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Comment by sparks1970 | Hacker News Reader

sparks1970·

Try breaking it up into small steps. I procrastinate about doing my tax return all year but I "tricked" myself into doing it earlier this year by telling myself "I'm not doing the tax return now, all I'm doing is finding my employment records."

Finding those records was easy, energized by that easy win I picked another easy task, "I'll get together my bank interest statements" and in a couple of hours I was done.

Maybe this could work for you.

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This is what helps me the most. I like to break down any large/daunting tasks into a bunch of small milestones. It makes it much easier to know where to start. You also feel like you have completed something and you have a defined place where you can take a break or pick up later.

I also find the actual task of breaking something large down into small pieces gets me thinking about the actual task rather than the abstract "big task" and gets me more motivated. Think of it like brain storming.

Exactly this. Do something small. Tell yourself I'm just going to do this one small thing and then I will allow myself a break. Rinse and Repeat.

yep. But the thing is, realize that you can't trick yourself. you need to be allowing yourself to actually only do that. So, instead, think of it like this: its fairly easy to collect my various tax docs, and if I can't find a specific thing, then I have something specific to investigate instead of a nebulous fear.

I think a lot of procrastination is breaking down a large, nebulous task into a loop of investigate and then resolve until the task is complete, but our brains naturally tell us to avoid this kind of thing, its riskier to go after the food that you really don't know how to acquire and takes a lot of investigation than the food that you've been able to acquire easily in the past

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