Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate | Hacker News Reader

Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

caycon.com

70 pointsborisfowler27 comments

They forgot #7: Do not read articles of the form "n ways to do X".

Also enable noprocrast on Hacker News, and use a time-tracking tool like RescueTime.

noprocast doesn't work for me. I have Hacker News added to my "Top Sites" and Safari likes to refresh those every so often.

When I did have it enabled I was locked out more often than not making it particularly useless for me. What I have found is that I have started finding a lot of the articles that make the frontpage are boring and I have naturally started visiting less and less.

That's funny, I've had the opposite experience with the lockout. I figure that if I set the refresh to be reasonably low, it turns into more of an odds thing whether or not I can read HN. And, after a while, I've stopped needing discipline to come looking here.

I like Marc Andreessen's post on productivity, especially "structured procrastination" where procrastination is actually encouraged (there's a good chance that the things you procrastinate on aren't all that important).

http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-pers...

I still believe in Merlin Mann's "First, care."

http://www.43folders.com/2010/02/05/first-care

All these little tips and tricks are fine. But they're usually treating the symptoms rather than examining the cause.

For as long as you know in your heart that what you're making or doing matters, and, consequently, for as long as you accept and embrace the immutable laws of scarcity, your options for maintaining focus will, like Frank's perfect answer, remain stunningly obvious.

Those are very true observations, but the problem is, how do you care? We're told things like, "do what you love," and " follow your passions," but that's just not realistic in an adult, professional world. Writing code is awesome for the first 10% of a project. After that, it usually becomes a grind to complete all the uninteresting things.

I am working on a new way to fight procrastination: http://asaclock.com

It is an elite anti-procrastination community for startup single founders and people working on side projects.

I absolutely love the first point that they make to not start out with a regular routine of reading news or checking your email because I think many people (including myself) do it as a habit and then get completely sidetracked from it (especially email) leaving everything else on a side-burner until later. I didn't even think about this point until reading this. If you do something you dont want to do first you will have more motivation to get it done so that you can get back to your regular routine. Since people are creatures of habit its quite a big motivator.

#7 Don't write a blog post about ways to not procrastinate

http://xkcd.com/874/

My favorite way to procrastinate is to read online article about procrastination. I also bought a book about it, one of the few I never finished. If you procrastinate too much there is usually a reason for it, try to find out why, and what you can do about it. For me it is ambitious project that are ill defined. Breaking them in smaller task that can become daily achievements helps a lot.

One Noble prize given for the research that said best way to achieve your goals is by working on a goal to procrastinate even higher goal.

Secondly, I remember reading a research paper that said, whenever you have a task at hand which you want to procrastinate at least give it a start. Urge for postponing the task goes seriously down once you at least start doing it.

7. Effective stress management.

Stress causes procrastination. Reduce stress to procrastinate less!

It seems like this is what the author was trying to get at. My favorite stress management methods: exercise, meditate, socialize.

Also, the first thing you do each day should be something low stress, achievable and important. ...gets you off on the right foot.

One of the best ways I've found is to just start it! Tell yourself to just force out 10 minutes of whatever it is you're putting off. Once you've started, you'll want to see it through as much as you can.

There's proven theory behind why that method works... something about unfinished jobs fatiguing the mind.

The "startup kind of person" is ambitious so I'm not sure how many people that applies to.

An ambitious procrastinator...is that an oxymoron?

Maybe you don't like being a procrastinator and you have yet to find a way to help it. Like people with ADHD, in which case it's likely that you got a bad hand dealt to you by genetics.

No...many ambitious people are also perfectionists, and perfectionists are often horrible procrastinators as they wait for things to line up perfectly or wait to refine it one more time before releasing, putting off the next phase over and over.

Also, one very dangerous form of procrastination is doing real work...just work that is less important than what you should be doing. Paul Graham touches on this at http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

Ambitious people can often times be the worst procrastinators because they can have an over inflated idea of what they can get done in a given day putting too much on their plate and thus leaving off many things for later days (often times the things they dread most which keep getting put off)...

The irony of seeing this link on HN nearly killed me.

Article added to instapaper...

Looks like an insightful article. I'll read it later.

I'll read this later.

Beat me to it!

7. Always have something worse to do. It's amazing how much you'll get done trying to avoid that one thing you're really, really dreading.

Sometimes I will actually clean stuff just to avoid working on something I hate more, and it's actually almost fun. So this is definitely true from my experience.

It's also amazing what you'll get done when the power is out or you don't have internet, but that's almost impossible for me nowadays thanks to my smartphone.

Reminds me of this well-written article/confession: http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-ProcrastinateStill/93959

When I was still in college, nothing got me more motivated to clean my apartment than having that big project that I needed to work on.

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