A major technique mentioned by the author is omitted from the article’s headline: co-working. She writes about benefitting greatly from logging on to a muted Zoom room with hundreds of other people to work at a set time. It’s interesting how this is effective for some people; for another anecdote, blogger Alexey Guzey wrote about a similar system [0] with a smaller group.

Psychiatrist Dr. David Burns writes at length about more techniques on addressing procrastination (called “do-nothingism”). He has a chapter on the subject in his book “Feeling Good,” and he wrote a similar passage online in an article for his podcast [1]. The methods he writes about that work best for me have been breaking down tasks into sequence of simple steps. This helps greatly for straightforward tasks, though it is less effective for difficult tasks that involve uncertainty and learning. These harder tasks require persistence and preferably time.

Separately, a personal technique I use is to really sell myself on the value of completing a task. The phrase, “discipline matters more than getting motivated” is thrown around a lot on the web, and though it has merit, I find motivation crucial to sustaining projects in the long-term (and also figuring out when it’s worthwhile to exit from a method or approach).

[0] https://guzey.com/co-working/

[1] https://feelinggood.com/2017/09/18/053-ask-david-i-dont-feel...