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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

Fortunately I've the definitive answer to the Procrastination problem, and I want to share it with you:

if you procrastinate you are working on things you don't care. And if you are in this condition the procrastination is the minor of your trouble, you are wasting your professional life. So... switch to something you really care, and for you to procrastinate will be to work on your things, because they are really interesting to you.

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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.

Exactly.

Fantasizing about what it would like to have already finished my Great American Novel/Web Site/Open Source App gives me such a warm and comfortable glow that I am reluctant to spoil it by taking two steps into the project and looking around and saying "OMG this is total crap and I have no idea what to do next".

PS: And yeah, the pomodoro method rocks.

I personally think that you're both right.

I find myself procrastinating at work because what I do for work isn't intellectually engaging, and with tasks that I want to work on for myself (like building my web site) I get hung up on details and make no progress.

Learning to set smaller milestones has helped with the latter, but the former is something I'm stuck with for the moment. My web site is a step to escaping from that grind, but it's going to take time... so I'm taking advantage of the fact that my job isn't sufficiently challenging to require much thought, and therefore saving my energy for things that actually matter, which is everything else. :)

This is absolutely true for me as well. I'll turn something as simple as writing a blog post into a gigantic project because I'm too strict with what I output. If the open source tool I'm working on doesn't perform quite as well as I'd hoped, I have pessimistic visions of it being wholly useless. If a homework problem stumps me, I simply cannot skip to the next problem or else I feel I've been defeated. Pessimism, combined with really caring, is strongly connected to procrastination.

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

> switch to something you really care

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

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 :)

That's not procrastination. That's planning.

The first time you do it, sure :)

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

That's different. They still want the cigarette itself, they just don't want to be someone who wants cigarettes, if you see what I mean. The 'really caring' about stopping applies to a wider scope than the single cigarette you'd have to decline in order to start quitting.

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