How to do the thing you've been avoiding
jasonfeifer.beehiiv.com
jasonfeifer.beehiiv.com
So one way to jump that hurdle is consider the consequences of not doing it, and how that makes me feel. For example, learning French. I would like to speak French. The consequence of not putting in the hours conjugating verbs means I will not be able to speak French. That makes me sad. I consider that sadness, and conclude I would prefer to spend the next hour reinforcing my knowledge of the passe compose of avoir. That is better than feeling sad.
Some consequences are not obvious, but cumulative. I don't really want to go to the stand-up meeting. What happens if I don't go today? Probably not much. But what happens if I don't go for the rest of the week, or my attendance is patchy? It'll be noticed, and I'll have to explain why I am not on the calls. The thought of the explanation makes me uncomfortable, more uncomfortable than going to the calls. Therefore I go to the calls.
Where this technique is powerful is that it enables me to filter out those activities where there is no obvious consequence of not doing the thing, which means the activities that remain on my daily list are generally pretty important.
Actually I can’t speak or write it fully, but I can understand you for the most part. I didn’t reach that B1-2 proficiency because I got hired around that time.
I got into relearning French during the pandemic. I did learn it at school (age 11-16) but that was well over 20 years ago.
(BTW awesome French, no weird sentence structure or obvious mistake apart from the missing accent on "est à 2h")
Pour l’instant, je suis content de lire des livres et d’écouter des podcasts.
Uh oh!
"Cessez d'écouter des “podcasts”, préférez l'audio à la demande" https://actualitte.com/article/7421/distribution/cessez-d-ec...
I don't speak French but I find the official aversion to anglicisms endearing and amusing.
Please do not think that French is only in France. We use words here that french people won't understand and they do the same. And the aversion to anglicisms varies a lot depending on the person (ie "footing", a non-existing word in english in the sense used, is used in France to say "jogging").
Maybe just language centers or local people offering classes might be your best bet. Maybe an Italian aficionado can chip in on this one.
Negative consequences are one important class of reasons not to do things. Positive consequences exist, too.
Sorry if this is annoying. I hope it might help anyone that is down this path.
But it's not better than catching up on sleep, netflix and/or a great meal with a fantastic conversational partner.
> The thought of the explanation makes me uncomfortable, more uncomfortable than going to the calls. Therefore I go to the calls.
My mind would answer: "I'll take the 10min akward explanation for 5 missed meetings mr Gibbins. No problem."
Why not go to the calls because it is your duty? If nothing else, it makes you dependable and you can be proud of your virtuous follow-through.
Doing things only to prevent the penalty feels like a negative way of looking at things and, for my monkey mind, one that is ultimately doomed to fail. Instead of aiming for the stars, my mind just gets better at dealing with the penalties. It might just be me though.
There's not a lot of pleasure of doing those things if your mind is consumed by the fact you're behind in something else.
You're probably high on conscientiousness if that's the case though. In which case procrastination is not something you are allowed to talk about because you literally don't know what it is.
Joking of course, but I have quite a few people who score high on conscientiousness around me. I myself am not such a person. I say they have absolutely no idea what procrastionation even means. Being a day late on a minor thing will be an existential threat to them. It is amazing and I watch them as I watch magnificent wildlife. Full of awe and wonder.
1. Denial of the importance or urgency of the task, and denial of my future self also lacking desire and willpower to complete said task in the future.
2. Anger that I cannot magically will myself into not procrastinating, or anger that I even have to do the task in the first place.
3. Bargaining how far back I can push a task back a.k.a. "I'll have plenty of time to do it tomorrow."
4. Depression because I always mismanage my time, overestimate my future abilities, and seem to never learn from the past -- "why do I always do this to myself?"
5. Acceptance that I am at the end of my rope, and I have to do the task now or I will face some kind of consequences far worse than actually doing the task itself.
However some things are generally pretty awful (such as standups) and don't really have a positive outcome that's easy to focus on and identify as a reward - not in my place of work anyway, YMMV!
So yes, in this case I could go because it's my duty (and try to feel proud of that!) but arguably forcing myself to turn up by focusing on what happens if I don't is also pretty effective, and is basically just like jump-starting a car - as other commenters have noted, merely beginning the undesirable thing is the biggest hurdle.
All this makes me wonder about the art of negotiating.. at the existential level. You only have to do things you didn't refuse in a way (figure of speech). Too often I said yes without asking more details, or said yes to things I didn't really like..
This filtering is important. Doing X with a block of time means not doing Y, or Z, or any of A through W. I can do anything with this next minute, but that means that I am not doing all the other things with that minute.
So there are a pile of things that I "should" do that I am not doing. Which ones should I get to (even if that takes finding a way to defeat my avoidance), and which ones do I not need to get to, ever? In fact, which ones should I avoid, because they're going to take the time that should go to other things? I need some way to think about those questions.
So I prefer to focus on positive rewards for doing things instead of the consequences of avoiding them. And build from there.
and maybe it's also eh, it's counterproductive, but maybe it's fine to just have those curiosities - and have them just be that. even if it's kinda 'non-committal' - maybe that's just kinda the dynamic for it, and that's alright. maybe some knowledge of language is just fine, and it's gonna be enough for watching or chatting, and it could be just those little bits of 'knowledge gain' where you look something up (like a word, definition, etc.) as you come across it, and amass some knowledge that way. this - does not help with 'how to do the thing', but hey - maybe there's also isn't really a need to beat yourself down over it either, over some 'thing about it you don't really want to do' when maybe it's just fine without it. (cause maybe that thing could be a buzzkiller that sucks the joy out of it, only further deterring you from it)
Just spend that one hour right now.
