Procrastination is connected to perfectionism
solvingprocrastination.com
solvingprocrastination.com
It didn't matter how polished our product was, he'd find a way to tear it apart. When he'd have a bad day, he'd start picking apart a random team's product. "Unbelievable!" he'd say in Slack, dropping a screen recording of the app that showed something we were supposed to be embarrassed about. It could be that the app took 3 seconds to load and show fresh data from his hotel WiFi, or it could be as simple as the UI not matching some directive he gave to the UI designers who failed to update the designs or tell us about the change. He would rant about how disappointing we were. At his worst, he fired some people on the spot for a problem that wasn't even their fault.
I quickly learned that the only way to avoid that pain was to not ship anything. The people he liked most were the ones who were operating in hypotheticals: The people who made UI designs in Figma, or the architects who drew nice diagrams about how things would work, or the people who wrote long design documents to hand to other teams. They never shipped anything for him to critique, so he thought they were the geniuses of the company. As long as they could avoid having to actually implement anything, they continued to be favorites.
It took me longer than I like to admit to shake that habit when I finally escaped. I found myself delaying shipment, pivoting from design doc to design doc, and trying to operate in that hypothetical space as long as I could. Fortunately I learned to get over it, but it was scary how much that single job could shape a large part of my personality.
Out of curiosity, what kind of background did your toxic boss have? Is it technical or business side?
I have a couple hunches for why this happens: 1. These people are dreamers and dislike people who bring them back down to reality, even if they need those people to actually build things.
2. They feel superior to people on the ground doing the building. Like they're above getting their hands dirty.
I worked for a non-toxic-personality friendly boss of this type. Took me a long time to figure out how to manage upward in that case. Everything that had worked with previous "builder"-type bosses seemed to backfire and I wasn't sure why.
Because the personality was good it was especially frustrating. Deliver stuff on time without bugs or surprises, but still fail to change his mind about ambitious-yet-unrealistic goals, or put a dent in his confidence in (and preference for) the "idea people" feeding him similar goals in hypothetical-land. "But really, if you'd just build [vague idea], we'd be golden!"
I've certainly seen my fair share of these types - too busy (ie. lazy) to really get stuck into detail during a project even when invited to do so, but very quick to point out an issue after a few minutes of expressly looking for one when it's too late.
They seem to see it as demonstrating their experience and superiority over others ie. "I only need a few minutes to find an issue". In my experiences, they also tend to insist on saying "everything needs to go through me", but never make time to follow through - out of laziness. This gives a high ROI on effort expended to stress created.
The best times I had with these people (when I was beyond caring) was laying low and doing launches semi covertly, so that there was time for clients to provide positive feedback and praise first. Then play dumb and deliver news about launch and feedback as a package.
At least to me, one of the defining bully characteristics is an inability to moderate their own behavior, even for their own benefit.
Then, the people to whom the actual task of implementing it was left can’t deliver the grandiose perfectionist idea, and the narcissistic boss can and actually wants to fiercely abuse their power over them in order to feed on the high of superiority and control over them. It’s the perfect position for this kind of person, they can feel high all the time (eventually the tolerance will kick in and the boss must leave though but this can take some time).
Organization-wise it’s a bad boss really. It’s the job of the creatives to come up with great ideas, then the boss should moderate that working together with the feedback from the implementers. Instead the boss is due to personal weakness too suggestible against the creatives and puts the damage of his own making on to the team with bullying.
I used to enthusiastically throw myself into projects and other endeavors, but over the years, as it became impossible to think, focus, motivate myself... for nearly a decade, things have only been "possible" until I attempt them, find myself unable to, and end up crying in my bed for the five-thousandth time in my life.
To a point where even when I'm a bit better, I'm perpetually trapped in this "hypothetical space", never trying to do anything for real. Using my energy to dream about a better life and life goals in lieu of as much as lifting a finger to do any of them.
when someone who is like your old boss (i think a huge percentage of people are) finds themselves in a situation where their mistakes are unambiguous and obvious they panic and have an identity crisis. most people do not live with the accountability of their mistakes like people who make and do things with unambiguous results. it would be great if more people did, but in a way, thats the whole point of those "ideas" / bullshit jobs, to insulate you from your mistakes.
Corporations should start screening for personalities like this. They’re sick, and often seek out positions of power.
(Doesn't sound like a bad middle-manager that snuck in through the cat door. But I could be wrong!)
