To Stop Procrastinating, Look to Science of Mood Repair | Hacker News Reader

To Stop Procrastinating, Look to Science of Mood Repair

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238 pointssushirain66 comments

This is basically a stripped-down article version of The Now Habit [0], without the good bits, such as guilt-free play, the idea that you should set aside time to do whatever without constantly thinking "I should be working", or the Unschedule, where you mark down the times you actually did good work.

[0]: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination...

Can you expand on the "Unschedule" bit or link to some reading?

Keeping track of what I've worked on time-wise during a day is something I've attempted many times and it has never taken. Perhaps there is something I am missing.

Unschedule is a reverse psychology trick - a schedule where you fill in the play, not work. Being in the gap between periods of play motivates you to start working. Also, google it.

I have not actually tried Unschedule so I cannot really recommend it but I have read "The Now Habit" and it is the most high-level anti-procrastination book. It goes straight to the root causes of procrastination, IMHO.

That's actually more like the theory behind guilt-free play. With the Unschedule, you mark any completely unavoidable block of time (meetings, meals, sleep etc). Whenever you happened to have done a half-hour of completely focused work, you mark it. This lets you a) spot patterns in when you work best (e.g. I seem to do my most focused work on a Tuesday morning for no apparent reason), and it gets you thinking "It's 2pm, I have a meeting at 3, I could get this small bit of work done".

I would also recommend Getting Things Done; even if you don't subscribe to the entire method, there are bits that gel quite nicely with the Now Habit; the bit about just starting which this article also touches on falls nicely into place with GTD's "next action" workflow.

You can download a summary of the book here (in mobi i.e. Kindle format): http://www.amazon.com/Summary-Strategic-Overcoming-Procrasti....

also can't go wrong with Brian Tracy on such topics

http://www.amazon.com/Eat-That-Frog-Great-Procrastinating/dp...

This is also a basic Getting Things Done principle: do first whatever is currently in front of your head and constantly nags.

Motivation isn't an eternal flame waiting to be discovered, it can be a daily practice of reminding similar to showering and eating, if we don't do it, our thoughts and feelings tend to stink.

This article stuck out to me in providing relatively clear and immediately applicable strategies that could be a lot closer to a first principles of addressing procrastination.

Knowledge is not power, acting on knowledge is. Remembering to remind yourself to imagine the future feeling of accomplishment, building momentum with small items, and practicing forgiveness might be a realer challenge for many.

An interesting question that this article leads me to wonder is, how do others here remind themselves of their big picture, their why, that leads them to keep their flywheel spinning?

Motivation isn't an eternal flame waiting to be discovered, it can be a daily practice of reminding similar to showering and eating

Definitely

This is a cool perspective! It reminds me of "sleep hygiene"

Im only posting this because it annoys me that I thought it.

"Knowledge is not power, acting on knowledge is."

At first, I totally agreed. Thought I'd tuck it away as a keeper, a small pearl of wisdom. A good thing, right?

But then the bloody NSA thing floated in to my my mind and ruined it. They have knowledge in the form of all that data they slurp. They haven't acted on the vast majority of it, but many people, including the sort of people the NSA are unlikely to ever be even vaguely interested in, have changed their behavior as a direct result of knowing what the NSA has and what could be done with it. So, NSA does have power from knowledge they are not acting on.

Shame, because I do know what you are getting at.

What they're collecting is information. Their knowledge is in how to collect all of it, and access it. That's where they're taking action.

Good critical thinking, though you can view knowledge as the method of slurping the data NSA slurped and acting on knowledge as the slurping process itself.

Interesting.

I have difficulties with procrastination as well. I don't recall having met anyone in our realm who says they don't have some difficulties with it.

Generally, I agree with what the article is saying. I have found my own ties to procrastination and emotion; specifically anxiety, which the article touched on.

I think the suggested approach from the article is missing something that I have found to be important for personal growth and also applicable to startups: you must be able to measure your progress. The process of measuring the progress should be easy, if not automatic, and the ability to digest the measured progress should be just as easy.

My blog post from last week[1] shares my personal experience with how I've implemented the approach of measuring (and hopefully defeating) anxiety tied to my procrastination. I go about describing my process to turn those anxieties into actionable and measurable goals that sort of turned into my resolutions for the year.

[1] - http://randomdrake.com/2014/01/02/destroying-personal-anxiet...

The irony of all these procrastination articles appearing on HN is not lost on me. :-) For better or worse, the "Just get started" approach works best for me.

Well, it's a very well targeted group, and easy to reach. What's not to like?

