Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough

The issue is the ego. Ego has a lot of ideas about itself and others. Ego has such high opinion about itself it only can do great work. Which prevents it from doing anything. It's kind of a way of avoiding failures. Because failures will break the grant ideas about himself OP has created.

I accidentally went through a spiritual awakening which diluted ego. I have no problem in doing any kind of work now. Whether it's great or petty.

OP needs to work on the ego. Or figure out a situation where OP has to ship things no matter what. Which is hard unless you are jobless and can't figure a way out apart from building useful things that people pay for.

If I had a massive new app to build, it would indeed feel overwhelming if I felt like I just had to sit down and build it. I think we get extra stuck on that with writing, as it often feels like we just need to go from an empty page to a well-reasoned and edited blog post, with a lot of ambiguous struggle in between.

With programming, I start breaking it down into pieces of functionality, and smaller ones, until I have a list of concrete things I can actually get my head around and write the code for. I keep on doing those small things, build the structure around them, and eventually I have my app.

I do the same with writing now. Not an outline really, but a list of concepts I want to get across, then smaller ideas. I write out a few of those, often a paragraph at a time. The structure starts to reveal itself, and soon enough I have a new blog post.

I think the key here is arriving at something small enough that it doesn't feel overwhelming. New app or blog post feels like way too much in the moment, and my body and mind to everything possible to avoid it (procrastination). Writing out a paragraph, coding a function - very doable.

1) Give yourself permission to do bad work.

If you're stuck, just start writing whatever junk is in your head. Make it hilariously bad! Write like a total idiot.

But often that alone is enough to unstick you. Having very rough work is infinitely better than staring at a blank page.

2) Procrastinate "a little bit"

Rebrand some procrastination as manageable short breaks, stop beating yourself up, and take control back from your rebellious subconscious. That way, you're working with yourself, not against it.

3) Always be asking yourself, "What's the smallest thing I can do RIGHT now?" and doing it.

E.g. you might not know how to write a full paper, but you can write down all your random ideas on a sheet of paper. Do that. Then once you're done with that, the next step might be writing an outline. Then, expanding each outline into a short paragraph...

But don't think that far ahead, just do the smallest thing now!

> While I do read articles here and there, it’s far less than I should.

Formulating it as a "should" abstracts away who wants it, and makes an artificially abstract norm out of it.

But what is actually? It's probably just something that the author wants. Not doing something I want feels less bad than not doing something I should. There are lots of things that I want and don't get or don't do, I'm already used to that.

It's a bit like the passive voice in writing, it hides who does something, or should do something.

Some "should"s are also what we think that others want us to do, often just assuming that without asking.

And so on. If you assume that every "should" is a thinking error, some go away, some become "want"s. It's a good first step, I recommend it.

Also, write about things you've learned and projects you've built: both of those are topics where you aren't expected to provide shining new insight never seen before online: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/

The article just says they pushed through and “put it aside”, but that has never seemed to quite work for me. I can push through once or twice, not enough to build a daily habit/obsession like I want.

Anyone have any tips that worked for getting over this hurdle?

Forget about trying to change this from the perspective of thoughts. Cognitively understanding that you should "just" stop worrying about what other people think about your work might not bring you far.

Instead, realize that anxiety is a bodily phenomenon and as such needs to be addressed with the body. That means: Breathing techniques, exercise etc.

It is frustrating. One recent mindset change I have adopted that reduces the feeling of overwhelming is:

1. Say it out loud, "I have plenty of time" and breathe deeply

2. "I have to work within constraint for which I do not have control of"

3. Can things be a lot more worse then they are? Fortunately, the answer to this has been 100% yes. Things can be worse in terms of developing complicated medical condition to family complication.

4. There always be be 'noise', work on reducing it and accept the 'distractions' are noise. Since distraction is noise, ignore it instead of giving into it.

I used to have the exact same ambitions, blocks and difficulties writing (you can see on my blog).

Turns out, I just don't like writing. It's something that many smart minds extol as a great practice, which I 100% agreed, but once I gave it a serious go for myself, just didn't really enjoy the journey, product nor the outcome.

