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Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with the idea that getting past procrastination should (always) be the target.

Mostly because I don't think procrastination is inherently bad. There's a lot of stigma attached to procrastination as it's seen as being "unproductive". But I think procrastination can lead to great insights.

Your brain is telling you that it is not interested in the current task. The question is: Why? Overworked and needs a break? Much more interested in exploring something else? Protecting against the pain of failure?

Investigating the why instead of forcing "overcoming" is quite fruitful in my personal experience.

My guess is "action leads to motivation" might be helpful for solving one of the root causes (likely fear of failure/imposter syndrom) but not all of them.

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I procrastinate a lot on hard tasks and usually it's because I don't yet fully understand the risks with each decision that goes into the design.

I think for younger engineers "fail fast" makes a lot of sense; there's not enough of a foundation of experience to tell right from wrong so the only way to learn is to fail.

For more experienced engineers, there's a greater sense of "I have a sense where this can fail; how do I design around that?"

It's not that a more experienced engineer will know exactly how it fails, but that there are modalities of failure that have been encountered so the goal is to design with some flexibility or optionality in mind. And sometimes, this just requires a bit of "gestation" or "percolation" before carving the path.

I think of it like an experienced sculptor sizing up a block of marble before making the first strike with a chisel. It's a kind of procrastination, but really, its a process of visualizing the path.

Wow, that's a really insightful perspective. I often feel a bit ashamed for reading hacker news or some other IT related post on the net when I know I should be doing some development task. Your description pretty accurately describes the reasons for my procrastination. Thank you.

This is a solid observation.

I'd say that procrastination is bad when it drives you into some unproductive but addictive behavior, like watching silly tiktok videos, etc. It can be actually good if you do "structured procrastination": can't force myself to do task X, but find solace in solving problem Y really neatly. Another approach is to take a walk, do push-ups, etc, anything that changes your focus away from mental tasks, and preferably brings more oxygen to your brain.

Yet another approach is analytical: "I can't stomach doing that thing! But what thoughts or feelings make me loathe it so much? Where do they come from?" Interesting insights can follow.

> It can be actually good if you do "structured procrastination"

This is actually what John Perry, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford calls it. There is even an essay (and a whole website) called "Structured Procrastination" [1]:

> Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

[1] https://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

My expert machinist friend (mold/tool maker) calls it "couch machining". It appears like he isn't working but really in his head he is laying out the entire process from start to finish. Then when he goes to CAM it up it flows very quickly and the entire part is already mostly planned.

I think often people who don't visualize in their head can't grasp this...it appears as inactivity. The reality is it seems to be a hyperactivity...procrastination comes from having too many tasks and directions with unsolved solutions. (in my case...)

Another way to put it I have heard is "Thinking is working". If it doesn't appear like I am working...I am likely thinking.

In a certain large part of the population procrastination is a symptom of mental disorder (like for example ADHD etc.), and often a particularly severe one. Dismissing it as a "benefit" is not constructive.

I suspect that you use word procrastination too general, to include all possible cases. If a person is lazy for 5 minutes or for an hour it's not a procrastination. Procrastination is severe case of inability to do something a person wants to do. And before anyone interjects about "duh, work may be unpleasant", it also extends to ALL other spheres of life. Imagine wanting to play a game and literally not being to force yourself to click Start. Or scrolling saved watch list and not picking anything you want to watch. Stuff like that.

Procrastination and related issues is a severe mental disorder and I'm sick and tired of people normalizing it or dismissing as something good or beneficial.

PS: to rephrase all that above - the answer to the question "Why?" is not exclusively something external (like "not interesting") but often an internal one, a chemical disbalance in a person's brain, some brain structures under- or over-developed etc.

Yeah, maybe there are different types of procrastination, but there's nothing good about my type. If I hadn't procrastinated through my 20s and 30s, I could be retired and spending my 50s fishing instead of working to make a living. I've got enough of a handle on it now that I keep my bosses happy, but it's still a struggle at times, and there are plenty more things I want to do that I may never get around to. It's a bad thing.

That's nice and all but when your procrastination prevents you from doing anything at all for months it doesn't really feel like it's a good thing.

One can model procrastination as a reaction to some form of mental pain. Doing the work hurts one in some way, so one subconsciously finds excuses to do something else instead.

But pain is a valuable signal, and often learning and resolving the root cause of the pain can be more valuable than reaching for the oxycodone to power past it.

I think the same thing applies. Have you been procrastinating for months for example, perhaps because you utterly hate your job? Perhaps you should switch jobs.