I am reminded of a simple diagram a therapist drew for me (on a whiteboard, no less): a triangle connecting "mood" to "thought" to "behavior" illustrating how the human mental state is a feedback system and that you can adjust one thing by applying pressure to another.

Sure, it is simple and obvious, but seeing it visualized that way, coupled with the idea of "mood hygiene" was helpful to me.

Sounds interesting. Could anyone please point to more literature along these lines?

The general concept is called "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy" or just CBT. One of the classic CBT workbooks (specifically for depression) is "Mind Over Mood"

http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Over-Mood-Change-Changing/dp/0898... I'm sure if you look you could find other books that are a little more academic than instructional, if that's what you're after.

Edit to add: Even though it looks like it might be, this isn't soft touchy-feely self-help bullshit. CBT has been proven as an effective treatment for things like depression. There's real science here.

The Now Habit, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy are several popular works in this area.

Now Habit and Feeling Good both address the feedback loop we create in our own mind. Not the external pressure of life, but the internal dialogue we create around it. 7 Habits is about action steps and asking yourself "What should I really be doing."

And, for a more "runway level" approach to borrow the phrase from the next one: Getting Things Done.

EDIT: I was just about to add CBT, but I see someone beat me to it. Feeling Good is by one of the early practitioners of CBT.

Feeling good by David Burns is good, but you kind of have to buy in to it. Otherwise the tone and language can seem California fluffy.

Did you know that a study was done around the "Feeling Good" book, and that it was shown that merely reading it was way more effective vs. depression than antidepressants?!

(Unfortunately, I don't have the details in front of me and couldn't pull them up quickly via Google. Maybe someone else can provide a link).

The claims are noted in the 20th anniversary version of the book.

I believe the biggest difference between medicine and reading was relapse rate rather than a big difference in how much improvement people saw.

I believe them. They're persistent strategies.

CBT helped me beat my depression, and overcome my addiction. Your mind is a powerful tool once you learn to take advantage of it!

One of the causes of procrastination is perfectionism. The fear of not meeting your own high standards probably affects HN readers more than anything else.

I just made the same comment. This article may help: http://coastalcenter.org/overcoming-perfectionism/ .

Dr. Pychyl advises procrastinators to "just get started, and make the threshold for getting started quite low."

That's like telling a depressed person to just feel better. I've tried a lot of things to help with procrastination but very little works, this is just another thing to try that maybe will or won't work.

Also, personally, I've never had the "suffering" from failing when I put things off, so it's hard to believe that this method would work for me :(

I see your point, however I don't think the advice is necessarily bad. For example, I put the world's easiest stuff on my todo list first -- something like "start the dev server" or "fix that typo". It's so easy that I can convince myself to do it, yet it gets me into "work mode".

Yeah you're right, but I think this doesn't work quite as well for the larger projects which are the crux of most procrastination issues.

Well, that's the trick. (Serial procrastinator here. Hello!) You can't think of a large project as a large project. Otherwise you'll never get it done. It's impossible by definition, because a larger project is a composite of a number of smaller tasks. So sometimes you end up having to trick yourself with "fix a typo" or "change this class name" or w/e. It has to be small and stupid enough that the activation cost is as low as possible.

Easier said than done, of course. Did I mention I'm procrastinating?

Good point :)

Of of the things I "trick" myself with is "you don't have to start working on it now, just look at the task list and split a couple of them into smaller sub tasks".

If I'm in a mood for putting things off, this provides an "excuse" that at the same time eventually results in a list that's fine-grained enough to convince myself to "just knock off a couple". Once I've then started, it's a lot easier. Sometimes it can lead to ludicrously detailed lists...

In particular for large projects it works very. I decide to work on it for only 15 minutes, doing something simple like making a folder with a text document with a list of things that needs to be done for the project. After that I take a decent break feeling good about myself before I start with the next 15 minutes.

That's the problem. I had some suffering from procrastination. Suffering does not exactly helps against it. A self reinforcing feedback loop so to say.

The Now Habit has solid advice. But it takes a lot of effort to implement that advice.

Get yourself together first. Sleep! A minimal Schedule! Rituals! Build a structure for yourself. If you fail here assess yourself and build up a structure for your in small steps from there. This works for me. If it does not work re-examine the situation, adapt. You need a minimal structure before you can even start to working on yourself.

Learn about stress and how it affects your mind and your body.

The basic idea is to switch your mind into a more mindful state so you can act conscious. You don't need meditation for that. That is in my experience too complicated if you have bigger issues. But these mindful moments. Work towards them. Their effects multiply.