Usually, you need to like one of those elements otherwise there's a good chance you're not doing the thing for yourself, but because someone else is giving you the reason.

Do try though, because you won't know until you do.

I believe this belongs under the term Perfectionist Dilemma, as defined by Adam Miller [1]:

   The perfectionist dilemma is when a creator values the quality of a finished product, such to the extent that it inhibits their ability to iterate, change, and even produce. For many, it’s the ultimate writer’s block, invoking a fear that the finished product isn’t or won’t be as originally intended.

I totally agree with this. I believe it's an instinct feeling, so I'm accepting it as it is.

_________________________

1. https://medium.com/@thatadammiller/the-perfectionist-dilemma...

If the substance of the bad review hurts, it means you've communicated something clearly enough that it was easy to pick apart. If you understand and accept the criticism about how you were wrong, now you have a better chance of being right.

This is Hillary Rettig's specialty; she largely focuses on being kind to yourself, and getting out of your own ass. The world isn't ending when you fail.

https://hillaryrettigproductivity.com/the-seven-secrets-of-t...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE

Opinion: having seen this with many friends I think the author does good to acknowledge it, but the main thing to figure out is why they're writing. To be prolific at writing does not need to imply prolific at publishing.

I've actually started to write these review style comments because far too often the articles posted here don't have substance and interesting debates happen around bad data. So I wanted to see a change and critique the content not just the general concepts behind it. I now write more without having to accept my contributions are significant. But also create a network effect where friends read my reviews instead of being swayed by the upvotes and comment sizes, or worse the algorithm.

Don't worry about being good enough or what other people will think. The truth is almost nobody even cares.

"The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind." - Albert Einstein

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." - Stephen King

In other words unplugging, making time to read books, and allowing yourself to be bored are all good ways to stimulate the creative mind.

When everything seems like a elephant... start with small bites.

And get a good way into the elephant before you start measuring how well you are doing the eating.

The solution might be to use the internet less and enjoy the offline life some more, not to "overcome the hurdle".

He's one of the few people I've seen address what I think is the key difficulty with this sort of stuff: that you can think think that you're addressing procrastination/perfectionism when actually you are engaging in it (with a target of fixing your procrastination/perfectionism). It's a difficult situation to break out of, because it seems like any effort to break-out would necessarily have this sort of grasping, but I think he (and Buddhist meditation) talk a lot about that key challenge.

It helps you learn your own thought patterns and understand whether your logic is sound or not.

And you're right, getting started is the name of the game. Someone brilliant once said: beating "procrastination" is really just imagining yourself starting the task, instead of being in the middle of it or finishing it.

Instead of picturing the document full of paragraphs after writing for several hours, what does it look like for you to sit down at your desk or couch to write? Do you need coffee first? What's a good motivator for getting started? Can you find a new trigger to motivate you, like a snack? Some people like to reward themselves after doing a task, which can help, but I find myself saying: "Ooh, I'm going to brew some coffee before I start" and that gets me excited to follow through with whatever I set out to do.

If you fall off the bandwagon, returning to the activity is tedious. First lines feel like hard work, as if you were a totally unfit person trying to climb a steep hill.

Then it gets slowly better and if you can persist and write for several days, you are "in the flow" again.

The solution: do things that you really believe people need. Then you owe it to them to find out if you actually are “good enough”, and you don’t care what others think because all you care about is whether the people who need it are happy with it.

I've tried that. I've tried shunting out everyone else's opinions. But then of course, if you lock me in a room with me, myself, and I, you now have 3 of my biggest critics all in the same room.

I don't really care what others think, never really did, and none of these anti-procrastination or anti-perfectionism pieces help when it's my own standards that I'm not meeting.

I'm doing something similar with reading – 50 pages minimum everyday. I've read more books in the last 4 months than in the last 4 years by just keeping the streak alive.

It hasn’t really gotten better since then even though I’ve built even more cool stuff since then (hell, I even was #1 on HN for a whole day earlier this year).

