No Studying After 5pm: Using Parkinson’s Law to Kick Procrastination’s Ass
blog.seangransee.com
blog.seangransee.com
EDIT: I just tried it. Unable to check a clock, I felt a real urgency to get things done. Very interesting idea.
1. Habits have a trigger and a reward and you'll get nowhere unless you work within this fact.
Yesterday I had some success, I was trying to fix a dumb programming mistake and getting frustrated. Normally that would trigger my usual behaviour of running off to /r/funny or HN to get my little reward of amusement/knowledge. This time however I was mindful of the loop and said to myself that my reward would be the feeling of fixing it and having the tests pass. It worked. I got my head down, fixed the bug, and felt good about myself.
2. People who successfully adhere to a habit change routine, visualize and practice how to deal with "inflection points" upfront. Inflection points here are those tough spots where you are more vulnerable to regressing to your previous behaviour.
I've been having a bit of trouble lately sticking to my habit of getting up at 5am to work on my own stuff (open source and writing a book). Last night I thought about my alarm going off, feeling the cold outside the duvet and having an overwhelming desire to roll over and go back to sleep and visualized myself just getting straight out of bed. Sure enough, this morning my alarm went off and I was out of bed before I was even fully awake.
I think it's going well, however here I am procrastinating by writing a big post on HN, so YMMV :-)
At the moment I've gone through my morning websites, consumed everything I need to, replied to emails I need to, and now this is my second visit to HN ... so it times to make my work environment a clean slate, eliminate all distractions, and focus for a little while... perhaps I'm not awake enough for the focus required though either... |)
My wakeup time is determined by a wriggly 2 year old alarm clock that comes in to the bedroom at roughly the same time every morning (~7am) shouting "WAKE UP MUMMY AND DADDY! WHERE'S MY MILK?" (we're working on the pleasantries). Last night my sleep time was determined by same said wriggly 2 year old alarm clock who has a horrible cough/cold combo disrupting her sleep (and ours) throughout most of the night.
I have to leave the office at a certain time in order to pick her up from nursery, no chance of running late or getting someone else to do it. That hard cut-off to the end of my working day is very motivating as I know I don't have any buffer to stay a bit later to finish off something I'd said I'd do by the end of the day.
I got in to the office this morning and within 2 minutes I was programming away where I'd left off the night before. The commute in (cycling[1] usually, train sometimes) is where I do the majority of thinking and planning for the day ahead.
There's very little email where I work and I keep my distractions in check with willpower and Leechblock (not got long left to post this).
I definitely believe that I'm more productive in these 8 hours a day (9 if you include commuting) than I was in the days where I'd be 'working' for 12-14 hours.
1. There's my hour a day exercise too.
tldr: student life has a lot of freedom and perks over working a job, nanananana.
I'm now faced with either getting a little more sleep, getting to read a book series I started recently, trying to get some of my russian studies done, or maybe actually learning something about programming today.
I think I developed more as a person when I was working a 9-5. I never even got to experience the freedom of academics, because I couldn't afford to go to college.
Fuck it, I'll read another article about monad transformers and then pass out.
I went from grad school to Google in nyc, where the working culture supported going home by around 6pm. That felt like the opposite of grad school, where I regularly slept in my office.
Running stats on our version control, I do about 4000 checkins a year, the next highest is 1000, and most team members average about 300.
That being said, my focus is horrible. Using the pomodoro technique has helped me in the past, there's something about not being allowed to multitask that means you can avoid context switching off of a difficult task to something easier (eg: the coding equivalent to cleaning off your desk).
My other problem is a willingness to work overtime. It's one thing to do it for deadlines, but because I internalize monthly deadlines I always have something that I think is so important that it Has To Be Done Now.
This could be skewed. I'd imagine entrepreneurs who are already successful have the mental peace to order their life and make time for these things. Those without success will be overly concerned with making something work and figure they can deal with physical and mental health when they have achieved success. So the statistics or things you are reading may look like there is a causal relationship between exercise, sleep --> success, but it is really success --> exercise, sleep.