It's the only thing that ever helped me with these blocking situations. Afterwards I'm usually warmed up and curious.
Thanks for reminding me, because I'll only feel the whole overwhelming abstract thing instead if the situation has gotten really bad.
But I get your point. I wanted to cite the original comment, though. It's true that the entry point has to be chosen according to the individual and the task at hand... as long as that's not something that has to be chosen so wisely that I should take time to reason about first :)
I'd think the definitions seem similar. The avoidance strategies usually have slightly different hotspots, though.
What I find useful is the vomit writing technique. I will just drag myself to get started no matter how horrible the work I am doing in the beginning. But once I started doing, I won't feel so bad. This basically solved my problem.
I just need to start doing and do a shit job, then improve it to be less shitty.
Getting rid of what, exactly? The pressure? (Currently procrastinating by the way, on very important things that I keep delaying for some unexplained reason.)
Modern life indeed.
For instance, if you have problems submitting your timesheets on time, it could be due to the fact that you're worried about putting too many hours on the budget. If you remove the worry about putting too many hours on the budget, then you might find yourself doing your timesheets on time.
The answer to your question lies in the "unexplained reason" which can actually be explained, that's the hard part.
Having struggled with this for almost 20 years now, with little to show for it, I'd say "'unexplained reason' can actually be explained" seems to belong to the same category as "P != NP can actually be proven". Good luck and Godspeed.
Maybe I'm more of a clinical case, but for me, whatever I think the source of anxiety is in any given scenario, it's never that. I can eliminate potential sources one by one, dig in recursively, but it only provides very short-lived feelings of relief, lasting seconds to minutes, before anxiety restarts. To make matters worse, the more I spend time on such investigations, the more anxious I get about not working on the actual thing I wanted/was supposed to.
The most accurate model/explanation I have for this is: anxiety always comes, unconditionally; any "reason" behind it is just desperate post-hoc rationalization. The only reliable defense I know of is to be doing something so interesting or stimulating that it captures all of the brain's compute and starves the "anxiety process" entirely. Of course, that process will restart as soon as resources for it become available.
> For instance, if you have problems submitting your timesheets on time, it could be due to the fact that you're worried about putting too many hours on the budget. If you remove the worry about putting too many hours on the budget, then you might find yourself doing your timesheets on time.
I have problems submitting my timesheets on time. It's mostly because it's a boring, mind-dumbing chore, done using a GUI designed to prove that evil exists in this world. Like all modern timesheet tools, this one resists automation too. It's an annoyance that distracts me from the actual work I'm already behind on thanks to anxiety, and thus compounding the latter.
Yes, the task takes maybe 5 minutes. Would, if I could focus. But my focus window for mind-dumbingly boring tasks and routines is around 30 seconds; anything more than that requires ongoing, conscious effort. In reality, those 5 minutes usually turn into one hour, by the end of which I'm all dripping from stress-induced sweating.
I mean, I could've done my timesheets for the last two weeks four times over, in the time it took me to write this comment. Yet somehow, this comment is up, and the timesheets are not.
1) As I got used to finally being able to decide to do something, and then actually follow through without first having to win a mini-boss fight in my head, my perception of whole classes of tasks shifted - things I assumed were hard, or instinctively avoided, became things I knew I could do. This is good and how it should be, but what I didn't realize is that this state of things is still quite fragile. At some point I overloaded myself with responsibilities, and as I hit my limit, I started to slip up, which cracked my newfound trust in my own reliability - and things quickly spiraled down from there. Even though things got better, and they are better than they were before I was diagnosed, my self-image got seriously damaged. Even after half a year, I still haven't fully recovered.
2) I am a night person. Always have been. Whatever the reason underlying the reasons for this is, the meds didn't do much about it. What they did, however, is allow me to get away with much less sleep. This was super useful when my second daughter was born, as it made it easy for me to take the "first shift", feeding and changing the baby and letting my wife sleep more. Shift the meds schedule around to have one dose at 23:00, and I could do some work and care for the kid until 02:00, then sleep some 5 hours, and feel well-rested in the morning. Of course, this was not sustainable; there were two major bad consequences:
- "Sleep debt" kept accumulating, but since it was masked by my carefully-tuned med schedule, it took me way too long to notice I'm getting slower and less focused at everything.
- The whole experience broke my internal rhythm that told me when to go to sleep. And with overall improved executive functioning, it only became easier to stay up late.
3) It also took me a while to realize that the meds are "sticky". That is, they make it easy to stay on course - wherever that course lead. While they also make it easier to switch tasks, the improved focus makes it harder to notice that I should switch. As a result, whatever I'm doing when the meds kick in, is what I'll most likely continue to be doing for the next couple hours. Whether that's work, or writing HN comments.
