The Dangers of Productive Procrastination | Hacker News Reader

The Dangers of Productive Procrastination

blog.shipify.me

31 pointsktrgardiner12 comments

Unless the thing I "should" be doing is immediately necessary or massively more important than the secondary thing I end up doing I'm generally pretty happy to follow my motivation around.

I normally seem to get back to the important thing when its deadline or reason for happening actually becomes so important that it really needs to be a focus.

It might be the issue isn't that you're focussing on the wrong thing, it's that you stop after having done the first thing. When the code based work starts closing in on me I start picking targets of what I will do before I'm allowed to sleep. I can do as many other things as I want, but that has to be done. I also seem to focus better on boring tasks when I'm tired. It mostly works.

That was a rather useless blog post. As a lifelong procrastinator, I was hoping for solutions, not a description of the problem...

My solution to this problem is to track everything I do. I use RescueTime and Toggl. Rescue time for automatic background tracking, and Toggl for tracking projects and tasks. I review my time sheet weekly and if I see a project or minor things take up a large portion of my time, I'll actively reduce that the next week and focus more on things that got neglected this week.

Before I started doing this, I often got distracted by doing productive stuff, i.e watching video tutorials, listening to podcasts or reading blogs, instead of getting down to coding the project. You gotta find a balance, monitor it and stick to it.

Speak for yourself. I didn't find it useless at all.

Knowing is half the battle.

I have found myself doing this quite often, according to a friend of mine who is a doctor it could be yet another sign of ADD.

I would call it more like N.A.D.D(http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2003/07/10/nadd.html). I have seen ADD kids(with experiments being run on them) and realized calling myself ADD is an exaggeration.

Cleaning the room! Been there. I think another major productive distraction is trying to stay updated with everything about the startup world. Reading hacker news. Reading about the new startups in 500startups. Checking out my StartupAdvice list on twitter. What's saying Mark Suster today? New blog post? What about Brad Feld? Anything new with YC, what is PG posting today? So much information :):)

I mean all this information is incredibly valuable don't get me wrong. But still is important to know when to step back and stop reading about other startups and what is the right way to do things, because otherwise nothing would get done.

Information and the greed to soak up more... that has been my biggest distraction so far... working on fixing it.but it's rather hard to observe the subtle difference between productivity vs reading articles from YN/LinkedIn

Subtle? Unless your title is "Social Media Expert" the difference should not be subtle.

I wish I would clean my apartment when procrastinating. Instead, I procrastinate by coding (for fun, not work). That's it! I'm going to clean my apartment... tomorrow... or maybe the day after...

When I read all these procrastination thoughts in HN, I sometimes feel that we should run a "Why do I put it off ?" thread once in HN where everyone answer for themselves and not for others.

AKA "avoidance behavior."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com