Nothing will work without effort. That's a sad truth but a little momentum (even if it is external) can go a long way.

No need to be perfect. No need to aspire some vague world class. Just do the next logical thing that needs to be done. If this thing is to big, divide and conquer. Iterate.

Ah well... honestly would be nice if my words would help. Without being able to act upon it's all just talking and no walking.

Thanks nisa, I actually own the Now Habit, but haven't read it... I bet this is common :P

Since getting a Jawbone UP, I'm pretty rigorous about my sleep as I was able to get real data showing when/how sleep affects me and I have been able to optimize the right amount of sleep and when the best windows for waking up are, it's been a great help in building a better structure for my day-to-day.

I'm really self aware, I can tell when I am stressed (though this took work to develop, I wonder if that's generally true, I didn't know what stress was, or rather, I couldn't identify it in myself until I was about 27).

Everything does fall apart when there are strong external stressors that cannot be remedied with even your own hard work, but that's a separate issue I think.

> Everything does fall apart when there are strong external stressors that cannot be remedied with even your own hard work, but that's a separate issue I think.

For me that's exactly it. I have yet to find something that works. I don't know. Not giving a fuck does not work for me.

Anxiety, which is at the core of procrastination according to the article, is not like depression. Making small progressive advances builds confidence and eventually leads to recovery. The most effective treatments for anxiety (CBT, exposure therapy etc.) are based on learning to work through the discomfort.

Yep, I used a bad metaphor when referring to depression, you are right.

I've had luck recently with the Pomodoro technique. Actually, switching to Vitamin R2 on Mac which lets you adjust Pomodoro lengths - sometimes if doing 1/2 hour feels daunting I'll start with 10 minutes, or even start by allocating myself 1/2 hour to do something trivial - feels great when you can mark it as done in a fraction of the time.

Ditto, when I can maintain the attention span, pomodoro works wonders for me. Thanks for the tip on Vitamin R2, I hadn't heard of it. For me, I actually would prefer longer Pomodoros, sometimes the distraction cost of starting another timer when I'm mid task feels too high.

>Also, personally, I've never had the "suffering" from failing when I put things off, so it's hard to believe that this method would work for me :(

That's the worst. A lot of people with ADHD (myself included) find that the stress response of an impending deadline is an extremely effective medication. It's a horrible way to live, but it reinforces itself by getting results.

That said, "just get started" is the closest thing to useful advice this article offers. Thinking about how good you'll feel when you finish a task barely qualifies as a "strategy", thinking about how bad you'll feel if you don't finish the task is exactly the kind of automatic response that causes procrastination, and "easy things first" is the kind of behavior that quickly leads to a todo-list you can't even bare to look at.

I just took the small comics from the sidebar, and put them as my desktop background image. I find they give particularly short but useful advice as to how to proceed once procrastination attempts to strike.

Good idea. I think I'll do the same.

I was pretty disappointed in this article. Rather than offering any new insight or techniques, it was just a reiteration of well-known techniques, each of which I've personally found to be barely helpful at best, and counter-productive at worst. The "time travel" technique in particular is actually just my default behavior, and only serves to reinforce my ugh fields.

Beyond that, all the article offers is a piece of jargon to name the obvious motivation behind procrastination: doing something to distract you from an unpleasant obligation.

This is very primitive advice.

We should meditate on why surfing Facebook is "bad mood repair" but forgiving yourself is "good mood repair." If it's bad to feel good, maybe forgiving yourself is just another way to dodge your responsibilities? The advice presented in the article offers no escape from this psychological tangle, except projecting yourself into an imagined future, where your present work is done -- but you don't feel any more like working (so start now).

The truth is, feeling good only helps. You should feel as good as possible, and make time for the things you enjoy. Be understanding with yourself, and feel free to just watch TV sometimes. At the same time, dial down your anxiety and worry. This is helped by not racing to react when you feel anxious -- to distract or fix or rationalize -- but just breathing deeply and carrying as best you can. Finally, get in touch with who you are helping now, who you are being now, how you are serving your values and what's important to you now, and what progress you can make now -- not in the future. Get in touch with your motivations and what you care about. If you don't care enough about something in your life, try not doing it. You can choose your life and your work (at least, once you get out of school). Don't clean your car, then. Oh, that bothers you? Enough to clean a car? Sit with your anxiety for a bit and observe it without reacting. It will pass if you face it head on.

Time management is also a whole skill unto itself, like math or small talk. It takes practice. There are no bad activities (among the usual ones cited, like surfing the Internet), only bad uses of time. And you're in charge of your time. What do you want to achieve with it? If your ideal life is to sit around all day and you can afford it, go for it.