Edit: I made some logical comment about doing something useful with half that time but deleted it because it would be hypocritical.
Do you remember any of the thoughts or techniques you used to shake it?
2. Stick to the facts: what happened, and what should have happened instead? Remove all the noise such as blame, emotional reactions, etc. Less drama, more clarity.
3. If the root cause is something dumb such as the hotel WiFi, close the ticket as "can't reproduce" and add an explanation.
You can avoid reading the text, then use a LLM prompt such as: "Can you rephrase this removing all emotional reactions and extracting only the parts that relate to reproduction steps".
Do not waste energy on toxic people. You are not a therapist, an emotional support animal, a sandbag or a doormat. You are a software engineer.
Unless you are getting rich you should avoid working there.
Criticism is fine, when it is constructive and done with tact.
Hence why telling truth to power, in a productive way that gets things done, is an important skill.
My two main pieces of advice: The bar is very very low, and share your burden quickly.
99 times out of 100 you are way overestimating the value of what you're delivering and people's expectations for it, and underestimating the value of time i.e. shipping quickly.
I've turned in so many things I'm not happy with and gotten a "this is great" that now I frequently just send over pseudocode, whiteboard sketches, and bullet point design docs to just get going on the feedback loop. Nobody has ever said "this is so bad we can't use any of it."
I also realized I do much better finishing other people's work than starting my own .. and so does almost everyone else. Bringing other people in overcomes "the boredom paradox" of a looming deadline - working with other people has its own challenges, but it is definitely not boring!
One specific thing I did that helped a few years ago at my precious company was I told my team, wrote in my email signature, ran a small study group, etc. On grit, procrastination, and "growth mindset" and just made a very intentional effort to tell people how I struggled with this problem.
So many people shared the problem! It really gave us a nice community and helped us (and management) recognize some of these issues, lesrn some new techniques, and get better at coaching, setting expectations, and ultimately managing the work.
So maybe last piece of advice is be open if you have these issues.
Agree with this. Shipping is the most important quality. The faster you ship the faster you would be enjoying anything
There is something to be said for the good old days when we modified PHP files in an editor over FTP :)
Never done it professionally. But developing in production would make me ship faster, and using php would probably limit my tendency to make gold plated solutions.
Code and software quality was surprisingly better than it is today.
Today? In a process heavy company with Jira, PMs and QA it can become a week-long affair, unless I (the lead developer) bypass parts of the process.
The perfectionism is in the process, but the outcome is not quality. Come to think of it, perfectionism never really leads to anything of quality.
TeX stood the test of time and it was released as close to perfection as it gets in non-life-critical software. (One could argue it wasn’t perfectionism at work, but sound top-down design.)
It even leads to more different changes and more ground to improve upon again.
So.. Can you trick yourself into directing the perfectionism into shipping fastest?
At one point, the thing I wanted to learn was "call something done". So I did that, and because it was a side project with learning as an explicit goal, I was able to actually do that - it was literally impossible to ship something imperfect, as shipping would already mean I'd perfectly reached my goal.
But that turned out to be enough faking it to make it - the feeling of shipping it felt good, and gave me the confidence to spend a small amount of time to polish my side projects up enough for shipping, rather than a large amount of time to do everything I want. And it's way more fun now to be able to occasionally pull up an old side project of mine that's still usable, because I got it to a usable state in the first place.
(In case anyone's interested, you can see the project, and how small its scope was, at https://agripongit.vincenttunru.com.)
Perfectionism comes from iterations
Great if this feedback is from users; not great if it's from somebody who's just been waiting for you to finish it so that they can sell it. Unfortunately in a big-company environment like the one I work in, the initial and dominant feedback is usually from the latter.
Going to adopt every part of it. Thank you for sharing.
I'm still somewhat of a perfectionist, an old habit, but I'm now much more aware that a quick feedback loop and shipping things are far more valuable than perfect, over-optimized work. People may love such work, but it's often overkill and involves too many unnecessary hours of effort.
What did you write in your email signature?
"I'm working on my unhealthy perfectionism by developing a growth mindset. Join me!"
- Ed Catmull (from the book Creativity Inc.)
edit: by way of the marginalian, which is excellent, one of the best sites out there- go read it: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/05/02/creativity-inc-ed-...
This may not work for everyone but for me it works exceptionally. Most often the reason why you don't want to work on something is because you find it too hard, too boring, or too irrelevant. But if you force yourself to be bored for a while, you will eventually crave some mental stimulation.
