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Comment by ghoomketu | Hacker News Reader

The easiest antidote for procrastination is boredom.

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.

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> The easiest antidote for procrastination is boredom.

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.

It depends, do you define endless scrolling as boredom ? Because I think it’s not.

That's not what the post above you is talking about. "Endless scrolling" was never even mentioned

I know, I was just asking.

The point is, I guess, the worst procrastinators don't choose boredom, they choose some mindless but not boring activity like endless scrolling through social media.

Thank you, that was my point but I should have been more precise.

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.

My daughter would literally sit and stare at the wall instead of doing her English class homework.

I guess the alternative has to be mentally stimulating for it to work. Maybe she finds it too easy or meaningless?

Agree with this, from personal experience. The conventional idea of “boredom” doesn’t fit well, because we have everything we need and love already in our head, which makes leaving it painful and staring at a wall for hours a great time. Incidentally my “bad boss” was my father, who had two emotions; Preoccupied and angry.

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.

For me, I procrastinate to get the reward of making progress without having to do the hard thing that I'm supposed to be doing. It is an emotional thing, almost entirely; I feel low (perhaps for unrelated reasons - I was bereaved of my mother 18 months ago) and so seek quick rewards through "work", just not the work I'm being paid for.

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.

I'd be curious how quickly neurochemical stimulation levels reset to baseline, on order-of-hours scale.

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?

An alternative to boredom is something else more important even less desirable that needs to be done, that drives progress on what is being procastrinated. Unfortunately, it only shifts the problem elsewhere.

As in, pursue something else that seems even more important, yet less desirable than what we were already considering? Or am I mixing something up?

This does not solve the issue of procrastination at all. A common myth is that procrastinators are simply lazy people who don't do anything useful. This is not the case. Many procrastinators are super-efficient at working on what they need to do; it's just that they are procrastinating on another useful task/project that objectively should have a priority.

I call this procasti-working and it is absolutely my most productive space. I don't really see it as a problem though; I might be completing lower-priority tasks, but they would have later become high- or critical-priority tasks; it's ultimately a net win.

I have seen it called "structured procrastination".

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.

There are well known psychology experimental results to support your hunch. When the alternative is total lack of mental stimulation, people will perform all kinds of otherwise unattractive activities.

interesting! Can you recall a source for that?

There is this study where they let people sit alone in a room with the option to shock themselves. Many shocked themselves. I thinks it’s this one [0].

[0]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1250830

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