I'm so bad with procrastinating, in fact I'm avoiding work right now! I've found virtually all the books and blog posts useless, but this one really made me think differently.. http://www.amazon.com/Self-Discipline-10-days-Thinking-Doing...

Title should read: "To Stop Procrastinating, Get Off Hacker News"

Actually, I had a lot more productive day when HN was down then when I'm reading the wall street journal's 1500 words on the science of mood repair, plus all the comments on it. And participating in writing my own.

Smite thee, heretic!

Definitely some good stuff in there, a lot of those are techniques that I've discovered on my own. But the big problem in talking about procrastination is that it's caused by so many different things. It might be anything from small fears to 30,000 foot problems in your life which may intractable in the short term. Assuming no true pathology, the key is really self-awareness and stopping the productivity drumbeat long enough to peel back a few of the top layers of your own psychology.

No book has helped me overcome procrastination more than Steven Pressfield's "The War of Art":

http://www.amazon.com/The-War-Art-Through-Creative/dp/193689...

Instead of overanalyzing procrastination, he identifies the invisible but real force of Resistance and how to deal with it.

EDIT: grammar

If you liked that, check out his follow up - Turning Pro. I read the second book first & loved it; thought The War of Art was a liiiittle bit self-helpy.

What I took away from those two books were that the /only thing/ that will help you is sitting your ass in the chair and doing the fucking work.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'm reading it now and I'm liking it so far (I've read "Do the Work" and I didn't like it as much). I agree that The War of Art is a little bit self-helpy, but I got a lot of value from the other non-self-helpy part.

In my case procrastination is/was a symptom of perfectionism. This article was an eyeopener for me: http://coastalcenter.org/overcoming-perfectionism/ .

I find some of this advice to be really silly.

Telling someone with procrastination issues to "Just get started" or in other words "Stop procrastinating" seems as effective as telling someone with a smoking habit to "Just stop smoking".

Putting off a cigarette for ten minutes is better than smoking it right away and surely achievable.

"time-management consultants"

Wow, I wonder what it takes to become one.

Time.

Bucks:

http://www.davidco.com/organizations/trainer-certification

I put off reading the article for about a day now...

What's bizarre about procrastination is how much it derives from irrelevant past experiences (negative ones) that, in truth, have little or nothing to do with the activity being procrastinated. Some failure or embarrassment that is hardly related to the activity at all gets dredged up, not always consciously, and becomes paralytic.

In the process of doing work, people are generally happy and can even get into a flowful state. That's even true for most people with mood problems-- if they can get themselves there. But the anticipation of work or change or even playful activity like exercise is often an anxiety-ridden negativity-fest. Cleaning an apartment isn't so bad; but the anticipation and feeling of having to do it brings forward all those negative emotions like, "how the fuck did I get to age <X> and still have to do my own cleaning? Why can't I get my goddamn shit together and take ownership of my career?" It's much easier to just do the damn cleaning: even high-status, rich people have to do it sometimes, it's not a big deal. But the mental and social prison of "having to" clean makes that menial task 10 times worse than it really deserves to be.

I think that people have to reprogram themselves to "just do" instead of fussing about how their work will be evaluated and how long it will take and what might go wrong. That kind of nonsense makes it hard to do anything.

My suspicion is that procrastination (like depression) was adaptive to our primordial existences as pack animals in hierarchies that were brutally enforced. Depression (low libido, physical lethargy) is an adaptation to low status and scarcity-- inappropriate to modern life, but it probably helped our ancestors survive periods of transient low status. Procrastination also seems to be something that we evolved to defer ambitions (especially while young, and unable to succeed in a physical fight) during periods of low status so we could survive into better times. It's the "I'm not ready to do that" reflex. It's incredibly maladaptive to modern life-- in which social status is mostly undefined and a little internal confidence can go a long way-- but given our "winner-take-all" society in which most people lose, it's not surprising that it's at epidemic levels.

But who is going to clean your apartment under an open-allocation world utopia?

I do like your idea about the origins of procrastination, but like almost all evolutionary psychology, it is too easy to make up stories to explain things. Occasionally there is something concrete from the fossil record to work from.

Funny how this is the latest research findings. It seems so obvious. I guess we all are so distracted, numb and unconscious we don't even know ourselves anymore.

EDIT: I'm pointing the finger at myself as well.

To stop procrastinating, open HN, see article about procrastination, pause, close window and go back to work.

...then come back to HN to post pithy comment, then go back to work.

Just add it to the read later queue and then go back to work.

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