And that's when you can pick up the task you have been avoiding and work on it with renewed interest and focus.
Of course, this requires some discipline and self-awareness. You have to resist the temptation of checking your phone, browsing the web, or doing anything else that distracts you from your boredom.
Maybe there is some psychological reason for it but I have found this technique to be very effective for overcoming procrastination and getting things done.
From my experience with young people, the worst procrastinators will often choose boredom over the task they're avoiding. Doing nothing at all is less painful to them than doing the work they're avoiding.
This is even more true for the perfectionist procrastinators: They are avoiding some exaggerated hypothetical pain that might come from failing at a task. If they never finish the task, they can't experience that disappointment. Some of them will happily do nothing at all, walk around, or daydream to avoid even engaging with their computer, because engaging with the computer would remind them that they're procrastinating, which would remind them that failure to deliver is also imperfection.
> Of course, this requires some discipline and self-awareness.
Unfortunately, the people with the worst procrastination problems are in their situation largely due to a lack of discipline and self-awareness in some variation.
This is further complicated by things like demand avoidance, ADHD, burnout (autistic people may have difficulty even recognizing that they are chronically stressed and anxious to the point of shutdown, until they just crash completely) or other executive function related pathologies, of which there are likely multiple involved if there is a noticeable problem.
I heard that some boredom may be "good" to "reset" dopamine systems and try to fix procrastination issues (especially since I have diagnosed ADHD.
So I tried to get bored. And I observed that being really bored is incredibly hard when you have a smartphone (or a laptop or …).
The point of my question is that I often physically looks like I’m bored but actually if i have a screen in front of me, I’m never bored. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the people that looks like they prefer boredom are really bored or a just look like they are.
So, I got diverted from a difficult task and spent time doing a task that created a very useful and time-saving tool but which I want being paid for and which I know I can't share because I was doing something other than my job ... it was rewarding in the sense of 'I created something useful' and so made me feel better about myself until I reflected that I was further behind on the task I was getting assessed for.
I found Tim Pychyl's writing/videos and http://www.procrastination.ca/ useful on this topic.
Given that afaik tasks seeming "hard" can be a consequence of bathing in hyper-stimulation from media/games, thereby raising the "much be this stimulating" minimum about what normal tasks provide, does 30 minutes or an hour of boredom reset some of that?
The idea is that instead of trying to focus on what's important, leaving out everything else, make a long task list, including things that are not that important, but still productive. So that you have plenty of things to do to avoid doing the top items.
To avoid shifting the problem, it suggests self-deception, so that you put items on top that appear important, but are not really. So that you do the really important ones in order to avoid doing the falsely important ones.
I don't know how effective it is though.
Perfectionism, only when intentionally and cognitively executed in an orderly fashion, is linked to extremely high consciousness and extremely high consciousness when not properly managed is highly correlated with anxiety. The slang for this is anal-retentive.
This becomes complicated because anxiety is most typically concerned with high measures of neuroticism but a person can score extremely low in neuroticism and yet still suffer symptoms of anxiety from too high of consciousness when their concerns for orderliness prevents timely accomplishment of a task. That specific set of personalities defines obsessive-compulsive disorder in contrast to anxiety in general.
The solution to this is to learn to accept and contribute a wrong outcome, as opposed to taking no action at all, which requires a tremendous amount of careful practice. The ability to accept that solution is even culturally reinforced as identified in one of the Hofstede cultural indexes: uncertainty avoidance.
Just to clarify, you're still referring specifically to "perfectionist" personality types? Because last time I checked anxiety is _not_ correlated specifically with any personality traits but rather spans a broad spectrum of personality types.
I tend to think that mostly people with a lot of capacity for creating mental images (who can freak themselves out) are prone to procrastination.
Edit: Apparently it is more complex than that. I believe that self-worth also plays a role (fear of not delivering as good as one would like to), also ADHS (jumping to a thousand other things and losing focus). Generally fear plays a role. Meditation helps. Anything that helps to relax (running, breathing exercises).
1. Instead of “what will they think?” always ask yourself the alternative question, “what do I want?”. This saves you a lot of time and trouble. Do what you like to see what people will say. Make it a fun game.
2. If something takes less than 2 minutes, just go do it. Make it your “kick”. After few weeks, work your way to turn 2 minutes to 5 then 10 minutes. You will get so much done because of the inertia.
