Why We Procrastinate and How to Stop

I don't think it's that hard. But I did notice that I could give an almost immediate answer the question "An example of a bird is ______", whereas my first reaction to "A bird is an example of ____" was "uff" and just kept on reading the article.

Then I read your comment and I thought, is it really hard? And then I actually tried to get an answer. It was even easier than the first one (I just said "animal" :P).

So I think the article does have a point. It's not that it's harder, our brain's initial reaction makes it look hard. And maybe it's because it's easier to process and deliver concrete information rather than vague or abstract.

On a side note, I wonder if these two questions asked to little kids instead of students would have different results...

Many people really care about stopping smoking, yet they continue saying tomorrow.

This is an oversimplification. I have a project that I care about immensely and still procrastinate on. It's because I want to get it right first time, and spend my time mulling it over instead of just doing it. I'm working on shaking that approach :)

You seem to be dismissing the advice in the article -- take big tasks in small bites. Your advice is good but it doesn't cover all situations. Sometimes the work is just a means to an end.

For example currently I'm working on a side project that I'm procrastinating badly on -- the work is tedious and uninteresting. But I need the project to help pay for home renovations that are important to me. I could do the renovations myself (and I've done it before) but you see I can make 2x or more money per hour than I'd pay a skilled professional to work on my house. In the end, while I appreciate your advice it is only applicable for career decisions.

I think that if people followed your advice academia would essentially be deserted and not only by students but by teachers as well. :)

I don't procrastinate because I don't care, I procrastinate because there are multiple things I care about. A few of those happens to be playing games, reading hacker news, having a god awful many feeds in my newsreader, drinking beer and having more then one project at any time. Although I have the personality type that does things at the end of a deadline and I know people who aren't like that think of us as lazy and unstructured but it's not like that at all. I found this to be extremely insightful once: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

I also doubt there are many (if any) that has a job that's interesting all the time. :)

False. In fact, just about the opposite is true for some people. I don't know if you're a procrastinator, but I am, and one of the things I've discovered about myself is that my procrastination is closely linked with my perfectionism. The things I really care about are things that I want to be perfect, so I put off doing them. Example, let's say I want to redesign my blog. I start off with a couple simple improvements in my mind. However, I really want this redesign to be perfect. Pretty soon, I've turned a small, simple task into a huge project and the burden of accomplishing it is just too large, so I put it off. Do I really care about this redesign? Yeah, I care way too much about it. If I didn't care, I'd just knock it out in a few minutes.

I've since learned that I have to force myself to accept the "good enough" solution, to work in iterations, and to do timeboxing (I use the pomodoro method) so that I just get started on something, without worrying too much about the big picture. Most of all though, it really does come down to just mental discipline, to recognizing when you're putting something off (which itself can be difficult to a life-long procrastinator) and forcing yourself to just do it now. Sadly, like a recovering drug addict, I'm afraid it's something I'll always have to fight against.

A better way to think of it, is that procrastination is a symptom of another problem. You are referring to one potential problem i.e. not actually liking what you are doing. Some of the others responded with the problem being perfectionism, and wanting to do something that they cared about correctly. Right now I am procrastinating from fixing a bug because I cannot think of how to test it adequately and I do not want to just give it to the customer and hope that it works. Procrastination may not be the optimal solution, but it may be much better then just ignoring the problem and pushing ahead with what you think you should be doing.

In most cases, the path to success contains patches of work that's hard to get really excited about.

Of course, this argument is invalid if you're able to focus on the ultimate reward, rather than the task at hand, but I just find that leads to more procrastination.

One personal trait I admire (and don't have) is the ability to just pull yourself together and get an unpleasant task done. This wins many friends and much social capital.

> switch to something you really care

Just who is going to pay me to work on a Free and non-Unixlike operating system? You?

I think it's more likely that procrastination is a result of our internal reward system. Things considered work are not considered fun, and therefore not done. I mean, have you ever heard of a person putting off masturbation? The only things that people procrastinate on are things that don't seem fun.

Procrastination does appear to have evolutionary benefits. If you only hunt when you're hungry, not only are you determined but you're not wasting resources. If I go out every day and kill a deer because I feel like it, and not because I'm hungry (I'd assume a fully grown deer would probably last me more than a week) I'm going to cause myself major problems. Either A) the deer will get wise to me and any deer anywhere will run at the instant sight/smell of a human; or B) I'll kill all the deer and then I'm stuck trying to kill rats for food.

Collecting firewood would likely have a similar problem as option B). When humans get it in their minds to cut down trees for anything other than necessity, historically very bad things have happened to us: the prime example of this is Easter Island. A lesser known example is the Old Kingdom deforestation, which is probably why none of Khufu's descendent's beat his pyramid. The scary thing about both of these incidents, especially Easter Island, is that people would have noticed a rapid increase in wind speeds as the trees disappears, they'd have noticed their crops failing (due to the wind) and yet the island is so small that the person who cut down the very last tree could clearly have seen it was the only tree on the island.

I'd say in your example Og the go-getter would likely have killed off all the major wildlife around him such that he had a multi-mile trek every day to gather food. Instead of Ug the procrastinator, who could probably walk outside and find a deer foraging on the berries he'd been too lazy to pick.

Indeed, I commented it myself a few days ago.

'Distraction from distraction' is my take - don't worry about everything else in your head, just open notepad and start making notes on whatever it is you're trying to put off. You'll forget the rest soon enough :)

I must admit I, too, was expecting another fluffy "just do it" article, but I was surprised to find that this is not one of those.

Rather, they are saying: "If you think about about the concrete, specific steps to doing a task, you will be much more likely to complete it than if you think about the task in general -- and we've done the research to prove it."

This is much better than other procrastination articles, which are generally speculative punditry and attempts to copy well-known successful people.

Agreed, I've been doing that my entire life. I remember at 16 I'd saved up around $1000 by simply never buying anything with my allowance. I don't think my parents were too pleased when I had enough money saved up at 18 to fly to a different continent.

To the people who voted parent up: You do realize you are encouraging comments like this that doesn't add anything to the discussion or the article, right? It's only mildly better than "first".

To the commenter: There's an easy way of saying you found something interesting; vote it up.

EDIT: Oh, I completely failed to consider that it was sarcasm, thanks for pointing that out. I did notice the commenter only had 5 karma and figured he was just new but yeah sarcasm seems more likely.