself that you're not breaking anything and it's all good. But at some point you have to take a bigger bite and it's still scary.

Oh god x1000 this. I need to write something really complex, and I have grasp of few components. But not so sure how those would interconnect, and how exactly all should work.

I am anxious and discouraged when working on it and often fallback on safety of procrastination.

This is exacerbated by the fact that I like to have a holistic view and understanding of something before implementing something. And I can't do that here :/

I see the same on a micro-scale. I have a task that will take an hour of concentrated effort - I'm afraid to start because I know I'll be interrupted. But it accumulates.

Wow, that one really hit home. I knew I rarely get work done when there's upcoming events on my calendar, but I think _fear of being interrupted_ is the real source of procrastination there.

As a variation on this, I've discovered over the years that "resistance" to working on a task sometimes comes from a clash between a conscious thought that the task should be easy and an unconscious realization that it's actually not going to be easy at all.

It's sort of the internal version of having a manager present you with a task and telling you up front that it will be "easy". That's enough to elicit a silent, knowing groan from most of us.

The good news is that often once I accept that a task is really quite complex and will take a long time, the resistance fades, and it becomes easier to start working on.

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