I procrastinate all the time, listen to much to your mind or chase the fun stuff only, would not get you traction, probably it’s a distraction, because the mind is lazy. Most of our systems wants to conserve energy or expend at little as possible. Going to the gym in a cold morning is not something that the mind or body is seeking, so listen to the idea of not going would be bad for you. Muscles are lazy too, they just want to chill. But if you make them do a little work, they like it and ask for more. We are weird and we need to force us to do stuff. That’s your job, you command your body

I have always found that when a task becomes difficult to the point of procrastination, that is a sign that the approach to the task needs to be reworked.

The phrase "do something instead of nothing" might be more useful than "action leads to motivation." I have plenty of motivation - but my brain does not always comply when I try to focus on purpose. In such a case, I work on an unrelated task that is easy to engage with. This gives my brain a chance to focus, which begets more focus, until there is enough focus to do so on purpose.

This post and similar advice is aimed at people who feel pain from procrastination. You are not one of them, probably. It's not an inherently bad thing, just like any number of things some, not all, people struggle greatly with (drugs, food, etc.).

I would say that the original poster is intimately familiar with procrastination, because they recognize that the underlying cause of most procrastination is a barrier of some sort. Different people have different combinations barriers, so it can be difficult to recognize someone else's experience.

> Your brain is telling you that it is not interested in the current task. The question is: Why?

I think for a lot of us it's something like: Because it's nonsense busywork that I don't care about. Procrastinating isn't going to help, and it is absolutely bad because it leads to uncompleted tasks and that leads to financial distress. I need to get it done regardless of whether it's going to provide a dopamine hit or not. Best thing to do is to stop thinking about it and get it out of the way so that I can focus on the things I want to do. I'm not overworked, I just don't want to do this task. I am interested in exploring something else but that's not a choice that I have right now. I don't have the privilege of doing whatever I feel like doing. Pain of failure? No, it's not at all something that I'll fail at. It's drudgery avoidance. Unfortunately there's plenty of drudgery that has to be completed.

I find that shutting off one's brain and just slogging through a task leads to work quality on a par with AI slop.

So if one really is as uninterested in the quality of the output as you suggest, perhaps it might actually be better to dump the problem into Claude/Gemini/Cleverbot and just copy/paste/act upon the results verbatim and then mark the checkbox as "done" and move on.

For me personally, the pain of such efforts is ordinarily from making sure that the output is correct when the input is largely guesswork or speculation that always leads to hunting through a morass of poor documentation of some library or seeking a workaround to some irritating problem or rolling the dice on what the risk to various decisions might prove to be over the future: "eh, duct tape this and it ought to hold".

And most notably that doing more of this work correlates to an exponential rise in the volume of similar work that will be required down the road to maintain the same results.

Those are often exactly the time one would be best served by taking a step back and questioning the entire framework that supports the busywork in question. Perhaps starting from scratch or making some huge change would reduce the garbage portions of the effort and keep them from further proliferating?

While I don't disagree with this approach, it only works for some digital tasks. AI won't clean my house or exercise my body or engage in obligatory social interactions. In these cases, just getting it done by shutting off your brain is often the best way to get it going.

Also, it's not all or nothing. You can decide to engage more in the task as it's ongoing, which could contribute to higher quality output. The hard part is usually starting.

Yeah.. for awhile I tried exercising by walking/jogging on a treadmill with headphones watching youtube to keep my brain entertained through the drudgery.. but yeah, one constantly drowns in the noise of being jostled.

For me completely shutting down the brain (when/if I'm even capable of doing so) is just a function that activates sleep. While I haven't tried this while exercising in particular, I have more than learned my lesson from trying it merely standing up and the result is very much falling down.

Well said!

The productivity fetishists want us to hate ourselves for resisting the orders issued by the executive mind. Fuck that.

Why? The answer is easy: the work is pointless corporate bullshit. Not sure if it ever going to hit the prod at all. But they pay huge salary and I need money. Turns out nice things are expensive.

I was going to post something similar until I saw your comment. I completely agree. It's difficult to motivate oneself when one knows the work they are doing is actually not worth doing.

many such as cases, it's clear why. People hate doing task x, because it's not fun nor valuable to them, but need to do because of duty.

I develop apps and after I have completed 80% of the crucial work, the remaining 20% of the work involves boring and brainless stuff like adding in app purchases, adding features like send feedback to developer, asking for reviewing the app, designing the app icon, designing the App Store screenshot, writing the metadata for App Store description etc.

I procrastinate super long on this 20% of boring task even though it could all be done in maybe 2 days.

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