For me, what help a lot is reframing feedback, whatever it is, as opportunity for learning, and not something you need to fear, ashamed, or get rid of(to keep face) Embrace it. See it with the eyes of curiosity, and not fear.
Still do your best, yes, but not overly anxious about things you can't control, e.g. what people think.
"Productivity", the abstract word that looks as if it were invented by the "flat-earthers" to sell books. Just a drug for to make the clients to pay for being alpha-testers, without remorse.
Not easy to talk about perfectionism. In the last decade the threshold changed much, unfortunately. The main problem with this is in the retro-feeding, low quality here, there, affect the time needed for to advance in better products because there are more issues to solve, that of course will be "un-productive" to solve, in loop. Enjoy.
Russel Barkley with a succinct video on "ADHD as Motivation Deficit Disorder": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR3RJU6838c
It is horrible. But it’s manageable on most days (and yes, I’m medicated and have been since early adulthood). And honestly, having people in your life who understand your condition and can help pick you up sometimes [2], is a huge part of coping.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions
[2] I do not mean do stuff for you. For me, when I’m in that place where I’m so frustrated that the only options are either to primally scream or to sit in the corner and cry, a simple fucking hug is like a miracle drug.
FYI, the Russel Barkley video from the grandparent comment is a controversial figure. He presents a lot of his own pet ADHD theories as if they were facts.
He's one of the OG internet ADHD influencers, back when ADHD was still commonly stigmatized. Someone I know joked that if you watched enough Russel Barkley videos, anyone could convince themselves they had ADHD.
Meds helped for only a few months. Then my brain patched that exploit too. :/
The author of the Search Engine pod just had a two-parter about his "ADHD":
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/whyd-i-take-speed-for-...
(The history of regulating Speed in the US is actually fascinating).
I could focus just fine all my life, then suddenly I couldn't. I've talked to other adults who are experiencing the same.
And it's funny how people get super torqued when you say something like this. There is a lot of room between "I have legit ADHD" and "I am addicted to my phone".
Sometimes I could not start a project at work for weeks - then I got off Twitter.
Lots of kids have behavioral and impulse control problems. If you give them amphetamines you see exactly the same problems, but with the boundless energy amphetamines give you. When you give amphetamines to ADHD children they visibly and noticeably become calmer, quieter, and more focused. If you did not come into it with the predetermined idea that this drug is "speed" you would certainly not arrive there from watching the behavior of medicated children with ADHD.
You were addicted to twitter good for you for solving your problems. Don't extrapolate that experience out to kids though. ADHD is fucked up, life ruining stuff. Look at the rates for drug abuse, car crashes and incarceration for adults with untreated ADHD. This sort of scare mongering makes it less likely for children to access effective treatment when it can be most impactful on their lives. It is harmful and you should be ashamed.
One thing that jumped out at me though with regards to your comment about medicine. I started taking concerta and quickly noticed that if I'm the slightest bit sleep deprived, concerta doesn't amp me, it doesn't make me have more energy but instead it makes me sleepy. With it, I'm visibly calmer and quieter and I also have a lot less craving for chocolates (which I'd keep eating non-stop during the day). It's quite magical actually.
That said ADHD runs through my family like a (mad) bull in a china shop, and yes, hence very much voting this comment up. Lots of individual things can help - getting enough sleep for one, enough exercise ... but at the end of the day, one has to be reasonable and accept that medicines help.
An aside : children under a certain age, one can't (safely) detect ADHD because the symptoms are "ordinary behaviour". This is why I suspect there are lifestyle components too...
One of the most concerning patterns I've seen is that these people go out and find a doctor who will prescribe them stimulants (during COVID it was as easy as following ads on TikTok, filling out a form, and having a <5 minute virtual visit with a doctor, believe it or not) and then many of them get worse.
By this I mean the stimulant medication supercharges their actual underlying problem: The anxious procrastinators become even more anxious. The perfectionist procrastinators become even more obsessed with perfecting things. The video game procrastinators now game for harder and longer with stimulants in their system. The hobby/side project procrastinators are now putting in more hours on their side project and have even less time for the work or studies they're supposed to be doing.
I'm not saying that ADHD isn't real, because it's definitely real and debilitating. I'm saying that we have a real problem with the current trend of "ADHD explains everything". Social media has supercharged this trend by bombarding people with videos that position ADHD as a perfect excuse and explanation for their frustrations. They are frighteningly good at finding a video or TikTok or Reddit post that tells them exactly what they want to hear, and they're also good at skipping past any content that doesn't confirm their beliefs.
