

The Dangers of Productive Procrastination - ktrgardiner
http://blog.shipify.me/the-dangers-of-productive-procrastination

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bmcleod
Unless the thing I "should" be doing is immediately necessary or massively
more important than the secondary thing I end up doing I'm generally pretty
happy to follow my motivation around.

I normally seem to get back to the important thing when its deadline or reason
for happening actually becomes so important that it really needs to be a
focus.

It might be the issue isn't that you're focussing on the wrong thing, it's
that you stop after having done the first thing. When the code based work
starts closing in on me I start picking targets of what I will do before I'm
allowed to sleep. I can do as many other things as I want, but that has to be
done. I also seem to focus better on boring tasks when I'm tired. It mostly
works.

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pongo000
That was a rather useless blog post. As a lifelong procrastinator, I was
hoping for solutions, not a description of the problem...

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benatkin
Speak for yourself. I didn't find it useless at all.

Knowing is half the battle.

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X-Istence
I have found myself doing this quite often, according to a friend of mine who
is a doctor it could be yet another sign of ADD.

~~~
aangjie
I would call it more like
N.A.D.D(<http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2003/07/10/nadd.html>). I have
seen ADD kids(with experiments being run on them) and realized calling myself
ADD is an exaggeration.

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rgonzalez
Cleaning the room! Been there. I think another major productive distraction is
trying to stay updated with everything about the startup world. Reading hacker
news. Reading about the new startups in 500startups. Checking out my
StartupAdvice list on twitter. What's saying Mark Suster today? New blog post?
What about Brad Feld? Anything new with YC, what is PG posting today? So much
information :):)

I mean all this information is incredibly valuable don't get me wrong. But
still is important to know when to step back and stop reading about other
startups and what is the right way to do things, because otherwise nothing
would get done.

~~~
aangjie
Information and the greed to soak up more... that has been my biggest
distraction so far... working on fixing it.but it's rather hard to observe the
subtle difference between productivity vs reading articles from YN/LinkedIn

~~~
dasil003
Subtle? Unless your title is "Social Media Expert" the difference should not
be subtle.

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splicer
I wish I would clean my apartment when procrastinating. Instead, I
procrastinate by coding (for fun, not work). That's it! I'm going to clean my
apartment... tomorrow... or maybe the day after...

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bo_Olean
When I read all these procrastination thoughts in HN, I sometimes feel that we
should run a "Why do I put it off ?" thread once in HN where everyone answer
for themselves and not for others.

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rhizome
AKA "avoidance behavior."