[0]: https://www.kai-sassnowski.com/post/never-good-enough/

This is one of the reasons I took the dates off of my posts (even though I think they might be useful to readers).

Naturally, I ended up not even attempting doing anything, because the punishment for not doing something and making a mistake was the same.

I ended up getting a great job that I was really happy to land. But I only applied sporadically because just the thought of having to endure the slog was mentally painful.

Fear of what others might think didn’t stop me from building effective automation at the command line. It prevented me from publishing my work on GitHub. It took being in the job market to push me past that as I wanted to let my work speak for itself for technical reviewers during the screening process.

On a different note, present-tense me is always harassing future me with ambitious plans set as reminders. The sense of failure from constantly pushing them off is demoralizing. Some of that came from depression (I’m in treatment now) and some was a byproduct of being a high-achieving alcoholic. The latter sapped my mental fortitude and turned me into a passive streaming consumer. Each time I quit drinking, projects abound as my mind clears up.

Apologies for trembling a bit. Procrastination is one of my greatest challenges, now that I’ve corrected so many other self-sabotaging behaviors. It’s one that I still haven’t really begun to figure out how to address. But hey, I’m doing pretty well otherwise, so there’s that.

Thank you friend..

An ever present sense of pressure, feeling imposter syndrome and that bleeding into self criticism and anxiety is 100% fixable, and this information needs to be much wider distributed within society.

Dr. Aaron Beck and Dr. David Burns introduced the concept of “cognitive distortions” - they identified various methods humans use to lie and deceive themselves in their self conversations.

Dr. Burns publishing of a book titled “Feeling Good” that kick started the entire Cognitive Therapy movement, which is the idea that one can talk themselves out of unhappiness with the right guidance.

It is all about learning how to identify self deception; once one learns how to be truthful in your own self conversation, the emotions and unrealistic expectations fall away leaving a more stable and logical individual.

Here’s a summery, but be careful searching this topic online as the “fraudster community” loves to prey on people seeking self help information.

Filtering. We take the negative details and magnify them while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation. For instance, a person may pick out a single, unpleasant detail and dwell on it exclusively so that their vision of reality becomes darkened or distorted.

Polarized Thinking (or “Black and White” Thinking). In polarized thinking, things are either “black-or-white.” We have to be perfect or we’re a failure — there is no middle ground. You place people or situations in “either/or” categories, with no shades of gray or allowing for the complexity of most people and situations. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

Overgeneralization. In this cognitive distortion, we come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or a single piece of evidence. If something bad happens only once, we expect it to happen over and over again. A person may see a single, unpleasant event as part of a never-ending pattern of defeat.

Jumping to Conclusions. Without individuals saying so, we know what they are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, we are able to determine how people are feeling toward us. For example, a person may conclude that someone is reacting negatively toward them but doesn’t actually bother to find out if they are correct. Another example is a person may anticipate that things will turn out badly, and will feel convinced that their prediction is already an established fact.

Catastrophizing. We expect disaster to strike, no matter what. This is also referred to as “magnifying or minimizing.” We hear about a problem and use what if questions (e.g., “What if tragedy strikes?” “What if it happens to me?”). For example, a person might exaggerate the importance of insignificant events (such as their mistake, or someone else’s achievement). Or they may inappropriately shrink the magnitude of significant events until they appear tiny (for example, a person’s own desirable qualities or someone else’s imperfections).

Personalization. Personalization is a distortion where a person believes that everything others do or say is some kind of direct, personal reaction to the person. We also compare ourselves to others trying to determine who is smarter, better looking, etc. A person engaging in personalization may also see themselves as the cause of some unhealthy external event that they were not responsible for. For example, “We were late to the dinner party and caused the hostess to overcook the meal. If I had only pushed my husband to leave on time, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Control Fallacies. If we feel externally controlled, we see ourselves as helpless a victim of fate. For example, “I can’t help it if the quality of the work is poor, my boss demanded I work overtime on it.” The fallacy of internal control has us assuming responsibility for the pain and happiness of everyone around us. For example, “Why aren’t you happy? Is it because of something I did?”