3a) This "stickiness" also makes it easier to waste time going too deep into low-value tangential tasks. Like e.g. that time when I was working on a bug that turned out to be a regex issue - specifically, someone assembled a regex by concatenating some string constants, and didn't notice a subtle bug. As I fixed it, I decided to make sure such bugs don't happen again. I started writing some utility functions, and... few days later, I ended up committing a small library for making regexes via composition, which structurally prevented the class of bugs like the one I was originally fixing. Suffice it to say, those few days could've been better used on some other tasks. After that experience, I learned to pay attention to early signs of going too far off tangents. That's definitely a med problem - before diagnosis, my procrastination would've stopped me from pursuing such tangents too far.
(Or, in other words: meds make it easy to do the tasks that, before, I had to fight myself to do - but that fighting also served as a filter, forcing me to repeatedly consider whether the thing is worth doing at all.)
All in all, I'm still adjusting. Many of the changes - both positive and negative - take a long time to become apparent.
I don't see it as stickiness, I see it more as effortlessness, because it's so easy to continue working on something, but I recognise the description. I'm dealing with it by exporting the "what am I doing?" question to text - in other words, being really really explicit about my thinking by writing it down. I have a log running in a Slack window that often has things like "ok, we're gonna take a step back, and think about the steps we need to take to accomplish the goal. First we X, then we Y, etc". I'm essentially rubber ducking my executive function.
Luckiyl my adhd meds should kick in in about an hour making it much easier to focus on taking care of things.
If I was going to be taking meds I would be hoping life becomes a LOT easier, considering the risks to disrupting the body's natural equilibrium. You should be very cautious of any drugs, especially mind-altering that must be taken frequently.
The drugs own warnings are pretty bad: https://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/drugInfo.cfm?setid=f22...
>neurotoxic amphetamines
That's deliberately loaded terminology. Amphetamines are neurotoxic but not at the doses used therapeutically (obviously). Everything is neurotoxic at a high enough dose.
>The drugs own warnings are pretty bad
All drugs have pretty bad warnings:
Each year, the side effects of long-term NSAID use cause nearly 103,000 hospitalizations and 16,500 deaths. More people die each year from NSAIDs-related complications than from AIDS and cervical cancer in the United States.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050111123706.h...
It’s interesting that we know and appreciate that there will be more work tomorrow and next week, but when you see it in advance, it pushes you to the bed.
One thing that [somewhat] helps me with it is breaking down the next thing into a list of pretty trivial tasks on paper, while leaving the rest at where it came from. Makes you focus on what’s here and now. Out of sight, out of mind. Doesn’t work 100% but helps a little if I manage to forget the rest enough.
The meds help me to actually stay focused on a single thing instead of every distraction completely throwing me off and not getting any work done at all because I'm doing 6 things at once and constantly starting them from beginning
It's not always useful, but it does eventually consume enough resources to starve the anxiety thread and some of these lists end up as the (pre)analysis for the tasks I'm supposed to be working on.
Sometimes I don't get a good list for the task I'm currently expected to solve but I make progress on some other thing that piqued my interest. This helps me justify spending the time on just making lists because not all of it is useless and lessens the anxiety about not getting anything done.
When I do get a good enough list for the thing I'm supposed to be doing I usually feel less anxiety about doing it because I know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing.
Another one : learn to say no -and this is a big one and difficult in some cases- but setting boundaries can help. Some people just never communicate that they are swamped. Ask your manager or higher up on what they consider a good days work and how it differs from your experience.
My first thought was: you're crazy.
But then I thought deeper and as an adult I realized that there is a cost/benefit to everything that somewhat didn't exist as a child. Most of us cannot escape triggers of anxiety anymore. If you have everything you need, and complete freedom, you still can't escape the arrow of time for example.
I still think zero pressure doesn't work in the way you think it does. It's exactly something someone says when they are pre-occupied most of the time. It's wishful thinking.
You'd be surprised how much pressure can go down when you have fuck you money and you don't give a fuck about running some business, the "protestant work ethic", or getting more, just spend it and enjoy life. Met a few such types, and they feel zero pressure.
You still have inevitable stuff to worry about like relationships and health of course.
But then it's a question of whether they have the motivation to complete the projects they want to.
It's really easy not to ship things, and never know where they might have led.
Often they do not give a fuck about projects either. Just living their best life.
Then as the deadline approaches, not finishing at all is a kind of “fucking it up” that is not at all abstract or hypothetical. So now the anxiety of the deadline is focusing you on the task. It’s exhausting for one, and for another when you get a good review on your work you feel like a fraud, because everyone else took weeks to do this and you slammed it out in 6-10 hours.
IMO the word "anxiety" is now of limited utility as far as human species development goes. Same with "procrastination." People are often caught short by not having appropriately-honed replacements for those words that can help them move to higher heights, while building on what we've all learned about those concepts in the past.
That said, we have names for some common fears, e.g. caller anxiety. But again, is it universal?
I mean I get it, I work better in an office setting vs on my own and I've got a lot of issue to unpack, but I can also rationalize it and see that it's not a healthy condition to be in.
Put me in front or a concrete problem, and I'm a fucking monster at solving it. Give me someone's phone number to call and I'd rather spend the rest of the week in a bathtub.
I think it goes well with the anxiety explanation. You are obviously less anxious about things which are just business as usual. I guess my take away would be that if you want to start doing something you find hard, it will get easier and easier as you stick with it, which is pretty nice when you think about it.
