
Structured Procrastination: Do Less, Deceive Yourself, and Succeed Long-Term - gmac
http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
======
vinceguidry
What I have found is that the subconscious will resist taking action on
something perceived to be important until it's worked out an appropriate
approach. As a result one can avoid doing things like planning and preparing
and simply query the subconscious as to whether you're ready to work on
something.

Yes has me start on it and either complete it or hit a snag. If it's a snag,
then I'll analyze it briefly and then go back to procrastinating until the
subconscious has worked out another approach.

No is perceived this as a feeling of "Nope." I've attuned myself to this
feeling and have learned to listen carefully to it. Many, many times,
especially with work tasks the reason for doing that particular task will have
evaporated by the time I'm ready to do it.

Other times I find I needed to clear my mind before the subconscious can
present to me the right way to go about it. So I'll read articles so as to
purge my mind of the attachment (in the Buddhist sense) I'm feeling to the
task.

Sometimes it takes days / weeks / months for this attachment to clear up. I
have a task I've been wanting to do sit in my reminders for 2 months now. It
will stay until I'm either comfortable removing it or actually doing it.

~~~
xlm1717
Honestly, this sounds like justification to go days/weeks/months just reading
articles to me.

"Don't worry boss, maybe next week my subconscious will come up with a
brilliant solution that will sink our competitors. You'll see."

A little planning goes a long way. You can avoid doing things like planning
and wait days/weeks/months for your attachment to the task to clear up. You
can also plan out what you'll need to accomplish a task and once you're done,
your mind can essentially go on autopilot till you either hit a snag (in which
case back to the drawing board you go for more planning), or finish the task.

You can trust your subconscious to show you the right way and hope it's
correct, or you can plan the right way and have more of a guarantee that it's
correct.

~~~
w0rd-driven
If you only have a single task to complete, then yes that's precisely
justification to sit there and do nothing but collect a paycheck.

Hopefully your boss is putting multiple things in front of you that can be
juggled so that as you put something in the background something can take its
place.

I've solved some of the most challenging problems I've ever faced in my
professional life this way. By focusing on something else, usually another
task in an entirely different project or section or even just looking at
Youtube I'll often have an epiphany about something in a completely unrelated
task. I'll go to prove my assumptions and sure enough, problem solved. Much
more efficiently I might add.

When I only have one major thing to accomplish this looks like I'm doing
nothing because on the surface I'm not. I'm often here on HN reading articles
or on other websites filling my brain with useless trivia but it doesn't mean
my mind isn't churning through the plates I have spinning. I'll also often
pull a task out of background, make more assumptions, prove them incorrect,
then put the task back in background mode until that efficient answer comes.
This is not every task mind you, some things I can solve immediately. For the
things I can't, this model absolutely does work for me 100% of the time.

------
drb311
There's an old saying:

"If you want something done ask a busy person."

Busy people always come through for you. I used to think this was because they
were super efficient, super disciplined.

But maybe your task is a welcome distraction from something even worse?

And besides, everything we do is a distraction from the most looming, vaguest,
most intractable deadline of all.

The End.

~~~
rdudek
This actually makes sense. I seem to be more efficient at getting things done
when I have multiple things to do, but can never get something done if it's
one and only thing left. I get easily distracted by other things that keep me
away from accomplishing that one task or goal.

~~~
etingel
Could it be that we humans are afraid of running out of things to do? After
all, if we finish that last task, it would seem that we no longer serve a
purpose. As long as we have one task left, there is still hope that we can
find more to do.

Of course, that is a poor way of thinking since all it does is make you lose
your sense of purpose before you actually run out of tasks, but the human
brain is weird like that sometimes.

~~~
Retra
It's probably not so much an innate fear of nothing to do, but a resistance to
the mental costs of having a slow workflow.

------
aethertap
I'm a big procrastinator, but I finally found a way to get around it. Instead
of thinking about the big tasks, I just allot myself a fixed amount of time
that I'll be doing something, work on it steadily during that time, and quit
at the end regardless of the state it's in. For some reason, it really makes
it easier to face big important projects if I just say "I'm going to spend 8
hours putting up siding today, then I'm done" as opposed to "I need to get
that siding put up..." I've used that trick to get tons of stuff done around
my house as well as to write a book (which hasn't been published yet because
I've been putting it off, so I guess there's still room for improvement).