Fallacy of Fairness. We feel resentful because we think we know what is fair, but other people won’t agree with us. As our parents tell us when we’re growing up and something doesn’t go our way, “Life isn’t always fair.” People who go through life applying a measuring ruler against every situation judging its “fairness” will often feel badly and negative because of it. Because life isn’t “fair” — things will not always work out in your favor, even when you think they should.

Blaming. We hold other people responsible for our pain, or take the other track and blame ourselves for every problem. For example, “Stop making me feel bad about myself!” Nobody can “make” us feel any particular way — only we have control over our own emotions and emotional reactions.

Shoulds. We have a list of ironclad rules about how others and we should behave. People who break the rules make us angry, and we feel guilty when we violate these rules. A person may often believe they are trying to motivate themselves with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if they have to be punished before they can do anything. For example, “I really should exercise. I shouldn’t be so lazy.” Musts and oughts are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When a person directs should statements toward others, they often feel anger, frustration and resentment.

Emotional Reasoning. We believe that what we feel must be true automatically. If we feel stupid and boring, then we must be stupid and boring. You assume that your unhealthy emotions reflect he way things really are — “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”

Fallacy of Change. We expect that other people will change to suit us if we just pressure or cajole them enough. We need to change people because our hopes for happiness seem to depend entirely on them.

Global Labeling. We generalize one or two qualities into a negative global judgment. These are extreme forms of generalizing, and are also referred to as “labeling” and “mislabeling.” Instead of describing an error in context of a specific situation, a person will attach an unhealthy label to themselves. For example, they may say, “I’m a loser” in a situation where they failed at a specific task. When someone else’s behavior rubs a person the wrong way, they may attach an unhealthy label to him, such as “He’s a real jerk.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded. For example, instead of saying someone drops her children off at daycare every day, a person who is mislabeling might say that “she abandons her children to strangers.”

Always Being Right. We are continually on trial to prove that our opinions and actions are correct. Being wrong is unthinkable and we will go to any length to demonstrate our rightness. For example, “I don’t care how badly arguing with me makes you feel, I’m going to win this argument no matter what because I’m right.” Being right often is more important than the feelings of others around a person who engages in this cognitive distortion, even loved ones.

Heaven’s Reward Fallacy. We expect our sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if someone is keeping score. We feel bitter when the reward doesn’t come.

References:

Beck, A. T. (1976). Cognitive therapies and emotional disorders. New York: New American Library. Burns, D. D. (2012).

Feeling good: The new mood therapy. New York: New American Library. Leahy, R.L. (2017).

Cognitive Therapy Techniques, Second Edition: A Practitioner’s Guide. New York: Guilford Press. McKay, M. & Fanning, P. (2016).

Self-Esteem: A Proven Program of Cognitive Techniques for Assessing, Improving, and Maintaining Your Self-Esteem. New York: New Harbinger Publications.

But as I'm writing, the words are full of meaning, to just me, and I'm really saying something honest that I know is honest. After a while though, they seem dead.

So I write all the time (literally, and all over the place too) and I don't really care to share it because the words I've written aren't even all that impressive to me - it's more how I feel about the words I'm writing.

Or maybe I'm just saying that. I feel like when people say (share with others) that they think something, it's actually just a ploy to trick themselves into thinking that way - because being the person that would genuinely think that way is an attractive thing for them.

What can I say.

1. Trouble writing because you want something perfect:

Write crap, sit down and tell yourself I'm going to write one line, that's it. Just one line. But do it everyday.

2. Care too much about what others think:

If others perception of what you write is hindering you, just don't share everything you write. In this early a stage the point is to get good. Occasionally you'll write something that you'll be really proud of, share that. Not every word that comes out of our heads is pure magic, we all think and write a lot of crap. Welcome.

People-pleasers often do things because other people would like them more if they did these things. As such, the reward for work like writing a blog article is positive external reinforcement/approval or minimising the risk of confrontation, disapproval, or even aggression. If their work pleases few people (not enough readers), they may feel like it wasn't worth doing, or if their work attracts criticism, they may feel guilt or shame for doing it. Fear of these consequences fuels procrastination.

