
Good and Bad Procrastination (2005) - busterc
http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
======
drb311
Putting off an unimportant task to work on an important one isn't
procrastinating. It's prioritizing.

The best bit of this essay is the last 5 paragraphs, how to work on big
things:

1\. Break it down into fun small goals and experiments that get you in the
right direction but offer their own reward.

2\. Let desire and interest pull you to certain activities at certain times.
You're not a computer working through a todo list. Let serendipity happen.

I find having a to do list pushes me to do nothing. The thought of working
through it is just too depressing. Letting desire and interest lead me means
I'm usually doing SOMETHING. Often quite useful things it turns out.

When I look back over the first 15 years of my career I did my best work when
I had no to do list at all.

~~~
e40
Honest question: if you don't have a list, how do you make sure you don't
forget to do some of the stuff?

~~~
visakanv
The point is that "some of the stuff" doesn't matter– the only thing that
matters is that you do the most important thing. Once you've done the most
important thing, you do the next most important thing. As long as you keep
doing that, you're always in the clear.

~~~
e40
Then I won't be giving this to my 9th grader. Everything he's given (by
teachers) must be done.

~~~
drb311
Teaching your 9th grader to prioritize and make his/her own decisions might be
the most useful thing you can do.

------
dasboth
"The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B
procrastination [...] the to-do list is itself a form of type-B
procrastination"

This resonates so much with me. It took a long time to realise that my
specific procrastination problem was type-B (and type-A). It then took another
year or so before I realised that, contrary to a lot of advice out there, to-
do lists are a terrible idea for a remedy.

~~~
roddux
Other than to-do lists (which are a favourite of most 'beat procrastination'
guides that I've read) - what do you find helps?

As a side note; I found this to be a great article on the topic:
[http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-
procrastin...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-
procrastinate.html)

~~~
tjr
Rather than to-do lists, I have found much help with the subtly different
"habit tracking" systems. I personally use this one:
[http://productiveapp.io/](http://productiveapp.io/)

I keep my threshold for daily success low. For example, I have a habit item of
reading a book. All I have to do is read for, say, 15 minutes, and that
suffices for me to click off that I completed the habit for the day, and I can
go back to procrastinating if I like.

But I find that once I get started doing something that I actually want to do
(such as reading a real book rather than surfing the web), then it's pretty
easy to continue doing it for a longer period of time.

~~~
dasboth
I've noticed the same thing, it often boils down to finding a strategy to
'fool yourself' into starting.

------
known
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-
driven_development](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development)
helped me to overcome procrastination

