Good and Bad Procrastination (2005) | Hacker News Reader

Good and Bad Procrastination (2005)

paulgraham.com

71 pointsphgn11 comments

Super insightful article. Unfortunately, I think I might be a type A procrastinator. Over the last couple of year, I've found it especially hard to make any meaningful progress any of my side-projects/ideas. Has anyone else been in the same boat? Did you get yourself unstuck? If so, how did you do it?

Training myself, raising a watchdog in my head that periodically asks "is this useful?". Whenever I find myself refreshing some social medium like hn, I think "is this useful?" No, I respond, and I close the tab. I'll just force myself to read a bit about something, or at least alt tab to the editor, or what have you. Sometimes progress is agonizingly slow. But it's progress, and not a full day wasted on the net.

It helps to have a to-do list at hand with small, clearly defined, reachable goals that I can then immediately start work on, such as "read 5 pages of book X" or "finish writing the prettyPrintFizzBuzz function".

It is worth adding "Is this fulfilling?" or something similar as a second question. Going for a walk with friends is hard to justify as "useful" per se...but it is fulfilling and necessary to a good life.

I suppose it depends on your definition of "useful". I'd say going for a walk with friends is useful, because it boosts my mood and strengthens interpersonal relations, allows you to get a second opinion on things, etc.

But going on a gaming streak might be really fullfilling if the game is good and the players are fun. But it's not useful when you actually need to submit an essay due 2 hours ago.

I guess deep in our brains there is some sort of proto-word, from before we had language, that allows us to realize whether what we are doing is "good" or not. I think we often feel guilty when procrastinating because we are willfully going against that proto-good. But my point is to let plenty conscious, mindfull moments surface where you honestly evaluate what you are doing against that good. And to actually kind of discover what that "good" means for you.

I think your advice is helpful because it prevents the thought of, “ok, today is shot. I’ll keep wasting time now but buckle down tomorrow.”

Every moment you thwart procrastination is a win.

This seems to be the opposite advice from what pg is talking about. The very last paragraph closes saying don't worry about the todo just follow your muse.

If you are forcing yourself that much to get it done maybe it's not the right thing to be working on anyway?

Living a life where you are always able to work on "the right thing" is a mostly unattainable privilege. Sometimes, stuff just needs to be done.

There may be types of work that can only be done in long, uninterrupted stretches, when inspiration hits, rather than dutifully in scheduled little slices. Empirically it seems to be so. When I think of the people I know who've done great things, I don't imagine them dutifully crossing items off to-do lists. I imagine them sneaking off to work on some new idea.

Conversely, forcing someone to perform errands synchronously is bound to limit their productivity. The cost of an interruption is not just the time it takes, but that it breaks the time on either side in half. You probably only have to interrupt someone a couple times a day before they're unable to work on hard problems at all.

That's why Scrum is so damaging to productivity and software quality.

Mini-waterfall or Shape Up method gives developers time to think and work on a problem in uninterrupted 6-week slices. All the reactive work (like bug fixing, support or maintenance) is either postponed or handled by someone else / dedicated team.

Yeah, though type C procrastination is also a recipe for being an awful roommate or partner or friend. I would say I'm a lot less concerned with my obituary than I am with the quality of my life and relationships.

I've been working on this lately and I must say this is the first time I've seen "working on the highest priority items at the expense of lower priority items" framed as procrastination. In the literature it's always (that I've seen) the opposite- and that's the view I have.

Type C isn't a procrastinator- it's someone who practices good time management.

Now, maybe the way the person assigns priorities is wholly selfish. Maybe they assign the highest priorities to things that benefit themselves the most, and don't tend to think that things that benefit others deserve their effort as much.

But that's a different trait from procrastination.

Those people aren't procrastinators. They're assholes.

I think I might be a type B procrastinator in my personal life and a type C procrastinator at work.

I have a Trello board for my personal projects that I started at the beginning of the year. There's a list of features that I would get real utility from in one column. In the Done column are mostly tech things that have dubious value. I've been prioritizing unimportant tasks.

At work, I'll often be assigned some task that I view as unnecessary or complicated. I procrastinate on that while working on simpler things that are immediately useful. This leads to some friction since assigned tasks slip and it appears that I'm working on the wrong things.

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