If you really are studying with perfect productivity, then you need to ask yourself if you are triaging your time properly. For instance, say you have three tests: one easy, one medium, and one hard. Do you study equal amounts for all of them? Probably not. If you have already spent seven hours studying for the hard test, how much will one more hour help you? Maybe an 85 to and 87? But then if you spent that hour on the medium subject maybe your grade would jump up from an 80 to a 90. Thus your time would better be allocated to the medium test.
There is an economic concept about this though I cannot remember its name. Marginal Returns and the Law of Diminishing Returns, I think.
Thing is, i cant tell myself anything if its simply not true. I cant force myself to get everything done by 5pm because i simply dont have to, i can do it later and i know it even if that means stress and doing it in the last hours.
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/ase/schelling_fences_on_slippery_slo...
I think it's a lot about being motivated and excited about what you do. If it feels really interesting, the work is basically doing itself. If I've got other things on my mind (which I have lately), everything feels like a chore. Still have to do it though. The same even applies to my personal projects to a lesser degree.
I've found that achieving a consistent sleep and exercise schedule has been extremely difficult without any real commitments in the morning. I think one of the best things you can do to stick to a schedule is to commit yourself to something at 9am every morning.
That said -- the evenings are hard not to indulge. Weed and alcohol are pretty hard to resist... got any tips for that? :)
Get some self control.
Try finding something you'd rather be doing than drinking with people in the evenings. But that's also not very good advice. I'm not sure if there is good advice for this, but I was in a frat...
Personally, what keeps me from procrastinating is that at this point of my school career the work I have to do at home is mostly project based, so I actually find most of it somewhat interesting, unlike the busy-work laden gen-ed courses I was in the first two years (when I did have a big problem with procrastination).
The change needs to happen on a completely different level to get out of the old routines of laziness and inability to focus. I'm talking about some kind of life-changing experience. For example, people being diagnosed with cancer often makes them appreciate life and spend their time more carefully -- or something else that has an impact on our core values and instincts.
You can think of it as the difference between "that square way over there is green" and "that square is covered in tiny blue and yellow dots, with some a few reds ones for good measure".
Our brain performs that compression of "myriad behaviors to broad categorization" automatically, by the way, so we have to drum that mental compression with conscious effort.
It got easier once I moved out of the dorms. I'd have most (if not all) of my work done by supper and finish up a little bit after. I studied Saturdays but not Sundays. That left my nights open for things like irc or setting Red Hat up on my machine.
I found I was a lot less stressed than my friends that played N64 all day and STARTED studying at 8pm.
(Mostly) following this schedule has made me get everything done at least twice as fast, and given me more time to work on jobs and side-projects.
Yep, that's been the story for as long as people have been thinking about success and communicating to others on how success works.
If you work 9 hours a day, exercise for an hour, commute for an hour, and sleep 8 hours, you're left with 5 hours every day.
Real-world tasks that fill those remaining 5 hours - Showering and getting dressed - Working overtime - Eating meals - Random errands and appointments - Shopping for food and preparing meals (could be off-loaded to the weekend)
It seems like you should be able to cram that stuff into 5 hours a day.
I think another factor the OP doesn't factor is time spent with a significant other. This varies from relationship to relationship, or family to family, but the expectations to spend time together can be quite high, and that can cut into personal productivity.
I could only dream about your schedule.
I was thinking, wow, at university I had classes from 8am to about 4pm 4 days a week (Wednesday afternoons were "free")
Evenings were spent cracking the books and in the computer lab when I needed access to resources I couldn't get over the network.
Still managed to work part time.
Tasks can expand to fill the allotted time, that's true. But, conversely, if you don't have enough time to contemplate and to fail, you often don't chose the best route. You do what's familiar rather than what's correct.
My school has three trimesters instead of two semesters, so we have 3 terms of 4 classes each.
Get adequate sleep and exercise Maximize flow time