What kind of procrastinator are you? | Hacker News Reader

What kind of procrastinator are you?

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16 pointsgavindonovan14 comments

Missing a key one, which I would self-classify:

The not-sure-what-to-do-so-I'm-not-going-to-do-anything. Your plate is so full of things to do, and none of them are obviously higher priority than others. You could do client work, or you could work on your startup, or you could work on open source. So rather than just picking one thing to doing it, you other things, while trying to figure out which of the real tasks should be done first.

I know I've had moments where I just say, "I don't even feel like figuring out what I want to do, so I'm just going to play video games and go to sleep."

Those are the worst days...

Even worse is when motivational anhedonia develops into a full-blown existential crisis, where you fall into a Bartleby-esque† state of having no desire to do anything whatsoever. You know that you desire happiness in the abstract, but find yourself unsure how to achieve that desired state. You have no micro-desires, only this vague macro-desire, which can lead to an almost intolerable malaise. At that point you've basically crossed the line from "procrastination" to "mild clinical depression."

I'm not really sure why I typed all this out since I don't have much of a conclusion, but I'm going to leave it here in case someone finds this relevant to their own situation.

† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartleby,_the_Scrivener

Wow, your description is pretty much how I have been feeling in that last year or so in a way I could never put into words. Thanks!

i've been trying to force myself to write tests when i'm in that state of mind.

things can always do with improved tests, and i find that starting with the tests is a really gentle way to ease myself into the mind-space of working on a specific bit of code.

Things just follow on from there.

Here's when setting a work-in-progress (WIP) limit is really useful. Don't allow you to have more than say 3 tasks on your plate. Can be painful at first — you can be stuck in all tasks, and not being able to do work at all — but helps so much getting shit done.

This is very accurate to me right now.

On a semi-humoristic note, there's also John Perry's Structured Procrastination theory, which won him the 2013 Ig Nobel prize in literature: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

Basically, be productive by doing important things as a way to procrastinate on even more important things. He wrote it as a humoristic essay but I actually find one of the tips quite useful: instead of trying to beat procrastination by taking on less responsibilities in the hope you'll finally be able to uphold them all, take on more tasks so that even when you'll inevitably fail to do some of them, you'll still have achieved much more than if had challenged yourself less in the first place.

I like some of the tips in this article. Notably turn off notifications, use email filters, put your phone in the other room. But after years and years of hearing people recommending Neil Fiore's "The Now Habit" I finally picked it up. By far the best piece of writing I've ever found on the subject. It's strange to feel so trapped by one's own procrastination. If you're a procrastinator I hope you find what works for you.

I started reading The Now Habit, but then I put off finishing it. That sounds like a joke, but it's true.

Getting rid of Twitter and only checking RSS feeds once or twice a day (or every few days) helped me a lot, as did disabling all notifications for new emails (no sound, no notification popups, no new message count badges on the icon). These things were all immensely distracting to me.

I also block many sites (including HN sometimes).

But I always find ways to keep procrastinating and nothing ends up really working all that much for the core problem.

I find myself guilty on that last strain of procrastination: feeling so anxious about being late on a deadline that I end up delaying it even more, closing the loop.

Gathering the courage to face the task didn't work so far. Every time I try tackling it I feel it drains so much energy from me that I soon give up, only to feel more guilty afterwards (and with even less disposition to face it from the beginning once again)

You're not alone. But I feel the only way we can make progress is to actually break the cycle, as hard as that may seem.

Get back to you tomorrow on this

Two more possible categories:

1. Waiting until I know that I can work productively on something -- free of distractions or micro-management

2. Waiting until the task vanishes because it wasn't worth doing in the first place

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