~~~
fenomas
This is a bit like Raymond Chandler's process for writing:

> The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours
> a day at least when a professional writer doesn’t do anything else but
> write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he
> shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window, or stand on his head, or
> writhe on the floor. But he is not to do any other positive thing, not read,
> write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Write or nothing.

He commented somewhere that it works on the same principle as school - you
can't force children to learn, but if you prevent them from doing anything
else, the bright ones will learn just to stave off boredom.

~~~
drb311
Strikes me you have three choices:

1\. Force yourself to sit here and do nothing else until the task is done. The
Chandler method, which requires a great deal of discipline.

2\. Keep telling yourself "I'll start just after I check Hacker News / Twitter
/ watch one more episode on Casualty". This means you never achieve anything
and feel forever guilty and worthless.

3\. Put the task to one side for now and do something else enjoyable and
marginally useful. You make progress in other tasks, feel valuable, and only a
little guilty.

Structured Procrastination is the third option. If you can't manage Option 1
-- and who can? -- it's better than Option 2.

~~~
aethertap
The trick for me is always just getting started. Once I actually get over the
hump and start working, I generally find it's pretty easy to keep going. It's
getting started without sidetracking myself that really puts up the biggest
resistance.

That may not work for an author who's lacking inspiration, but in my case I
found that when I sat down at the keyboard to work on my book, if I couldn't
think of what to write I'd just start writing utter crap for a while until it
started to flow a little better, then I was usually off to the races.

------
jtheory
Notice that this is just a short essay. A blog post, maybe. But it's also
potentially a reason to search for available domain names; to actually
register one (after exploring the compromises around what registrar to
choose), to find a host (navigating the truly bewildering options), to decide
whether wordpress might be the right way to go, and what theme, and what big
header image. Plugins? And what if it really goes viral... surely we'd better
have some ads in there to capture a bit of value from that, right?

All of this can be really quite educational. But in the end it's fairly
impressive that it was ever done at all... which suggests that in fact it's
not done; there are a ton of other plans for what should be here, and only
because of those plans was the writer able to get this far.

~~~
sk8ingdom
I remember stumbling on this site a while ago and the format [1] was
completely different.

[1]
[http://web.archive.org/web/20150214165654/http://www.structu...](http://web.archive.org/web/20150214165654/http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/)

~~~
myth_buster
Well this gave me a good laugh.

    
    
      Brilliant essays by John Perry, defending yet more life choices 
      generally seen as faults.

------
meesterdude
This is all well and good, except when you procrastinate over things you
_want_ to do. It also throws discipline into the wind in favor of just
procrastinating.

It's true, some things you can put off, and nothing bad happens. Other things,
you put off, you lose your job or your house. Ideally you can separate the
two, but maybe not.

Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do, or don't feel like
doing. And that's life. Rarely do things get better by procrastinating about
them, though more often they get worse.

~~~
gpvos
You are apparently not in the target audience of this article.

~~~
meesterdude
As someone who battles procrastination and other avoidant behavior, I was
under the impression I was.

~~~
gpvos
In that case I understood you wrongly, I read it as you being not a
procrastinator. My apologies.

------
galfarragem
Maybe it was just me but I couldn't find any _juice_ on this essay.. The best
I essay I ever read on procrastination was from mark Manson [1].

[1]
[http://markmanson.net/procrastination](http://markmanson.net/procrastination)

~~~
Matumio
Quote: "The more you care about the outcome, the harder it feels to achieve."
This was great to read, thanks for posting it. It focuses more on anxiety. I
agree it's more juicy but I think the original article talks about a slightly
different topic.

------
moron4hire
I tend to think of my procrastination not as avoiding important work, but work
that is of unknown difficulty. If I don't know how hard something is to do,
then I can't predict how long it would take. I could budget 15 minutes for it
and it could end up taking 4 hours.

That so very rarely ever actually happens, but that is the feeling I get when
I stare at my TODO list. The solution is often to create a task just for
analyzing the complexity of another task, to be able to break it up into sub
tasks.

