Procrastination
Self Developments
- How to make quitting your addiction easier Hacker News
- Procrastinatory Doom Loops Hacker News
- Why Procrastinators Procrastinate—Wait But Why
- How to Beat Procrastination—Wait But Why
- The Procrastination Matrix—Wait But Why
- ADHD wiki—Explaining ADHD with memes
Productivity
Self Development
- Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)–Jakob Greenfeld–Experiments in Entrepreneurship and Learning Hacker News](<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29965957
- Step 1: develop meta-awareness of your state of mind.
- Step 2: pattern-match to identify your mind’s most common modes.
- Step 3: learn to pick activities that match each mode.
Anxiety Procrastination
Taxonomy of Procrastination
Taxum 1: Doing the thing is too unpleasant compared to not doing the thing
Taxum 2: You don’t really believe that doing the thing will work
Sub-taxum A: You don’t think you have the ability.
Sub-taxum B: You don’t think you have a good plan.
Taxum 3: Even if you successfully did the thing, you don’t really think it will matter
Sub-taxum A: You think no one else will care.
Sub-taxum B: You yourself won’t care.
Taxum 4: The timeline is too long
If you want to do a thing and
- you like doing it; and
- you’re sure it will work; and
- you’re sure it will be awesome; and
- you’ll get the benefits quickly;
then it will be easy. So if you’re procrastinating, look for the bottleneck.
Let’s consider the standard tricks
Make doing the thing more pleasant.
Make not doing the thing more _un_pleasant (or impossible).
Work on the thing with others.
Break the thing down into a todo list.
Do a different thing.
Be honest about your motivations for the thing.
Take drugs
5-stages of Grief to Overcome Procrastination
- Denial of the importance or urgency of the task, and denial of my future self also lacking desire and willpower to complete said task in the future.
- Anger that I cannot magically will myself into not procrastinating, or anger that I even have to do the task in the first place.
- Bargaining how far back I can push a task back a.k.a. "I'll have plenty of time to do it tomorrow."
- Depression because I always mismanage my time, overestimate my future abilities, and seem to never learn from the past -- "why do I always do this to myself?"
- Acceptance that I am at the end of my rope, and I have to do the task now or I will face some kind of consequences far worse than actually doing the task itself.
Tips
- Just "spend the next hour" on that thing.
- Vomit writing technique. I will just drag myself to get started no matter how horrible the work I am doing in the beginning. But once I started doing, I won't feel so bad. This basically solved my problem.
- Most of the time it's anxiety. You'd be surprised how easy it is to start doing something when you don't feel any kind of pressure. Getting rid of it is hard work though, sometimes even harder than doing the thing you're procrastinating about.