Good and Bad Procrastination (2005) | Hacker News Reader

Good and Bad Procrastination (2005)

paulgraham.com

93 pointsmmphosis41 comments

I find this to be the absolute hardest part of living with someone. You’re at the mercy of their ability to interrupt you and I find it incredibly demoralizing.

Seems like a communication issue though, just explain to them how important it is for you to focus uninterrupted and hopefully they'll respect you.

Generally, they won't respect you, sometimes feeling entitled to attention and other times forgetting you hoped for quiet coherence.

In general I agree, but if your partner isn’t used to that type of work they don’t really get it. Nor do they understand how a simple question can ruin an entire train of thought.

edit: In explaining this to my girlfriend, I showed her this comic: https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt... Didn’t make any sense to her. And even after talking about this she doesn’t get that “just coming in for a kiss” is the same thing. Like I don’t want to come across as an asshole, but that’s what it looks like from the outside.

Programming is really weird like that. I feel like I get practically nothing done 80% of the time, but the 20% where I'm in a flow state and going ham makes up for it. You don't want to be disturbed at all when you're in that productive time.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one that experiences this.

I've found that I have gotten better at this as I've gotten older. it does get easier.

I’ve been forced to learn how to deal with “DAAAAAAADDY!” whatever I’m doing, so now I try to do as little loading of state into my head as possible.

Part of that is meticulous notes on what I’m currently doing and planning to do, lots of “todo” comments and comments in general, etc.

The other part is just learning to live with interruptions through experience.

Some people might not have the same success, your mileage may vary.

I've got a set of sand timers (1 to 30 min) to handle such interruptions. Depending on how long it'll take me to finish what I'm working on, I'll just use one of those timers as currency to buy me the couple minutes I need to git commit my way out.

Start crying every time you get interrupted

You develop a parallel, compartmentalized sub-personality that makes eye contact, smiles, and poses for a kiss, while the rest of your brain keeps thinking.

That's how I deal with this. Seems to work. The wife is happy for the little bits of passing contact, while she remarks later how "out there somewhere" I've been all day. And then I summarize what I've been thinking about and genuinely listen and connect for our dedicated together-time.

What if you tried to explain it like it's similar to air traffic control. You wouldn't interrupt an air traffic controller would you?

This isn’t a place for relationship advice, but there must be dozens of things she won’t understand, and same from the other side: you can’t deeply understand everything that matters to her, you’d need to basically relive her life in her shoes.

There’s a point where you dont’ get it, but just follow what the other side is requesting, even if it doesn’t seem to make sense to you.

I showed mine this and she understood right away haha

https://youtu.be/HLI7MLZYPBg

> I showed her this comic: [...] Didn’t make any sense to her

Ask her to imagine that her job is to do multiplication problems involving not-even-large (three digits, let's say) numbers without writing down any of the steps (so, mental math). She should be able to recognize that this is doable, but with a higher-than-average amount of concentration to keep track of the intermediate values, and that any breaks in concentration will very likely result in having to start over. Now tell her to imagine what "starting over" would mean if there were very large numbers involved, and lots of them.

Alternatively, you can relate it to an orgasm. Suppose she lays down to masturbate, and if she were allowed to continue without interruption it will take her <however long>. Let's say this time it's 7 minutes. Instead, though, at 6 and a half minutes in, someone rings the doorbell, and it's something where she has to stop and answer, but she can continue once the interruption is taken care of. So she was what would have been 30 seconds away before being interrupted. Ask her: does that mean she can just lay back down, pick up where she left off, and then 30 seconds later, boom, orgasm?

Another thing you could do is show her a piece of legislation and point out all the nested conditions. Have her read it to evaluate whether some use case is/isn't prohibited/punishable/protected/etc., forcing her to keep track of what it's saying to understand whether some condition holds at any given point.

Approach #4: just ask her if she's ever been out somewhere with a long stretch of idle time (example: at a laundromat waiting for her clothes to dry, or having lunch) and pulled out a book to start reading, but someone in the vicinity (who she's less interested in talking to than reading) tries to make conversation. They chat for a few minutes and then stop, and then when she reaches the next page, the other person says something else, so then they chat for a minute or so and then stop, and then a minute or two later the other person says something else, etc.

Great analogies, thank you! The first one in particular seems like a particularly apt one.

What would you say to her about this if the most important thing was the long-term health of the relationship?

Healthy relationships rely on mutual trust and mutual understanding.

If you are on this site, I imagine that your ability to be fully present in your job as you practice your craft is important to you. If you're talking about your girlfriend, I imagine that your ability to not be worrying about project timeline delays outside of work hours so you can be fully present with her outside of work hours is important to both of you. I imagine that it is important for you to have a relationship where you trust her to understand you and you trust her not to jump to a conclusion that you are an asshole.

I imagine those things are more important to you than the awkwardness, discomfort, and risk that comes with asking her to have a real serious conversation where you start by saying the things that matter to you.

Well, Feynman tried that and failed.