I've thought maybe it was her job that led her to it. But I've also wondered if it was something in my blood. See, my father was a lawyer. As a kid I'd sit in his office and listen to him make tough phone calls one after another all day. But when it came time to talk to anyone at all at home, he always made my mother do it. I've found myself doing this with my girlfriend if we want to order food or something. Because I'll simply drink all night and delay the phone call.
So when it comes to any work flag that arises, I'll call my clients obsessively until they pay attention to the problem. But if I need someone to do something for me, I basically almost can't make the call.
In my worldview, when you state that, you don't really believe that. If you did, you would do these things that you think make them better with no effort. If you drop wishful thinking, look at the situation, then it's clear that if you think they are better at life, then the actions they do are better. But if you really believed that you would choose to do them, effortlessly.
Now I know there's plenty of frameworks you can look at things through and plenty of rationalizations, I'm just presenting another one.
So whenever you think it would be better if you would be doing something right now which you are not doing, you have some cognitive dissonance. It's possible to debug it. Sometimes it can go pretty deep, but if you are honest with yourself then after you do the debugging, you should either arrive at the conclusion that it is not better after all, or be doing it.
We are able to hold tons of contradictory beliefs, but only if we don't bring them together to our attention. Then it's just impossible. Cheapest way to resolve these, which often appears automatically, is quick rationalization - creating a special case, "yes, but", "this is different" etc. But when you are honest with yourself and observe yourself, do some debugging, it's impossible to not be doing something you want to be doing (and vice versa).
For me, it often means not that now I want to do these tasks and I'm going at them, rather, I understand that e.g. I think there are more important things in life to me given the wider context and I'm perfectly fine not doing them.
I have not been doing anything I wouldn't want to be doing right now for years. I sometimes needed to question my very basic values and choices to debug it.
Remember that it requires dropping wishful thinking. Wanting sky to be green is just madness, only after you accept that reality is how it is you can find out what you want.
Anxiety can be debugged away.
(Yes, I know - brains, neurotransmitters, amygdala, this is just a random dude's framework, a tool)
That's not my specific problem with phone calls. Phone calls always open up a Pandora's box of more problems. Perhaps if you feel like armchair diagnosing this: I clean my house almost obsessively every day; my desktop has only two text files on it called "Immediate" and "Todo"; my inbox is always cleaned out by 5 or 6pm before I let myself relax. Then I go get fucking wasted and make new friends and end up drinking in parking lots.
But I can't call the fucking tree guy or the mechanic or the accountant. It's not the conversation I'm worried about. It's that I know there will be one new thing on the list.
When the list is cleared, I will be free. I will take my clothes off and walk naked to the airport.
[edit] I just want to clarify: I do think that I'm good at life in my own peculiar way. Just not "good at life" as most people would define it ;)
But suffering is really something different without anxiety. If it's unavoidable anyway there's a peace about it.
And I'm sorry if I come off as an armchair diagnostician, I have no clue about your life obviously, it's just that this kind of thinking made such a big difference to me that it feels bad not sharing it.
My best friend as a kid was raised in Zen Buddhism and we learned to code together. This is the kind of way he would look at it. So I appreciate it.
There is a whole lot of assumptions in that sentence. To start, why would doing the right thing be effortless?
Add to that, if you are in a bad state you are likely to be pessimistic of the outcome of the task which makes it even harder. And fighting that is anything but effortless.
You could argue that when you are in a perfect state stars will align but even if you truly believe that the effort to get to that place will often be nothing but heroic and most people will never achieve it.
So it just feels like moving the goalpost? Which is fine if framing it like that gets you closer to where you want to be. But I'd need more convincing to believe that would be easier (for me).
[edit] I haven't done a lot of therapy, but I sought out an existential therapist in Buenos Aires and saw her weekly for a year while I was there and severely depressed. It helped me get over seeing myself as the center of the narrative, and made me realize everyone else was too trapped in theirs to notice most of the flaws I saw in myself. It also helped me come to terms with how the world being fucked up is neither my fault or something I can fix. But the real, true house on the cliff is unattainable. In the darkest and most honest moments, I'd admit it's not even what I want. As my ex's mother once said, I thrive on crisis. She didn't mean it well.
Because doing things you want to do does not require effort.
Real life example from the past - sewage system problem - I have shit all over the floor in my basement. It's late night next days are some celebrations. I can have this shit all over my floor it can wait for somebody to clean it, or it can just stay there, or I can clean it. You would think cleaning up shit is just that, it sucks regardless. But my experience is different. If you keep repeating to yourself false narration "I don't want to be doing this" that's hell. But after accepting the situation, deciding which option do you want, doing what you want to do is really effortless. Out of all the things this is what I want to be doing right now. If not, I'm not doing it.
Narration matters a lot and it seems pretty straightforward that when you think you don't want to be doing the thing that YOU decided and are doing right now, you have some cognitive dissonance.
(remember - no wishful thinking - thinking I want to have it clean but without doing any actions is no different than taunting yourself that you have no wings)
> no tension between satisfying the world and satisfying your own need
There isn't any. It's enough to try to satisfy your needs and doing what you want. But be observant and introspect.
People who are perceived as egoists are not optimizing for their own well being. You can't be happy when you are surrounded by people who are not happy.
When you want to support some charity and do something for the world, where does it come from? It's you, it's your need. It feels good. Not just a fleeting high, but like a feeling about your life in general. We seem to have that built in.
