Lean into Procrastination | Hacker News Reader

Lean into Procrastination

jodent.io

49 pointspatapizza14 comments

When you procrastinate, your brain is sending you a message. It’s telling you that it has already solved the problem, or that it knows how to solve it. Only the execution remains. It will deliver when time comes; till then, there are more interesting things to do.

My experience is quite the opposite. Most of the time procrastination means two things: either it is a task with a lot of stress and fear attached to it, or it is a task that the back of my brain knows damn well has some pre-requisites that need to be taken care of first, but the front of my brain doesn't want to admit that.

These can combine. Stuff that has an unadmitted pre-requisite task that is also full of stress and fear is never gonna get done until the absolute last moment, with a lot of stress and pain and swearing. If it is ever done at all.

For me most of the times it means that the problem probably isn’t worth the work.

Which in part is why I never understood the “solve a problem you have mentality” when it comes to writing software. On the occasion that I have an problem that a A) be solved by software and B) does not have a or existing solution that works well, it’ll typically just put it off or give up because the problem is not worth the effort it would take to solve it.

I can relate. When I have done the research and figured out a plan and know exactly the way I can approach it and am even excited to do it when I day dream about it...that’s when procrastination strikes. It has turned from a challenge into an easy task.

What usually happens though is when I finally start I realize there is a ton of stuff not clear and it becomes a nice challenge again without any easy obvious solution, and I regret my procrastination, and power on into flow.

The power of procrastination for side projects it’s absolutely amazing. It’s always this “if only I had more time I could finish all of it!”. But then when you have the time you become lazy.

> What usually happens though is when I finally start I realize there is a ton of stuff not clear and it becomes a nice challenge again without any easy obvious solution, and I regret my procrastination, and power on into flow.

Ugh I’m currently “working” on a project and as soon as I think I finally understand and sit down to start doing work I find out something else that effectively puts me back into “I’m a complete idiot who doesn’t understand this at all” mode.

Perfect analysis!

The premise that procrastination implies you already know how to do a task does not seem right or justified to me.

I think this advice is not 100 % serious but still has its merits. Sometimes, for me at least, this premise completely applies.

In fact that's a pretty classic rationalization.

This reminds me of a joke I used to tell people, when I was writing my master thesis:

"I wish I was doing my PhD thesis now. That way, I can finish writing my master thesis by procrastinating my PhD."

Atrocious advice. I think it's intended seriously, but perhaps this is satire?

Also, that grey-on-white style is something to avoid. Low contrast doesn't help anyone.

I think they are just trying to promote the two links near the end of the article.

This advice fails when you're like me and struggle with procrastinating the interesting stuff too.

The problem with this advice is there isn’t just one thing that gets called procrastination.

My experience is that procrastination leads to anxiety and stress before I even start doing any work.

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