How to reduce procrastination | Hacker News Reader

How to reduce procrastination

blogs.psychologytoday.com

23 pointsbd11 comments

I'll save everybody the trouble of reading this article with a summary:

The key to stopping procrastination is not to procrastinate.

Thank you. This is why I often skip straight to the comments.

And yet people are voting it up. It would be nice if HN's "vote up" and "save for later" functions weren't conflated, although I suppose that would make the interface more complex.

This might be the most criminally simplistic, naive thing I've read on HN this month. Get started, suck it up, and know thyself. Wow. Thanks. I never thought about doing something instead of not doing something. That's profound!

Yet it may be exactly the right advice. Sometimes you don't need to know more, you just need some good spanking :).

If you noticed, the author is a professor specializing in studying procrastination:

http://www.carleton.ca/psychology/faculty/pychyl.html

What he basically says: there are no cheap tricks. Most of the time you think you have some wonderful method, it's just another way to procrastinate.

Psychology Today seems to be a fluffy 'self help' style resource than a serious Psychology publication. Am I mistaken?

No, you summed it up perfectly. Psychology Today is a lifestyle magazine that just happens to have 'Psychology' in the title.

I find the best solution to avoiding procrastination is to simply figure out exactly what the next step is that you need to take to be one step closer to being done. Once you've figured that out, picture yourself doing it and then think about how you'll feel when the completed action is just a thing of the past. Rinse and repeat.

We set ourselves up for procrastination by not thinking about the next step and instead only thinking about the end result.

Yikes, not another procrastination article: http://www.google.com/search?q=procrastination+site:news.yco...

Must be because news.yc is where we come to procrastinate instead of actually doing things

Create a TODO list

1. Task name

2. Estimated End-Date to complete that task

Reply on news.ycombinator.com