I have extended family who are in grade school education, and the trend goes all the way into 5th and 6th grade from what they tell me: Kids using "I have ADHD" as an excuse for everything and then trying to show their teacher a TikTok that explains why they shouldn't be held accountable for late homework, low grades, or behavioral problems. They're not alone, it's a common topic in /r/teachers on Reddit too ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/12cfdj3/i_have_ad... )
A recent nytimes opinion on the subject: https://twitter.com/emmma_camp_/status/1726390207740608823
>> It's generally a sign of progress when diagnoses that were once whispered in shameful secrecy enter our everyday vocabulary and shed their stigma. But especially online, where therapy "influencers" flood social media feeds with content about trauma, panic attacks and personality disorders, greater awareness of mental health problems risks encouraging self-diagnosis and the pathologizing of commonplace emotions what Dr. Foulkes calls "problems of living." When teenagers gravitate toward such content on their social media feeds, algorithms serve them more of it, intensifying the feedback loop.
I think the same ADHD diagnosis problem is happening in New Zealand too.
Like many fears it is usually inappropriate and unhelpful. In reality you are almost always further ahead in life if you try even if you don’t get to the outcome you envisioned.
Seen that way you'd need to take care to not fall back into that creative-only daydream mode when you actually need/want to be productive. So you would need to steadily remind you to actually continue with concrete execution planning instead of mentally optimizing models (which of course itself is - and feels - productive and maybe even more important/urgent, but not in the ouput-oriented way you'd like/need to achieve in that actual production task).
Not sure if it actually helps, but besides that perfectionism and "just do it" issue/solution pair it might be a useful perspective and concrete criterion to keep one focused on the task of finishing. I'll try to include it in the repertoire at least.
Another manager I worked with, said “The #1 feature of this product is 'Ship'.”
In the app we’re about to release, we don’t have any schedule pressure. We can release when we want.
I found that the rest of the team was in “Perma-Tweak” mode. Lots of “Just one more thing.”
I realized that it was never going to ship, so I set an arbitrary date of … today.
In true software development tradition, we’ll be late, but not by much. Also, we have a great excuse. The CEO had a baby (ahead of schedule, but the deadline was quite firm).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Procrastination-Why-You-What-About/dp...
Every self-proclaimed perfectionist should start caring about time as much as they do about the object they are obsessing over. They'll then see the tradeoff in being less of a ^perfectionist^ in that thing and being more ^perfectionist^ about time.
In the middle of November, I started a daily (M-F) newsletter on topics related to DevOps. I've been consistent with it ever since.
The strategies the article outlines that have helped me the most are breaking things down into small pieces and starting small.
Also, by making my newsletter daily, it took a lot of pressure off me. I didn't feel like I had to have a "hit" every article like with weekly or monthly cadences. If the article sucked, then tomorrow is a new day with a new article.
It is very important to move forward in code, because you cannot predict how will actually end up a complex program: you need to have all the (sane) features in to actually know. Since code is all about trade-offs, there is "no perfect".
You have to be carefull at avoiding falling into a mental spinning loop about this.
Once you have a reasonable minimum of usable features in, publish it. It help breaking such mental loop.
For instance, currently writing a printf implementation, and printf specs are already brain damaged by themselves, so I am not looking for perfection, far from it. I did set myself a minimal set of features (full format decoding, hexadecimal and byte strings) before publishing it. Until it does not require the complexity of a compiler, does a good enough job, I'll be happy.
Sometimes it is not about perfectionism, but a question of resourses required to achieve something reasonably working: you have a montain to deal with just to get something minimaly working, and you are given a spoon... when you are lucky.
I'm curious to see why something like printf is worth writing in assembly.
The actual real way to work around the inappropriate complexity of that function is to remove it and switch to a brutal "put string" with string conversion functions (with space allocated on the stack). In the end it would be not that much more work in most cases, then in the end I may not even use my assembly code, but lower some printf function usage to what I said.
It is not going as fast as I wanted, since I wanted it be finished "yesterday", but I may focus next on, shell matcher and basic/extended regexp.
Not to mention that from the perspective of the life cycle of tons of system software components out there, the actual coding is not that much.
The spoon isn't the issue - why does that mountain need moving? The parable is about persistence and determination - necessity is ignored!