I mean regardless of the source, just look how it's unnecessarily nested narration. Your needs vs needs of others, where needs of others is what you feel is needed to do for others. It's still your needs, if you think you should be helping others it's you who feels that.
When you look at akrasia, the problem is not that you are not doing something. It's this painful cognitive dissonance. Unresolved conflict in your narration. Both doing the thing is fine and not doing it is fine. But suffering by doing it while telling your self you don't want to do it or not doing it while telling yourself that you do is completely avoidable.
And yeah, I agree about different experiences. Which makes communication funny - same words but two very different contexts and interpreters. Which is why I'm so verbose about the thing I was describing.
All options regarding sewage in your basement takes a lot of effort. Identifying and doing the least sucky option doesn't make it not suck.
I agree that it is helpful to frame it in a way that you choose to do it because its the best way forward. But that has absolutely nothing to do with effort and trying to recalibrate is as effortless does nothing but dilute and dismiss the effort you are putting into it.
Lots of things take effort, some things like workouts can (as with most things, in moderation) be more meaningful the more effort is provided.
> Narration matters a lot and it seems pretty straightforward that when you think you don't want to be doing the thing that YOU decided and are doing right now, you have some cognitive dissonance.
It is just a matter of perspective. You choose to do it because you want it done. It is an axiom. Not liking the situation does not equal cognitive dissonance.
If it helps you to not obsess about something, great. But that is a whole other topic.
To me there's a huge mental shift once you decided 100% on something and there's no questioning it. It may be tiring, but it just flows. This is what I call effortless in this context. Because it does not require any willpower to do it, even if it requires thinking or strength. You are locked in.
I mean whether it's coding or gym, surely you must have experienced it. When you are in the middle of the activity and you are not questioning whether you should be doing it or not.
The state of flow is familiar to most coders. Coding is nice because your mind is so busy building the castle that there is no place to be thinking about yourself. There is just code. So you are not questioning whether coding is something that you currently want to be doing. The same state can be achieved doing just about anything and to me the trick is to make narration without contradictions. Out of all things in the world, given my current life context writing this comment is the thing I want to do the most. Even if nobody reads it.
Btw I don't have that luxury 100% of the time. I can get hang up on the question of what do I actually want (in my case it usually drops down to not being honest with myself regarding the fact that what I really want is more sleep).
Regarding not liking situation, one that you choose to be in. I've had big mental shift from thinking in patterns of "lesser evil" and choosing what you want packages from the reality you are in (i.e. dropping wishful thinking). IT seems subtle but it's not.
"You choose to do it because you want it done. It is an axiom." is the right track. But not liking it, is the same as not liking that the sky is not green. It's fair, you might have preferred the green sky by a lot, but it's so ridiculous that you wouldn't experience anything negative because of that. It's the same with reality you are in and options available to you.
Basically seems pointless to fight with yourself. Maybe you don't really want the long-term task + result package. Or maybe wishful thinking is causing you to fantasize about getting a result without doing the task. (I'm sorry about using second person, seems most straightforward way to communicate it).
I guess there's also some element of narration creating fictional character - e.g. I can't stop playing chess - playing chess is who I am. Which basically is daydreaming again.
And btw it all sound pretty analytical but in practice is mostly value driven. But if necessary, I will debug the stack deeply. Honesty is required. It goes deep and into intimate places. I would leave my wife and kids if I wouldn't want to be with them (and I think that's best for everybody). Given that I do and want them to be happy a lot of stuff follows effortlessly. I think many people are afraid to question these deep assumptions. But it's worth doing it. Otherwise it's castles on sand.
Back when I was starting with debugging I once deeply considered our marriage since I needed to take some trash out :))
The first time this happened on the too high dose, the next thing I knew I was standing at the garbage can closing the lid, and wondering how the fuck did that happen? Now I was having side effects too but the feeling of mild disassociation was deeply disturbing, and got stronger when the pills wore off and I could reflect back on the day. So we cut the dose by about 40%.
I suspect half of why it works is that anything that treats depression probably also reduces anxiety and self defeating behaviors, in addition to stringing longer lists of tasks together, which is why it works off label for some classes of notorious procrastinators.
I was talking to my therapist about this a couple weeks ago (I’m trying something different now and it’s not working), and I asserted that a procrastinator - or at least an adult one - will never willingly take a mind altering substance that 100% eliminates the thought of procrastination because while it’s absolutely not the best part of who we are, it is part of who we are. Ideally for me, and I think for many others, you would hit the point were your brain still says, “we could do this tomorrow!” sometimes, but you choose to ignore that voice and do it anyway.
I think that would raise questions about their wellbeing and health. That seems like they have lost a healthy part of normal function.
I suppose that “never procrastinating” could end up looking like a weirder form of stream of consciousness, distracted behavior? Where you mean to go out for drinks but you get stuck yak shaving and then it’s midnight. I’d worry about that guy too. He is wound up way too tight and I think he ends up with a .308 on a clock tower some day.
It doesn't help either that such tasks are often chores or some kind of bureaucratic bs meaning they are basically in infinite supply. Once you finished with one there will be another one moved unconsiously from "would be nice to do" to "I should be doing this" category.