For example: "do taxes" might be broken into "find receipts", "print forms",
"fill out form 1 worksheet", "complete form 1", "mail form 1", etc. The more
detailed I can get it, the more space it takes in the TODO list, the more it
blocks out other things, and the more it keeps the TODO list from stagnating--
which is an important component of motivation for me.

------
edw519
_The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The
ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear
deadlines (but really don’t). Second, they seem awfully important (but really
aren’t)._

I did this for years. #1 on my list was proving Fermat's Last Theorem. While I
didn't do that, I got a thousand other things done.

Alas, someone else has proved Fermat's Last Theorem and now my task list looks
like everyone else's.

~~~
jerf
Oh, come on, this list is still full: [http://www.claymath.org/millennium-
problems](http://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems)

:)

If you need help picking, I'm definitely going to go with P =? NP. That seems
likely to keep you busy for a long time....

------
vpegado
Maybe I'll read this later.

~~~
zamalek
Maybe I'll procrastinate tomorrow.

------
atrilumen
Thinking about this lately... I guess I'm not really a procrastinator.

What I am is _always laser-focused on a project_ , and not at all impressed by
all the other things that the world is trying do demand of me.

I'm certainly not averse to hard work. I often choose it. (And somehow the
reward is intrinsic.) I'm averse to any work that doesn't seem to directly
factor into the success of whatever it is I'm presently obsessed with
creating.

~~~
benmanns
I'm a 10x engineer for a very specific x.

------
dangoor
There are other approaches that don't involve self-deception but instead work
on your intuition about what you're best equipped to deal with at the time...

[http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2015/5/21/the-
final-...](http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2015/5/21/the-final-
version-perfected-fvp.html)

------
ZenoArrow
I do this all the time. I find I have tons of energy to work on projects when
I'm putting something else off.

In my experience, the side projects need to have one key trait, they need to
be achievable in chunks of a few hours. I don't mind doing work multiple times
in a week, but as soon as I'm expected to work on something 5+ hours in a
single session I'll switch to do something else. Also, they need to be one off
tasks, I don't like repeating myself.

Whilst this may annoy the non-procrastinators, it's just something I've worked
out that works for me, though I never gave it a name before. I can still be
very productive in short bursts.

To whomever wrote the article, thank you.

------
FLengyel
Structured procrastination appears analogous to the second-price auction, in
which the winner of an auction pays the second-highest bid. This strategy
leads the bidders to bid the true value of the auctioned item. One proof of
this assertion can be found in the solution to an exercise in Game Theory
Evolving: A Problem-Centered Introduction to Modeling Strategic Interaction
(Second Edition), by Herbert Gintis.

It appears that structured procrastination is a two-player game that pits the
present self against the time-inconsistent hyperbolically discounted future
self. The success of this strategy depends on accurately ranking more
important things to do. Presumably the rank of the second-most important thing
accurately reflects its hyperbolically discounted value far enough in the
future to avoid time inconsistency. An assumption seems to be that most
important or interesting thing to do now is generally important or interesting
for the wrong reason. Also, if the thing I happen to be doing isn't that
important, the thing I should be doing can't be that much more important
either.

------
mangeletti
This is really great stuff.

Now, I need to have my boss assign me to Hacker News reading duty, so that I
can get my work done.

------
kctess5
This sort of strategy has worked quite well for me over the years. It takes a
bit of practice to get right, and probably isn't for everyone.

For me, it's mostly about knowing the things that I have to do, and just doing
them whenever I feel like it. So long as I feel like it some time before the
due date, it works out great! In the case where I never feel like it, then I
force myself to start with sufficient time before the deadline and power
through in one sitting. I find that so long as you _know_ what I need to get
done, and give myself enough lead time to stay ahead of my deadlines, it's a
workable strategy.

~~~
luos
I think I have the same problem.

For example I knew that I want to look for a new room. I couldn't start it
because I did not know how much time it would take. This makes it really hard
to start.

When I finally started I just said that I'll do it until 8 pm or something.
This makes it easy to not stop cause "oh it's only 30 minutes I have to do
this then I can go take a shower".

This is why I think techniques like pomodoro can really help someone. It's
just hard to start something, and more you do it, more you know what's left.
Usually this stops the fear for me.