"Reportedly, Feynman’s ex alleged that he didn’t just ignore her when he felt she interrupted him—he “flew into a violent rage,” and “choked her, threw pieces of bric-a-brac about and smashed the furniture."

I find myself thinking just what you wrote every day of my married existence: it's unnatural to be in a state of pending interruption at all times.

A significant portion of life, irrespective of marital status, is predicated by a state of pending interruption.

Death being the most obvious.

> it's unnatural to be in a state of pending interruption at all times.

I'd think the opposite is true. Interruption is natural, and prolonged sedentary focus is a human invention.

> I'd think the opposite is true. Interruption is natural, and prolonged sedentary focus is a human invention.

Have you never spent an entire day in the wilderness? IME it's usually devoid of interruption, unless it's a popular spot where other people show up.

The modern wilderness where almost all animals have died, with an outstanding bias to large animals and predators?

Not sure it is representative of pre-Industrial age wilderness if I'm honest

It's very natural to the point of being the default of human experience. Being able to expect to not be interrupted is unnatural.

I’d agree with others that solitude isn’t natural, but if you care about your work it’s kind of necessary. I find myself wishing I hadn’t moved in with my partner for this reason. But it’s hard to disengage from that choice once it’s been made.

This is why I loathe interacting with my mother. Love her but could never have her live with me. She had a stroke and doesn't realize she calls at the wrong times during business hours and how she's inconsiderate. Plus, her personality changed and she only brings perfunctory, negative, demanding, and judgmental interactions out-of-the-blue. Can't really talk to her about anything because her mental capacity isn't great, she lost her sense of humor, and she has a difficult time speaking.

I'm sorry to hear that.

Don't have kids.

The benefit of being male is that I thankfully can defer this choice indefinitely, but man, what a trade off (especially as I’d like to have kids for my mom’s sake, and she’s not getting any younger).

> The benefit of being male is that I thankfully can defer this choice indefinitely

Men don't have a sharp fertility cliff, but paternal age isn’t irrelevant to reproduction, either.

Taking care of the kids and sharing moments with them won't be easier when you grow older though, on the contrary. Fortunately that part is only 30 years long.

Agreed. As I mentioned there’s the additional side of having kids soon enough such that my mother is young enough to enjoy them as well.

Bank swimmers before 40. Get snipped. Your bank account and future offspring (should you choose) will thank you. Sperm quality declines with age and resulting offspring wouldn't necessarily be as healthy. Reminds me, I'm stepping away from the computer and going out. It's ACL.

Don’t have kids for anyone’s sake than your own. In the hard times you are better off if there’s no one else to blame.

After a number of frustrating episodes for my wife and I, we came up with a plan. At my home office desk, I've got a 5x7 index card with a big red dot on one side and a big green dot on the other, which I use to communicate whether I'm interruptible. When green is showing, she's free to chime in about any random thing. When red is showing, it needs to be some kind of emergency. This has help us maintain domestic peace.

The shape and color of the dots borrowed from Brazilian steak houses where they have markers used to indicate whether the people serving various cuts of meat should stop by your table.

Reminds me of the „On air“ signs radio stations have on the wall to ask for silence.

It is worth having a system like this. It is also worth having a shared understanding of what constitutes an emergency.

I made a home dashboard to display on the TV, which integrated with Toggl (time tracker extension) when my partner and I were living together: https://github.com/HartS/toggl-home-dashboard

Surprisingly, a feature to just "display a light when you're working" isn't super common.

Since it was just a keyboard shortcut to start the timer (I was also contracting at the time), this ensured my partner could see I was working easily without having to ask me :)

(apologies for poor code quality, this was hacked together extremely quickly... behind on tasks and needed a productivity boost, etc.)

These past few months, I have been slowly working through the audiobook version of Steven Strogatz' Infinite Powers. The work is enjoyable exactly because there's a bit of effort made to breathe life into the names everyone remembers. For example, Strogatz describes Archimedes as being so "neglectful of his person" that he had to be dragged to the bath; the irony being that one of the most famous anecdotes about him was a discovery he figured out in the bath. This is extra delightful to me since the beginning of my career was spent supporting these absent-minded professor types. I clearly remember realising that the path ahead of me was not going to result in some obvious legacy, despite whatever ambitions I had, but I could fix Dr Gell-Mann's printer. The working printer seemed to make him very happy, and I decided that was good enough. In 250 BC, someone just like me made sure Archimedes was clean and fed.

This post is pretty old, and I'm curious why it's been put up here today and what sort of conversation mmphosis was hoping for. To me, it reads as a half-considered opinion. Could it be that the siren song of ambition and personal legacy is a nice little perk if you can afford it? Is there a counter argument to be made that if you can't keep your personal shit together, you obviously lack the discipline required to turn those deep-thinky thoughts into a legacy? Are we taking digs at how the progress 2-3 productive coders make in the early, dark hours of a startup loses steam as it tries to scale? Anyone of these conversations overlooks a pretty crucial idea, which is potentially a more productive conversation in itself: how do we find and conscript those people who will fix our printers, run our errands, and generally work to move objects out of our way while we follow our delight? Do we have to occasionally treat their fiddly petitions for reassurance with respect, as a sort of payment for their efforts or do we simply assume that being around greatness is enough?