Open source works more than fine with defence stuff, actually would be a requirement...
From the very beginning, I skimmed the rest. Surely, this can be reduced to
> Avoid dealing with the associated negative emotions.
Start there, and work through those emotions.
Do have any advice for how to deal with the associated negative emotions?
They seem kind of endless, and I'm not really sure what to do with them. I've tried things like mindfulness, meditation, journaling, talking about them and so on. But they just keep coming back, it's like they can't be resolved. It's quite painful, and I'm at a loss.
> Forgive yourself for past procrastination
And this is an important point too, for the personal tasks and especially when some time passes due to procrastination without doing the task, it gets even harder to get back into the tasks simply thinking “if I didn’t procrastinate I would have done by now..” and it demoralizes me more and never start that said task..
- personally abused and shamed
- made the object of sadism or cruelty
- humiliated to their peers
- had important things taken from them
- been isolated
- lost an important relationship
If you know someone suffering from a bind like that, find a way to tell them that "this is not that," and you can have a big impact on their life.
Describing anything as an 'ism' is a thought terminating judgment of it, and not a meaningful abstraction for it that yields information about what it might be caused by.
This article might help your understanding as it talks about what concrete thinking is and how to recognize it: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-and-psychopat...
Get a project to a “good enough” point, then tell myself “I’ll fix it next year”, when I really just want to rip it out and start over.
Of course ‘next year’ never comes as later I come to see that the project is totally fine and doesn’t need a re-do.
I never understood who would think this. A core problem of real world economy is that you never have enough time and need to manage it accordingly. The sad truth is, if you dont compensate you will never finish your task as a perfectionist. You will always get half backed solutions that your boss needs to tear away from your very protesting hands. It requires working on yourself to not do that.
A lack of problem appropriate resource management is very much a weakness you need to overcome.
doctors say people work too much, and there's an epidemic of burnout
homo sapiens are not made to work and feel guilty when they don't complete tasks
it's a problem of work culture and productivism, nothing else
we're mammals with inflated brains, anxiety and depression, and it's too soon since we were hunter gatherers living in caves, we barely started working in cubicles and that's a small sample of the population.
I think this is kind of like, if you don't fail, you can't succeed.
To be happy, fail. -Me, 2024.
The thing to me seems, that doing anything has a high cost, that the mind wants to protect us from that, doing nothing is safer, I think it's that system that comes in to protect us.
If we do something, it might be disappointing, it might not be as we expect. Even small things, order something from amazon, you have to wait in to get it, the delivery might get messed up, it might be the wrong thing, it might not work etc, doing something requires more doing, it increases the changes of frustration/annoying things to happen, when doing noting often seems like it doesn't cause much issue. This is perhaps why even the smaller tasks are an issue, because the downsides of not doing it are less apparent. It's no wonder we want to procrastinate.
The trick I think is to meditate on the idea of momento mori, as the stoics did, remember your time here is limited and also reflect on the negative of not having done or achieved things, because the mind automatically considers the negative of doing something and wants to protect you from that.
https://hillaryrettigproductivity.com/overcome-perfectionism...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13417133-the-7-secrets-o...
- the task is too simple which makes it boring to do - the task is too complex and needs an effort which I don’t want to face so I defer doing it.
Best scenario happens when a task is both exciting and is in the scope ( or slightly upper ) of my expertise
When I procrastinate due to my perfectionism, I pretty much never do something enjoyable instead. Rather, I frequently lament that I don't have enough time for fun activities.
When I'm procrastinating in a WFH setup I could easily play video games, watch a show/movie, read a book instead, but don't. It's almost as like a punishment, rather than a reward.
Is it though? Or is it something nice to tell ourselves?
I don’t know if there is correlation here. I have seen poeple procrastinating with no sense of details and the reverse is true too.
What you're saying about people procrastinating for other reasons, is the difference between the phrase "one reason why people procrastinate is perfectionism" and the phrase "the only reason why people procrastinate is perfectionism".
As in, people can procrastinate for any of multiple reasons, and perfectionism is one of those reasons.
I'm happy about that fact, so that i can avoid "useless actions" until i fully understand what to do first.
Another word, solving problem before implementation !
I don't think the procrastination is useful. I think it's better to just get started and do anything. That way you learn and make progress.