------
sctb
PG on procrastination:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html)

------
unabst
I used to procrastinate on Quora and now I do it on HN. It has done wonders
for my writing, my awareness, and my education. As a side effect, I now have
far better plans for the projects on my todo list that I haven't been able to
do because of all this procrastinating. But if it's making me smarter, I have
just justified further not being able to help myself not be able to help
myself.

For those who procrastinate at the gym enjoy the side effects of being fit and
healthy. It's when it's work that we start experiencing sacrifice. There is
only joy in procrastination. The author of this essay procrastinates by
writing brilliants essays.

I did read somewhere that efficient workers sleep a lot and work a lot less.
Those who have experience being their most efficient selves work towards that
state of mind by sleeping and being lazy. And when they work, they get shit
done. At the end of the day, it may very well be a tortoise vs hare race,
where those that keep working slowly but surely catch the hares that only work
sporadically. But for the same amount of work, the hare gets a life.

------
marcusgarvey
I've found the Getting Things Done method of putting only the "next physical
action" on your to-do list to be very helpful. "Write a Masters Thesis" sounds
much less daunting when you focus on the NPA which might be something as non-
threatening as, "Go to the store and buy index cards."

------
Torn
Archive.org mirror from Aug 29th:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150829043424/http://www.struct...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150829043424/http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/)

------
hodwik
I've been using this system for years.

I'm pretty sure that deep-down I learned programming to distract myself from
writing a novel I intended to write. Now I'm learning electronics to distract
myself from programming. Imagine all that we could accomplish if we only
procrastinated more!

------
paublyrne
I'll read this later.

------
phkahler
My music teacher once told me that I'd start practicing more when school
started up again in the fall. He said it's a common way to avoid doing
homework. IIRC he was right.

------
metasean
I learned about "productive procrastination"[1] at least a decade ago and as a
result learned to embrace my procrastination tendencies as long as (a) I am
actually being productive at something and (b) there isn't something that must
actually get done right now.

[1]
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=productive+procrastination+-procra...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=productive+procrastination+-procrastination.net)

------
blatherard
A simple todo list system that I love, and that is built on the idea of
structured procrastination, is Mark Forster's "Final Version Perfected"
system. It is described here:
[http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2015/5/21/the-
final-...](http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2015/5/21/the-final-
version-perfected-fvp.html)

------
gull
> Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not
> doing something more important.

Or the opposite. Because the subconscious figured out there is something more
important to do than what you were doing.

Ignoring the pull of the subconscious is equal to self sabotage.

------
arielm
I like that the article is about hacking your bad habits, but at the end of
the day procrastination is exactly that - a bad habit. It isn't who I am, and
so I think the best way to fight it is to replace it with a better habit...

------
iopq
Wow, I'm going to do this as soon as possible. This seems great. Let me read
the comments on the article first though. But then I'm really going to do
this.

------
hellbanner
Just fucking do the work. If you spend as much time working as you trying to
"hack your brain to be more productive", you would have been more productive.

Overthinking about thinking can lead to neuroticism.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10142283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10142283)

[http://www.amazon.com/Do-Work-Overcome-Resistance-
Your/dp/19...](http://www.amazon.com/Do-Work-Overcome-Resistance-
Your/dp/1936891379/)

~~~
vidarh
> Just fucking do the work.

If it was that simple, everyone would just do that.

"Just x" usually indicates someone doesn't understand why others have problems
with x.

~~~
exelius
> If it was that simple, everyone would just do that.

It's not that simple; but it's also why not everyone is uber-successful.

------
codezero
Procrastination isn't just a bad habit it's a form of anxiety. Keep that in
mind. It's not just something you can will away.

------
bestham
I found this interesting and wanted to add it to my pinboard, but I had
already added it in March 2013. I guess I should read it.

------
occam65
Thus began the Day of Unproductive Hackers, as the number of cat photos on the
internet grew by a significant 1%.

------
NDizzle
It took me about an hour and a dozen sessions to get through this article.

------
foobarbecue
This is NOT the right advice for anyone trying to finish a PhD.

------
t_fatus
You just gave me an excuse for not doing my work and feel good about it by
doing something else instead of just reading random posts on HN !