I’m not going to ever get to the bottom of my task list. You know it, I know it, my seventh grade French teacher knows it. But if I don’t randomly do something from the bottom, then it will be five years and nobody has every dusted the blinds or vacuumed out the car or cleaned the cupboard doors because I sweep and mop the same floors that will be dirty again in ten minutes and call it a day.
I won’t clean the car again until the blinds are clear and the freezer has been defrosted, but at least it gets done once in a while.
For most of my life I thought - I am great on a crisis / hard problems, and performing well under pressure, bad at consistently doing small things without anyone looking.
Like all such self identification, it's a bullshit excuse.
Then I thought that I am just adrenaline driven. What excites me gets crushed. What just needs to get done sometime, doesn't.
(I am "high functioning" - manager in FAANG, multiple graduate degrees, father of 2)
Lately a coach helped me realize. What I don't have is a deliberate practice of giving myself time to sort out the urgent from important. Literally reserving uninterrupted time on the calendar to prioritize and think about what to do (vs, do)
The outcome is this allows me to get excited about things I would have previously been dreading.
Eg - "man, I gotta call X contractor to get a quote" is a drag. Giving myself a chance to reframe it like "I am really excited about upgrading our backyard so the kids can play there better. Calling X is the first step to that, can't wait to do it"
It changes it from annoying task to a part of an exciting project. Because if I wasn't excited about the project then the phone call isn't necessary anyway.
Becoming more religious and developing gratitude has helped.
Waking up every morning and recognizing that my children, wife, home, career are all an incredible gift. And all that work around them is a blessing too - to become a better person etc. Really changes your perspective. I am working on it!
I mention this because as someone who loves writing code and building solutions who migrated into management roles, this was the thing I would actively procrastinate doing in lieu of "fun" stuff like writing code and collaborating with the team on various problems. This may be more directed to developers who move into management, but the advice itself is good for everyone - dedicate time to organize, prioritize and really clarify to yourself what is going on - weekly/monthly/whatever your schedules look like.
For myself, procrastination is usually caused by the fear of how painful it is to get up and running on a new project or task.
Asking an LLM to start the work gets the annoying bits out of the way.
Even if it does most of it incorrectly, at least you've built momentum, and then you can take over from there.
Is your inaction a rational decision?
(And no, I haven't unpacked why I feel sad; I tried it a couple times, which is how I discovered my sadness is stored in a bag of holding[0]; in fact, I suspect the bag actually contains within it a portal to hammerspace[1], explaining why it's always full, no matter how much stuff I pull out of it.)
--
[0] - https://www.dndbeyond.com/magic-items/4581-bag-of-holding
It's actually kind of good advice, but it's hard advice, it's hard to actually follow through.
If you go see a therapist, it's often the type of stuff they have you do (challenging thought patterns, asking the hard 'why's). And it actually works pretty well, you can do it yourself too, but that's even harder.
Speaking as someone who has both successfully lost weight and gone to therapy, btw.
I sometimes have the same reaction to things - I remember once being baffled at the lack of insight in a writing course I was taking, only to begrudgingly admit it was motivating me anyway even tho it was pretty stupid... like a puppy wanting to play.
At least for me I think the root of that comes from a closed mode vs open mode way of thinking [1]. When in closed mode we'll only accept new information whereas in open mode we can be playful and accepting new motivation. Different content demands different states of mind.
[1] John Cleese's video on creativity is worth a watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
In practice, being able to sustain the kind of attention required to catch hold of the underlying agent is strenuous, drugs [2] could maybe help, make it easier to attain the observer state, but its early beginnings.
[1] 2021, Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence
[2] 2019, Ketamine as treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder: a review, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6457782/
Most modern activities are beyond the mind's capabilities in terms of assessing whether it's worth it, so it usually defaults to "no".
One way around it is to imagine the feeling of having this off your back. I found that it helps somewhat.
However the article is more about expanding our thinking and challenging limitations that are self-imposed, which then prevent us from taking certain actions that can be highly significant (if not downright pivotal) for the goals we're pursuing in life.
Personally, one of my favorite phrases is "what if?", in a dreamy, anticipatory mindest of wondering what might be possible. Sometimes this allows me to see that an "evident" limitation can indeed be overcome.
This is not about doing what you are avoiding, it's about considering the thing you think is stupid, is actually something you should do.
Avoiding the thing is more about, knowing you should do something, but still not doing it anyway.
More like, you never know if (bad) things you've been avoiding are actually bad. In fact, people might want you to do said thing.
Ie someone who does favours for others should ask back in return, to satisfy the reciprocal nature of most people.
Although I did appreciate the post.
So what I did is the classic 'break it down' but with a pinch of artificial compartmentalization from the part triggering the avoidance:
I tried to focus only on what was actually done (significant in volume of work) switched to itemizing everything that was done first, not directly working into the report template.
I report on each of these items in isolation first, without reference to the plan, which gives me momentum since the pages fill up fast.
The last part is sorting the pages into the report template, according to the work items they fit best with.
Edit: The idea being that the momentum from the documenting of the work in isolation, will carry me through producing relatively little text referring to the plan.
It's not honorable work but it needs doing.
Edit: Good luck with the report. Just the word "report" makes me convulse :)
Weird.
And now I have unlocked middle school memories of staying up all night, alternating between lying down from exhaustion to forcing myself to sit and write a few words each round for my English essays that day.
I think of it like a mixing desk in a music studio. Where these sliders have all been pushed to varying levels of extremity.