Reason was not "Too long" as I never even clicked the link. It was due to the link title "solvingprocrastination", as that name framed procrastination as a thing that needed to be "solved" somehow.
I'm sure that for some, sometimes that is the case. For me, not much so.
See, procrastination is a tool. It allows my subconscious to review and analyse a problem field while I keep my conscious self engaged with something else. Preferably solving some other issue. Rarely entertainment. I guess the situations where I'd want to peruse entertainment are not that often situations where I have important stuff to do, but I don't know. (I'm thinking mostly @job here, not leisure time)
What I do when faced with a problem that needs a solution, but for some reason or other I have no obvious "attack vector" (just to make a poor pun on the HN site name) it this: I do nothing. That is, I do something of course, especially if it's at $job: I do something else. Go solve some other task. While I do that the part of me that excels in solving really complicated stuff does what it does best.
This will not bring me the perfect solution. Most of the time it will not even bring me closer to the solution. All the while I'm doing something else entirely, so I don't even expect progress on the issue I put on the mental parking lot for a while.
But, somehow, when I start the task that I postponed, this happens: I really start it. I focus, I get going. Implement things, analyze and break down, and become productive. From square one. Thanks to, I believe, doing nothing for a while.
I still prefer to build a working prototype in private rather than flail in public, but the relative ease of integrating publicly-available sources means I get immediate leverage from ~publishing everything I depend on.
I've had less success extending that to writing, though.
I have literally nothing to do for 4 hours, and I'm awake, and I have loads of energy, and no one else is up, so I may as well just do that thing I've been putting off.
Also, literally just starting the task, regardless of how I feel. That works too.
It's likely that the brain chooses the path of least resistance toward dopamine.
Sometimes, just choosing to not be lazy clears it because then not being lazy and doing the darn thing provides enough of a dopamine hit in itself.
It can be changed consciously.
There is also the fear of the unk own but one has to then know that no matter what, they will figure it out. That can be a self-confidence issue. Related to the first point still.
That’s the question?
Also when only God is perfect and we are all sinners, this fights better procrastination than when the whole socio-culture is based on the human-god gnosis.
Want to fight procrastination: return to church.
Obviously this requires some mental gymnastics to eventually complete both X and Y, or to come up with some task Y that feels important but actually is not. But it works great.
And chronic stress. And anxiety. And trauma. And clinical depression. And avoidant behaviour disorders linked to autism and ADHD.
can be. It is an important distinction, usually one lost on people selling something (be it a product, themselves, their ego)
Everything is shit, think before you act! It's better to do nothing, than to deliver more shit.
How are you supposed to get better at delivering anything if you won't deliver until you have something "perfect"?
Part of the process of getting better is to be shit for a while, while you figuring things out.
Common saying when making music is that probably your first 100 songs will be absolutely trash, so better get those out of the door ASAP, so you can get to the good stuff :) Practice is the only way to get better, and your output will probably suck for a while, but we all sucked at one point so it's OK.
I know that it's hard to build the intuition and sharp judgment without failing, but with time anyone can dismiss mistakes in their head. Only money makes you make mistakes because you are 1) pressed for time 2) greedy.
Money IS the problem, soon money will be the problem of the past though (energy is the final problem), so that wasted time (most of 4 billion man centuries) is lost forever in a puff of smoke.
Please know that perfectionism is often fear-based and trauma-based. Learning to recognise the underlying fear and trauma, and working through them, will help with both perfectionism and procrastination. In my experience, there are very few quick wins, only long methodical work to get through the underlying issues.
The best way to do that is with the help of a mental health professional (should be first # in that article).
Reminds me of "Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)" - https://sivers.org/zipit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7496923 (74 points | March 30, 2014 | 21 comments)
In light of the need for community, talking about plans might be seen as a way to search for ideas that could have group buy-in and become something to undertake together. Failure to move forward on those plans would reflect that the group interest just wasn’t there. The mistake would have been in assuming you would have ever pursued the goal independently, the social impulse to share could have been the hint.
Shared interests between friends can help individual interests and goals become collective ones.
Ecclesiastes: one may be overcome (by the exhaustion of going to the gym), two can defend themselves (against lapsing on their New Year’s resolution). A three-ply cord is not easily broken.
Making friends is „easy“ too - treating people how you would want to be treated is a good first step.
Some people have so good relationships they even use the label "bestie", which is just a really good friend, who at the beginning surely was a acquaintance :)
Showing up is already a giant step forwards.
Best of luck