Writing should be about the innate purpose of writing. It is to learn, to express yourself, to communicate. If one wishes to do these things, then there is almost never procrastination, as these actions always bring only positive rewards. There is no negative outcome to learning, to expressing yourself in written form, and communicating. Sure, the type of things you learn, express, or communicate could bring some negative consequences, but those actions on their own do not. They bring good results and feel good to do.

Perfectionism exaggerates the expectations one would put on themselves and their work. So people-pleasing may become people-impressing, people-delighting, and people-sweeping-off-their-feet. Anything less may bring the shame, guilt, and disappointment, and then "procrastination" becomes pretty much guaranteed. Because it's not really procrastination, it is a natural and very rational decision to not engage in activities that would bring only a bad outcome. Humans, generally, really don't want to hurt themselves. We learn not to touch the hot stove, just as we learn to not do things that don't meet our (sometimes delusional high) expectations.

Everything in procrastination is a lot more logical and explainable than it may seem. People-pleasing/conflict avoidance + perfectionism combo is common in tech workers. This has taken me decades to learn, now it helps the programmers I train, and I hope it helps you. Of course, everyone's life is a bit different, so don't have an unreasonable expectation that what I said applies to you 100%. It may only apply 20% and still be helpful.

godspeed

And then once the issue has been identified, the next thing to do is seek help. One of the great lies that everyone believes is that nobody understands me. I’m on my own. I have to fix this myself.

Bullshit.

So whether you just talk to a friend, attend a support group, pay for professional help, etc., these are all very effective at helping those who desire change to actually change.

  If I had to sum up the reason in one word, it would be laziness.

What is 'laziness' when applied to something that you clearly want to do? How can someone want something, yet simultaneously choose to not want it? Turns out the answer is simple, and the nerds have known it since 1801[1]: you don't exist. Your continuous, unified self is an illusion brought about for instrumental reasons.

Treat yourself like a system to be optimized, not an ineffable soul to be brought away from vice through logic. If you were tasked with improving a malfunctioning software system, you'd be laughed out of the room for starting with "well, clearly, the system is just sinful, and choosing to make mistakes."

[1]: Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, Chapter I.2.II.1: "Of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason"

  Now to these conceptions relate four paralogisms of a transcendental psychology, which is falsely held to be a science of pure reason, touching the nature of our thinking being. We can, however, lay at the foundation of this science nothing but the simple and in itself perfectly contentless representation “i” which cannot even be called a conception, but merely a consciousness which accompanies all conceptions. By this “I,” or “He,” or “It,” who or which thinks, nothing more is represented than a transcendental subject of thought = x, which is cognized only by means of the thoughts that are its predicates, and of which, apart from these, we cannot form the least conception. Hence in a perpetual circle, inasmuch as we must always employ it, in order to frame any judgement respecting it. And this inconvenience we find it impossible to rid ourselves of, because consciousness in itself is not so much a representation distinguishing a particular object, as a form of representation in general, in so far as it may be termed cognition; for in and by cognition alone do I think anything. 

For the more empirically minded that are understandably resistant to such an unnatural conception, try to find discussions of "laziness" in these articles. I'd be surprised:

https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/executive-function

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/23224-executi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_dysfunction

The only thing that has worked for me to overcome my crippling fear of writing shitty blogs on the Internet, is to write more shitty blog posts.

I write every day, publish every day, send them to my email list, every day.

90% of them are crap. Next year I hope 80% of them will be crap. And so on.

I have also noticed that when I send a particularly crappy one, I don’t get a lot of unsubscribe or hate, because people just wait for the next one. I’m guessing the 3500 people on my list generally want to receive them, or they would leave.

Most of them are crappy in particular ways: two personal, too broad, too vague, too long, Too $hort, two philosophical, two tactical… You get the idea.

Publishing often allows me to try a wide variety of approaches, lengths, styles, tones, topics, without fear that I am doing “wrong.“

If you want to connect, drop me a line at marcus@marcusblankenship.com. Always happy to support a fellow writer.