
Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate  - borisfowler
http://www.caycon.com/blog/2011/11/six-ways-to-overcome-the-urge-to-procrastinate/
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AngryParsley
They forgot #7: Do not read articles of the form "n ways to do X".

Also enable noprocrast on Hacker News, and use a time-tracking tool like
RescueTime.

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X-Istence
noprocast doesn't work for me. I have Hacker News added to my "Top Sites" and
Safari likes to refresh those every so often.

When I did have it enabled I was locked out more often than not making it
particularly useless for me. What I have found is that I have started finding
a lot of the articles that make the frontpage are boring and I have naturally
started visiting less and less.

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bitops
That's funny, I've had the opposite experience with the lockout. I figure that
if I set the refresh to be reasonably low, it turns into more of an odds thing
whether or not I can read HN. And, after a while, I've stopped needing
discipline to come looking here.

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pbreit
I like Marc Andreessen's post on productivity, especially "structured
procrastination" where procrastination is actually encouraged (there's a good
chance that the things you procrastinate on aren't all that important).

[http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-
pers...](http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-personal-
productivity)

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TillE
I still believe in Merlin Mann's "First, care."

<http://www.43folders.com/2010/02/05/first-care>

All these little tips and tricks are fine. But they're usually treating the
symptoms rather than examining the cause.

~~~
georgieporgie
_For as long as you know in your heart that what you're making or doing
matters, and, consequently, for as long as you accept and embrace the
immutable laws of scarcity, your options for maintaining focus will, like
Frank's perfect answer, remain stunningly obvious._

Those are very true observations, but the problem is, how do you care? We're
told things like, "do what you love," and " follow your passions," but that's
just not realistic in an adult, professional world. Writing code is awesome
for the first 10% of a project. After that, it usually becomes a grind to
complete all the uninteresting things.

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vanni
I am working on a new way to fight procrastination: <http://asaclock.com>

It is an elite anti-procrastination community for startup single founders and
people working on side projects.

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greenxc
I absolutely love the first point that they make to not start out with a
regular routine of reading news or checking your email because I think many
people (including myself) do it as a habit and then get completely sidetracked
from it (especially email) leaving everything else on a side-burner until
later. I didn't even think about this point until reading this. If you do
something you dont want to do first you will have more motivation to get it
done so that you can get back to your regular routine. Since people are
creatures of habit its quite a big motivator.

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phzbOx
#7 Don't write a blog post about ways to not procrastinate

~~~
peterjmag
<http://xkcd.com/874/>

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antoinehersen
My favorite way to procrastinate is to read online article about
procrastination. I also bought a book about it, one of the few I never
finished. If you procrastinate too much there is usually a reason for it, try
to find out why, and what you can do about it. For me it is ambitious project
that are ill defined. Breaking them in smaller task that can become daily
achievements helps a lot.

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digamber_kamat
One Noble prize given for the research that said best way to achieve your
goals is by working on a goal to procrastinate even higher goal.

Secondly, I remember reading a research paper that said, whenever you have a
task at hand which you want to procrastinate at least give it a start. Urge
for postponing the task goes seriously down once you at least start doing it.

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ysilver
7\. Effective stress management.

Stress causes procrastination. Reduce stress to procrastinate less!

It seems like this is what the author was trying to get at. My favorite stress
management methods: exercise, meditate, socialize.

Also, the first thing you do each day should be something low stress,
achievable and important. ...gets you off on the right foot.

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highace
One of the best ways I've found is to just start it! Tell yourself to just
force out 10 minutes of whatever it is you're putting off. Once you've
started, you'll want to see it through as much as you can.

There's proven theory behind why that method works... something about
unfinished jobs fatiguing the mind.

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tmh88j
The "startup kind of person" is ambitious so I'm not sure how many people that
applies to.

An ambitious procrastinator...is that an oxymoron?

~~~
timwiseman
No...many ambitious people are also perfectionists, and perfectionists are
often horrible procrastinators as they wait for things to line up perfectly or
wait to refine it one more time before releasing, putting off the next phase
over and over.

Also, one very dangerous form of procrastination is doing real work...just
work that is less important than what you should be doing. Paul Graham touches
on this at <http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html>

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mikeash
The irony of seeing this link on HN nearly killed me.

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thoughtsimple
Article added to instapaper...

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ronmac
Looks like an insightful article. I'll read it later.

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run4yourlives
I'll read this later.

~~~
squeee
Beat me to it!

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georgieporgie
7\. Always have something worse to do. It's amazing how much you'll get done
trying to avoid that one thing you're really, really dreading.

~~~
s00pcan
Sometimes I will actually clean stuff just to avoid working on something I
hate more, and it's actually almost fun. So this is definitely true from my
experience.

It's also amazing what you'll get done when the power is out or you don't have
internet, but that's almost impossible for me nowadays thanks to my
smartphone.