This is why, when you explain it to a more neurotypical person, they will most often say, "oh yeah me too!". But it's like an Olympic sprinter saying that they can sprint, and an average joe saying, "oh yeah me too!". It's a matter of degrees.
Lose 5% of your leg strength? You might not even notice. Lose 95%? You can't walk.
This is what it's like for ADHD people. The impairment is enough to make it difficult to keep a job, difficult to maintain relationships and difficult to keep up with pretty much any complex aspect of adult life.
You excellently summed up something I've struggled a lot with since being diagnosed a couple of years ago.
This thing (ADHD) has permeated every aspect of my life in incredibly significant ways since I was a kid, and life made much more sense post diagnosis. Much much more. But, one of the hardest things to deal with - which I didn't expect - is that everyone I told would just respond, "yeah me too" (relating to the "symptoms", not saying they had a diagnosis) - essentially (without them intending to) invalidating my diagnosis. Or at least that's what it felt like - to the point that I've just stopped bringing it up. (Apart from in random HN threads... :)
And I totally get it, because I would probably have said the same thing if a friend told me they had OCD. I now know that my "OCD" tendancies are very clearly "not OCD" and to describe them as such risks trivialising the challenges for people who genuinely have this condition.
So I don't blame anyone really, but it does add to the "invisibility" of dealing with what from the inside feels like a very real and challenging condition and from the outside often just makes you look and act like a "bad impression of a human".
:)
Also, it's been very hard to get legally.
A low dose stimulant like the methylphenidate I got isn't the same as getting high on meth. For someone with ADHD it just brings them up to feeling normal. I have a family history of drug abuse too but I don't think it's a good reason to avoid legitimate medical treatment.
https://time.com/6272668/adderall-shortage-update/
That service sounds kinda fucked to be honest. With the right crank doctor, I can get most anything honestly - see everyone on Tik Tok on steroids.
>A low dose stimulant like the methylphenidate I got isn't the same as getting high on meth. For someone with ADHD it just brings them up to feeling normal. I have a family history of drug abuse too but I don't think it's a good reason to avoid legitimate medical treatment.
How about I'll make the call on what drugs I put in my body, thank you. You don't know me, my family, or my history. If you think I'm taking mental health advice from someone on hn with a My Little Pony fetish, you're fucking crazy.
Hmm, not really what I expected to be honest.
Which leads to the next slightly annoying bit—author was reluctant to follow up because Jimmy Fallon is a celebrity, which isn't said explicitly but is essentially the crux of the whole article.
Apart from that, "Hey, ya never know" is not terrible advice, but it's also a lottery slogan.
But heck, I'm not gonna spend money on that. So here I am.
This sounds like a recipe for resentment on both sides of the relationship.
I used this personalized chat-based service, where I said I will pay 1000$ if I don't go tomorrow. Like magic, there was no way I wouldn't go.
I also used it for shipping a small side-project in 1 week. I procrastinated for 3 days, and then felt this real panic-inducing pressure 2 days before the deadline which forced an incredible moment of focus (like cramming before an exam).
This approach is great when you need ignition from a cold-start to provide that initial momentum which is so important.
And yet people use it in circular arguments all the time: he is not doing homework because he's lazy. If we expand "lazy" to "does not do what he ought to", we get: he is not doing homework because he does not do what he ought to. So sky is blue because all skies are blue... Not really useful for anything except guilt tripping a person, because laziness is bad.
- I might have more important things to do
- I might be ill
- I might be missing some prerequisite
- I might be resting because I need my energy for something else
- Someone told me not to do the thing I ought to do
In all of these cases, I'm not doing what I ought to do, but I'm not lazy. Lazy implies that there is nothing preventing me from doing what I ought to do.
- I don't want to do it, but I'm afraid to tell you this;
- It seems the task requires a degree of sustained focus that is beyond my capacity;
- What? I'm hyperthyroid;
- I'm busy being afraid of something that could happen to me soon, over which I have no control, or the only control I have is to turn a probable bad thing into 100% sure bad thing; because of that, I am fully on auto-pilot and unable to process anything that requires expending effort to stay focused;
- What? What task? Oh sorry, I was busy trying to calm myself down from an anxiety attack and completely forgot. But now you reminding me is shooting my anxiety back, so kindly please GTFO; I may or may not do the thing, depending on how long it'll take me to calm myself down again.
Etc.
"Lazy" is a pure judgement. It doesn't care about reasons - it's a statement that "this person cannot be relied on". Which would be fair if used only to manage expectations, but it's actually used as a blunt weapon - a crude attempt to make someone reliable by guilt-tripping and peer pressure.
EDIT: a few more reasons:
- Whenever I attempt this task, my mind blanks out. Don't know why. But it's so bad that I can't even break things down into smaller steps.
- Two or three times, I poured all my heart and effort into doing this, and not only you weren't satisfied with the results, you actually ridiculed me for them and accused of not caring, while at no point explaining what your definition of "good result" is. So guess what, this thing got crossed off the list of possible things I could be doing, at a subconscious level. I'm unable to recognize this is a task to be done, unless you request it directly. Which I hope you won't. Fuck you.