Being interrupted is a killer and that's why I absolutely hate open-plan offices, cubicle hells, or what ever those farms are called. But self-induced "interrupts" are a completely different story for me...

I used to fear my tendency to procrastinate. I looked at people that were able to just sit down and start typing. I tried to do the same, but it was torture to stare at a blank screen. Whatever method I tried to be productive, I always slipped to procrastination. Finally I realized that what I was doing, was simply letting my subconscious to do the work. When I understood that, everything got a lot easier. No more guilt.

So, when PG writes:

> Someone who has decided to write a novel, for example, will suddenly find that the house needs cleaning. People who fail to write novels don't do it by sitting in front of a blank page for days without writing anything. They do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need for their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email. "I don't have time to work," they say. And they don't; they've made sure of that.

Personally, I am very much opposite of that. I do both writing and coding and with both activities I first do some research or other base work and the I let myself procrastinate guilt-free. I will clean up the house, empty the dishwasher, walk the dog. Go to the grocery store or solve some simple puzzles. Usually these are stuff that don't really require deep thinking or take up too much time. Then, when I get this "feeling" (inspiration?) - even in the middle of my procrastination - I will sit down and type out the work. Then, rinse and repeat. And somehow I always seem to hit the deadline. Although, I have to admit, I have never tried to write a full novel.

Part of the issue with this "ignore errands to focus on important things" argument is that often times ignoring errands makes it harder to focus on important things. Kinda hard to get into a flow state when you're homeless and starving, for example, so you're inevitably going to need to do at least what's necessary to not be homeless and starving. That is: while you'll very likely never be memorialized for all those reports you generated or whatever as some faceless cog in a corporate machine, you still need to do them - or else you'll be in an even worse position to do the things for which you actually would be memorialized.

(At least until we achieve fully automated luxury gay space communism, but in the meantime we're subject to the material conditions in which we live - and those conditions, at least for those of us in the working class, currently necessitate doing work which is unimportant in the grand scheme of things but pays us money with which we support our existences)

There's also the issue of importance being arbitrary and relative. For example, I created a scripting language for Erlang/OTP applications. If you're looking for a scripting language for your Erlang/OTP applications (and you happen to think that Tcl's syntax is the best thing since sliced bread, and can tolerate the fact that my work is very unfinished), that might be very important to you. To the vast majority who don't know what the actual fuck "scripting language", "Erlang", "OTP", and/or "application" mean, that's almost certainly entirely unimportant to them. What's (possibly, at risk of over-inflating my ego) revolutionary in my niche is entirely irrelevant to how nearly everyone around me will know me beyond "that YellowApple guy was pretty good with computers". Is that niche accomplishment really more important than how I treat those around me? Would I rather be remembered as "some reclusive asshole who was smart with computers" or "a beloved friend who put others before himself"? The example about writing letters is perfect; I procrastinate on responding to texts/calls/etc. from friends and family all the time, and I absolutely hate myself for it because I do love my friends and family and it hurts me to know that I'm hurting them by being an unreliable shut-in.

For some of us - hell, probably most of us - the "biggest thing" on which we can work is being the best human we can be to those around us. It's easy to forget that in a ruthlessly capitalist society like the one in which I and most other folks live (in general, let alone the subset reading Paul Graham's blog posts). Sometimes being that best human means sacrificing personal relationships for some revolutionary thing that'll improve the lives of hundreds or thousands or millions or even billions of people. Other times it means forgiving interruptions by loved ones, and treasuring those human connections over whatever mental state you just lost. Sometimes that might even mean figuring out how to reconcile the two, e.g. by writing down your thoughts as they occur so that interruptions by loved ones are less catastrophic to your workflow. What matters is whether what we do maximizes the positive impact on the world around us, and for most of us that maximization is realistically more likely to happen by supporting those around us and fostering mutually-healthy human relationships than discarding them in favor of self-important endeavors.

Put more succinctly: determining whether procrastination is "good" or "bad" is doomed to inaccuracy if we're unable to examine ourselves from the outside-in and put our own notions of what's important into perspective - and irrelevant if we're unable to fulfill the "unimportant" dependencies of human existence necessary to accomplish those important things.

----

"Ye are the light of the world, a city set upon a mount is not able to be hid; nor do they light a lamp, and put it under the measure, but on the lamp-stand, and it shineth to all those in the house; so let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works, and may glorify your Father who [is] in the heavens." -- Matthew 5:14-16, YLT

I know not everyone here puts much stock into Bible quotes, but this one comes to mind after reading the essay and writing out my thoughts above. The important things (good works) are those which positively impact (shine light before) as many as possible, to as high of a degree as possible. You don't need to believe in some sky wizard to see the value of being remembered as a good person who left the world better than one found it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com