Hacker News Reader

Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

“ > Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert”

That makes sense for some procrastination, but other procrastination is laziness.

Mopping the floor, taking out the garbage, mowing the lawn types of procrastination... those are under your own purview and don’t involve big emotions or decisions...

So I think it explains some kinds of procrastination but not all.

View on HN

It's not about just doing the dishes, it's about the sum of all the other chores and things you have to do. It's overwhelming in its entirety, not the individual tasks.

When they look at the washing up a procrastinator doesn't just see the washing up, they also see that they have to do a laundry, fix the cupboard creak, do a full clean of the cupboards, clean under the fridge, wash the floors, dust the cobwebs, fix the dripping tap, take out the recycling, decide what to do with those old jars, etc., etc.

Even if they do eventually manage to do a flurry of chores, and usually feel great, it's not a habit to do it again. It's not a scheduled minor, automatic, task. Your brain deals with habits much easier than things you have to consciously do.

So it inadvertently builds up, and BAM, as if from nowhere, there's a massive pile of washing up with a whole load of OTHER tasks mentally attached to it again.

You see it as easy and lazinness, but we don't. The irony is that living like this is actually a lot harder, you're having to ultimately put more work in for often worse results.

I don’t mean it as an attack. I’m affected by the above too. Sometimes it’s because you look too far down the road as you allude to. But that could be part of an “excuse” mechanism.

Breaking things down into more discrete unconnected units allows addressing neater (less messy) problems/chores.

In myself I do notice over complicating things as an excuse to put them off and waste time. But as others suggest, sometimes you just have to power through and get things done.

And in most cases it’s not a hard or difficult work. The hard part is committing to doing it. Once you actually start it’s mostly a breeze.

Ah, ok, I've removed the first paragraph as I was being too defensive and it didn't really add anything.

I've been personally struggling with this for decades, I've found solutions that work for months, or even sometimes years and had long periods of effective productivity. But they all seem to eventually get forgotten and then don't work the 2nd time round.

It's very frustrating.

It's funny as I can easily work hard for other people and clients, etc.

My wife is like you, she sees everything she has to do as a huge "lump" of work and gets overwhelmed and distracted trying to make progress on everything at once. She's also ADHD which means she very easily gets distracted by something, which then leads to hyperfocus on that seemingly unproductive thing.

I see the kitchen and I think "this is going to make my back and legs hurt so much, I'm going to rest a bit before tackling it." Then I get distracted with reddit or HN or whatever, and suddenly it's the next morning and I have to work again.

> When they look at the washing up a procrastinator doesn't just see the washing up, they also see that they have to do a laundry, fix the cupboard creak, do a full clean of the cupboards, clean under the fridge, wash the floors, dust the cobwebs, fix the dripping tap, take out the recycling, decide what to do with those old jars, etc., etc

This reminds me: is there a word to describe a related phenomenon, that I find incredibly frustrating? It goes as follows: say I want to take a one minute break to fetch myself some coffee. I go to the kitchen, find the dishwasher running and no clean cup, so I have to clean one myself. I do that, then discover I have to refill the water and the beans in the coffee machine. I make the coffee, and the machine flashes red. The dredgewater bin is full. I need to pour it out and clean it. I get dirty and coffee-smelly, so I want to wash my hands. Doing that, I use the last bit of soap in the dispenser, so now I have to fetch the 5L jug and carefully refill it. By this time, what started as a one-minute break turned into 10 minutes of chores, and I'm already anxious about getting back to work.

Some form of the story above happens to me pretty much every other day. Is there a name for this kind of unexpected recursive expansion of chores?

I don't know but I call it "the stack". If the stack gets big enough, it can get overwhelming.

Maybe it would make sense to have a todo list organized like a hierarchical bullet point list for things like these... where you don't have to store the whole dependency graph in your head. I find that that's often why I don't get the actual task intended complete; because in the process of emptying the stack, I forget what got me there in the first place.

Yak shaving is a term I use when I run into a chain of tasks.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/YakShavingDefinedIllGetThatDo...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fnfeuoh4s8

When you procrastinate on mopping the floor or mowing the lawn, you're making a choice to live with dirtier floors or longer grass in exchange for more time to spend on other things. Some of that work actually goes away forever when you procrastinate. It's not like you mow the grass twice to make up for missing a week!

Perhaps the difficult emotion that 'lazy' people are avoiding is admitting to themselves that they're ok making that trade-off.

> Perhaps the difficult emotion that 'lazy' people are avoiding is admitting to themselves that they're ok making that trade-off.

I don't think it's that simple. During low periods, I let plates/wrappers/leftovers pile in the dishwasher, in the sink, on the sides, and in trash bags. The result is that when I need to eat, I clean a single dish, make room (more piling), and make a trivial meal.

The pending cleaning grows, yet I avoid doing it, live in filth and avoid cooking.

I'd be better putting a trash bag in, putting the wrappers/food in the bin, and using my dishwasher to batch clean, rather than JIT clean by hand. But I don't.

That's a problem, not a conscious trade off.

The worst thing is when you put something off, like a project at work, and then it gets cancelled. That's the type of positive reinforcement that leads to even more procrastiantion. :-)

Sometimes the best action is inaction?

Not unless it got cancelled because you procrastinated on it, and your superiors decided to cut the loss.

> The first week after getting an assignment is called 'The Wally Period.' Never do work during the Wally period because most tasks become unnecessary within seven days.

https://dilbert.com/strip/2002-02-27

It might not be laziness if the difficult emotions would have to be confronted by the mopping the floor kind of procrastination. Or, worse, if realising you need to mow the lawn makes you realise your entire yard is a mess and probably a shame to your community and you feel worse because of it - so you suppress and procrastinate.

One of the best things I've ever learned was to recognize that voice when it says "I can do that later" and instead decide to do it right now. The payoff is huge!

My hack is that I'll start doing a thing while wondering if I should do it. Instead of standing around thinking about whether you should do dishes, do a bit while you think about it. And usually then it's easier to just finish.

I suspect the phenomenon is different for each person. Myself, I have little problem procrastinating household chores--they feel easy and not particularly stressful. For whatever reason, it hits me hardest for tasks that I "like" to do, like programming. It's quite paradoxical.

It's certainly true for me that procrastination is essentially avoiding a form of anxiety. But I don't think there's some deeper, larger problem. It feels more like "choking", just a fairly specific learned, maladaptive response. At some times in my life, I've pushed it into the background and become more productive, but it always seems to creep back.

Drinking seems to reliably reduce it, but I can't very well program lit all day.

I will let the dishes sit because the thought of doing them feels overwhelming.

I have no desire to perform any manual labor task that can easily be automated, it seems such a pointless waste of time. Time better spent procrastinating.

To me, mopping the floor reminds me of all those times I said to myself "I'll clean the apartment top to bottom today" and I tried hard, but by the end of the day it was still far from perfect. Then 3 days later it was dirty again. I failed and I was a loser.

I'm not really looking forward to reliving that.

You can have strong, negative emotions in any area of your life.

But you discount that some people might start feelings lots of big emotions while mentally understimulated such as when doing these kinds of chores.

Please be careful when dismissing something you don't understand as laziness.

Taking out the trash is easy, but mopping, that is a process.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com