- (4 year old version of the above) I tried my best, you didn't even notice, told me I did nothing, and even screamed at me. I'm now experiencing a panic attack when you ask me to do it, which blanks my mind out and freezes me in place. You calling me lazy and screaming more and throwing away my toys doesn't help. Good job at parenting you're doing there.
- (with apologies to 'coldtea) The reason you see me constantly "relaxing" and "having fun" is because I'm constantly 5 minutes away from curling up on the floor and crying. There is no "fun vs. work", there is only "fun vs. pain".
All of the reasons I listed are things I've either experienced or dealt with people who were experiencing them.
Nobody accused me of being too lazy to play games
And personally, I've had plenty of days when, if I didn't know better (or if I was an external observer of myself), I'd definitely say I'm too lazy to play videogames. Most commonly, this happened when, after being overwhelmed with work and responsibilities for a while, I suddenly found myself having one or more free days, like really free, completely for myself. Suddenly, all the things I wanted to do instead of working - including videogames I've been dying to play - didn't seem all that interesting anymore.
My Steam collection is full of games - good, interesting games - that I bought and then barely even played, because it turned out they only seemed fun when I was trying to force myself to focus on work, and lost all allure when I didn't have to.
Not exactly, it means "one habitually does not do what they ought to, because they'd rather relax, avoid hard work, have fun, and so on, and they're not hard-working or even just-enough working to not fall behind".
Motives are in the mind, they cannot be verified (even if explicitly stated by the actor, they can still be lies or wishful thinking).
Behavior can be observed however, and conclusions can be drawn.
The idea that it shouldn't be done because it's "unverifiable" is non practical (and somewhat absurd).
So it's exactly what I said in the first comment - "lazy" just means "one who doesn't do what they ought to". So it's completely meaningless, except for the part of describing behavior, and cannot be used as an explanation - i.e. "he didn't do his homework because he's lazy" is a circular statement.
No, it's because it is hard. If it is a bad idea, why would I want to do it?
And if I called he could still be like "Yeah, we went over time last time, actually I'm sorry I don't have time anymore."
And so I also try to communicate in this way, just saying things I mean and if I don't want something, I'll also say that. Makes everything much easier. (I'm German, maybe it's also a cultural thing.)
Another factor there is (corporate) politeness and avoiding emotional responses; the amounts of times I've had colleagues go on an angry rant / vent to us (as teammates) over a meeting they just came out of, instead of direct and use that anger during the meeting itself is a lot.
Of course maybe they just don't like me :D
But usually I just get over my "don't bother others" inner block and I call a friend or family member and then we setup a meeting for a lunch or just some longer catch up call usually - so in the end they also want or like me enough that we meet after all. But still initial hurdle has to be overcome.
Aside: maybe people should stop upvoting things hoping someone will summarize the content in the comments?
The article explores the concept of reevaluating ideas we consider bad and highlights the importance of questioning our assumptions. The author shares a personal experience of interviewing Jimmy Fallon and initially hesitating to request a follow-up call for additional information. However, when the author finally reached out, Fallon expressed appreciation and saw it as a sign of thoroughness rather than a burden. This interaction made the author question other ideas they had deemed bad. The article suggests asking simple questions to challenge our assumptions: Why do I think it's a bad idea? How do I actually know it's a bad idea? Am I the only one who thinks this? What's the worst that can happen if I'm wrong? The author encourages seeking social information and considering others' experiences before making a decision. They also share a personal realization about asking for favors, discovering that it can strengthen relationships instead of burdening others. The article concludes by encouraging readers to take risks, embrace possibilities, and engage with the world to gain experiences and potentially benefit others. The author also refers to a previous newsletter about focusing on one's strengths rather than trying to do everything.
The article encourages questioning ideas deemed bad, sharing a story about Jimmy Fallon appreciating thoroughness. It suggests asking simple questions, seeking social information, and taking risks to gain experiences. It concludes with a reference to a previous newsletter on focusing on strengths.
It has been a thing way before ChatGPT on some subreddits (e.g. r/worldnews). I'm not sure how it works, perhaps GPT-3?
I think that's the secret to doing the thing I'm avoiding; think of something you dread more. Ideally that sacrificial chore is unimportant, or eventually something that can be delegated away or something someone else can be hired to do.
Uh .. what? It isn't about this, and your dismissive tone is uncalled for.
We regret things we did (some marriage that didn't work out and destroyed our lives, some business decision that was bad, drinking and partying when we should have been getting ahead instead now we're at an AA meeting, spending sprees that left us broke, getting that tribal tattoo in our forehead while drunk, and so on) all the time...
I bought the 52x90 poster where each square is a week of your life. I've filled in significant events. It helps me ensure I keep working on making those events coming.
A better tip is to at least review or read boring work everyday until it's done. Tasks are easier to start if you planned them the day before and don't need to think to start.
You have to make you a priority. Pay yourself first I think is the phrase.
What's helped me is making a "shift" for me. Depending on how busy I am, it can be a hour a day all week or if it's slower just pick a single day and hammer it all out. No clocking out early to! :)
For example, you need to do the dishes, and you don't. This is procrastination, you know it is a good idea to do the dishes, that it has to be done eventually, etc...
But the article is more about say, finally using that dishwasher despite having some preconceived idea that it is bad at its job.
(No seriously I avoided it so I can avoid doing the things I've been avoiding)
We don't eat frogs at work, but we do get many a job you'd rather put off to later.
Try hn.algolia.com