Simple Tips for Overcoming Procrastination
meetmaya.world
meetmaya.world
In my case I have a "fear of getting started". Once started I can usually keep going, which I guess is opposite of many (although I do have my share of unfinished projects too), but my mind starts to reel at "all the shit I need to do" that getting started on any of them is really hard.
I've started trying to schedule really small things, almost meaningless things, so I get them done via the notification that I need to start on <X>. That's helped. I need to get better at doing the "one foot in front of the other" mentality, I guess.
Pointers, or anything that's helped any of you very welcome.
There used to be a time tracking app that I liked that I've never seen before nor since that helped me out. It worked like so:
- every 10 (configurable) minutes it popped up a dialog, "what did you do for the last 10 minutes?" with a list of common or recent tasks. You picked one or wrote a new one. At the end of $DAY it gave you your tallies.
The constant reminders gave me incentive to either keep doing what I was doing (if it was good), or stop fucking around and do something meaningful.
Sadly the dev bailed on it and wouldn't release the source. I may write my own, "one of these days", but I'm not sure how to get started... <sigh>
Secondly - I think the unschedule would help a lot. Having a 10 minute ping that says "Hey! Feel bad and stop being lazy!" sounds incredibly harsh to me.
Having said that, a lot of that doesn't get completed still. Procrastination isn't always bad, it can also tell you that something isn't actually necessary or promising. So if that sets in after the first steps, I'll happily abandon the project.
Usually projects that include external feedback or motivation won't get abandoned that easily, obviously.
There's a book by the guy who ported R-Type (an old arcade game) to the ZX Spectrum (an ancient 8-bit computer). It doesn't look like much today, but at the time the port was a huge technical accomplishment (the arcade game had special hardware for sprites, tiles and scrolling, while the Spectrum was underpowered even by the standards of its era). I like this quote from the book:
> I'd been working on the game for about two and a half months and I knew I could handle everything to come, I didn't know how I would but it was that psychological boost at work again saying "oh you'll work that out when you come to it, don't worry" - so I didn't. If you're not careful you can spend more time worrying if you're capable of doing something rather than trying it and finding out for sure, something I've unfortunately seen happen to other game coders and the half completed programs they've left behind as self-doubt overrode everything else.
I have every one of these articles opened as Tabs........ which I will read about how to not procrastinate some day.....
I fight it by doing something - anything - that will help me when I'm ready to start. I'll clean my workspace, gather the tools, start the IDE, write down the phone number, etc. I often end up tackling the whole task this way.
In the long run, it also pays to make projects easy to pick up again. It's harder to cook when the kitchen is dirty, to read when you lost your page, or to code when starting the project involves 20 different commands.
Works for me but the sequence of fixing formatting and small stuff first and bugs second might drive some coworkers mad :-]
Ideally you want to get to a point where you're able to hold yourself accountable, but I'm not entirely convinced most people are able to do that reliably, sustained indefinitely.
If you're procrastinating because of your fear of failure or because you think you'll look bad in front of your boss then no amount of planning is going to help you stop procrastinating unless that planning is helping you convince yourself that you won't fail.
In the same way, if you're lost and don't know what to do motivating yourself emotionally isn't going to help unstick you unless it results in your figuring out how to tackle the problem.
Watch your mind, figure out what it's running away from and tackle it at _that_ level, 9/10 times it's not the work as we can plainly see by the fact that once we start we can usually finish and get good results.
The other thing is that as crotchety as this sounds, put down the phone and other things that yank your attention around during the day. Re-learning how to focus on something past the first sign of uncomfortableness is a crucial skill for all of this.
I also built a productivity system around the concept of modular leverage as opposed to using the same tools every time.
But it turns out there are whole careers and things that can be done at/for work that are a better/worse fit for just about everybody. The worse-fit items are natural to procrastinate, no matter how many productivity methods you have. So at some point it's important to be able to set a boundary and loudly proclaim, "this isn't working."
(Also I got kind of upset about the word procrastination itself. There are often other words which fit better and help to understand and solve the problem faster.)
The "unschedule" in particular has so many genius pieces:
- Schedule your fun FIRST, so you know you'll survive your week.
- Set a schedule for your whole week so you know how much time you have, and you can set your expectations lower (thus lowering your guilt!)
- Eventually, you start to do this for the month, year etc. Totally changes your emotions about your time.
You have to understand yourself and understand your motivations before you can even begin tackling this problem.
Some of the techniques I use to deal with ADHD would be not only unhelpful, but actively harmful for other people: I struggle heavily with time blindness, so "stop looking at the clock" is terrible advice for me, I have gotten large improvements out of heavily utilizing timers, getting a watch that beeps every hour, setting tons of alarms, etc... For other people that can be really harmful, it can be something that is constantly interrupting you and removing you from flow. Having a buzzer go off on your wrist every 4 minutes while you cook is genuinely bad advice for some people.
Even motivation/anxiety plays into this. One big breakthrough for me was finding out that I don't get motivated by rewards -- telling myself "you can have some ice cream when you're done with cleaning" is not going to make me more likely to clean. I've met other people who are the complete opposite, and they are highly motivated by getting those positive feelings when a task gets done. They feel good after they do things, and I don't.
So beyond very general tips like "find out what motivates you", trying to figure out universal strategies is unhelpful; especially when you find out that it's not just reward structures or stress triggers that differ between different people, it's how they respond to rewards and stress in the first place.
This article is really broad, to the point of being almost useless and containing very little actionable advice -- but it's still not broad enough to avoid making some generalizations that aren't universally true. The article ends by saying, "when things are easy your mind tends to those first then anything else." This is just not true for someone who has my particular brand of ADHD, I gravitate towards difficult tasks and lose interest in them once they become easy.
Figuring out how to stop procrastination is very hard, and I spent a long time thinking I could come up with universal rules, and I don't think that's possible any more. There are no quick tips for overcoming procrastination that don't start with doing a lot of introspection into how your own brain works -- and I think that's true regardless of whether you are or aren't neurotypical.
To people who are reading these articles and getting frustrated, it's because they're not useful: they're not scientific and they're not individualized and they're never going to be able to do anything other than give you more ideas about other things you can personally try and evaluate to see if they address your problems -- because you don't know how much you do or don't overlap with author's target audience.
Instead, what you want to do is ask much more targeted questions:
----
- Are you aware of the passage of time?
- How easily are you distracted?
- Do you naturally jump between tasks or do you naturally stay on one task until it's completed? Is it easier for you to start a task than to finish it?
- Are you a perfectionist, or do you naturally want to leave tasks when they're "good enough"?
- What types of tasks do you gravitate towards and enjoy?
- Do you suffer from anxiety, or alternatively do you find that you have trouble internalizing risk?
- How are you motivated (not what motivates you)?
- Do you prefer hard problems or easy ones?
- Do you prefer novelty or routine? Does that preference change depending on your circumstances?
- Do schedules cause you stress?
As well as physical questions like:
- How much sleep are you getting a night?
- What are you eating?
- How stressful is your day-to-day life?
- How much time do you spend around other people?
- What external stimuli do you have?
And so on and so on.
And as you start to answer those questions, then you can start to look for strategies that specifically address your problems. You can start asking for advice online about how to solve specific issues.
But without that kind of background, it's like writing an article that gives tips on how to write good code without asking anything about what languages you're working with or what the context is or what problems your applications are trying to solve or how many people are working on the same codebase.
People experiment until they find techniques that work for them, and when they do their takeaway is that they finally found the magic solution that everyone else should follow. Usually, they're wrong.
"Procrastinate later — there's always tomorrow!"