
How to Beat Procrastination  - KC8ZKF
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/
======
apl
This article is a significantly less bad than most, but still suffers from the
ol' "depressed people should simply try to be happy, then the whole
depression-thing isn't actually that bad" fallacy of mental illness.

If you're hard-wired to be impulsive and have a knack for viewing things in a
negative light, it is in fact incredibly hard to get rid of such behavioral
tendencies simply by "getting off your butt, man." Similarly, all these hints
and tips implicitly require the very quality they try to instill. Works for
mild cases, but has little bearing on genuine pathological procrastination.
(See also: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_M%C3%BCnchhausen>)

~~~
Alex3917
"Works for mild cases, but has little bearing on genuine pathological
procrastination."

My guess is that 'clinical' procrastination, like drug addiction, largely
stems from Adverse Childhood Experiences and should be treated the same way.
Although I haven't actually looked through the research yet.

As for any attention deficit tendencies, these can be trained via meditation.

~~~
gcheong
I would be interested in the research you are referring to showing that drug
addiction largely stems from adverse childhood experiences.

~~~
Alex3917
The first speaker in this public radio series explains the issue extremely
well:

<http://www.wpr.org/book/100307a.cfm>

After you listen to that five minute or so clip, check out this writeup on the
addiction portion of the ACE study:

[http://www.nijc.org/pdfs/Subject%20Matter%20Articles/Drugs%2...](http://www.nijc.org/pdfs/Subject%20Matter%20Articles/Drugs%20and%20Alc/ACE%20Study%20-%20OriginsofAddiction.pdf)

And if you want to read the original ACE study, which has over 1,300 cites,
you can do so here:

[http://www.liftchildren.org/admin/upload/The%20Adverse%20Chi...](http://www.liftchildren.org/admin/upload/The%20Adverse%20Childhood%20Experiences%20\(ACE\)%20Study%20-%20Felitti,%20Anda,%20et%20al.%20\(American%20Journal%20of%20Preventive%20Medicine,%201998\).pdf)

The basic finding is that addiction doesn't really have anything to do with
the molecule in question, but rather it has to do with emotional issues that
stem from adverse childhood experiences. And so the way we as a society handle
drug addiction is completely wrong, because we're actually making people's
drug problems vastly worse instead of treating them.

~~~
apl
I'm gonna bite.

So the observation that different drugs show different addictive potential
(e.g., heroine versus cocaine) is in fact irrelevant because "addiction
doesn't really have anything to do with the molecule in question"?

~~~
Alex3917
So I think there are three different metrics to look at:

1) How physically addictive a drug is. E.g. withdrawals from oxycontin are
much worse than withdrawals from cocaine.

2) How 'moreish' the drug is. In other words, how compulsively do users
redose. With salvia most people smoke it once and then don't want to do it
again for at least a few years if ever, whereas with mephedrone people snort
it and then they NEED to keep snorting it ever fifteen minutes or so until
they run out.

3) The percentage of people that use a given drug who become addicted. You
would expect this to vary wildly depending on factors one and two, but it's
actually virtually a constant.[1] Pretty much 10% of people who try a drug
will get addicted whether it's alcohol, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, etc. There
is a little variation of course, but not nearly as much as you'd expect if
addiction were driven mainly by the properties of the drug itself.

[1] Once you cancel out the differences due to the routes of administration,
i.e. smoking a drug is vastly more addictive than eating it regardless of what
the substance.

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thibaut_barrere
A comment by antirez here [1] really led me to consider that procrastination
is a signal rather than an issue: the best I can do is be aware of that and
listen to it.

Now I often realize that when I feel procrastination coming, it's because:

\- something needs to be clarified (a situation)

\- there is a risk that hasn't been assessed

\- I'm hungry

\- I'm tired (physically or mentally)

\- I'm hurting myself (RSI)

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190700>

~~~
math
For me "something needs to be clarified" is often "faith in the idea needs to
be clarified via stamp of approval from a third party". Yesterday, I was
procrastinating badly. This morning, I talked about my project with someone
and they were very positive about it. Today saw a massive burst of energy that
will last through the week.

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edw519
edw519 has one form to complete, two database tables to configure, four
functions to test and an app to deploy today. But instead of getting started,
he minimizes his test environment and Textpad and opens a browser window to
Hacker News. He knows he has 6 hours of work and only 7 hours before the Super
Bowl and he understands that he'll probably be too drunk to program after the
game. But he is too caught up in stories of software development, scientific
journeys, industry trends, the pratfalls of rich and famous hackers, and silly
articles about procrastination.

edw519 is lazy. He should close his browser and get back to work.

(Simple story, but too boring for a scientific study.)

~~~
apollo
As your first sentence indicates, in this scenario you have specific,
attainable goals. Just getting to that point goes a long way towards beating
procrastination.

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hasenj
Impulsiveness is a personality trait, it doesn't change, it's part of who you
are. It comes from preferring to take information instead of making decisions.
Some people have it and some people don't. For the people who don't have it,
it would seem like a character flaw. But for the people who do have it, it
seems like the most natural thing in the world.

You can of course force yourself to be diligent, but it'll make you very
stressed. (hint: startups are stressful).

You can only force yourself if you see a value thats attainable in the
foreseeable future.

If something is of low value, low importance, and boring, why would you want
to force yourself to do it? It doesn't make any sense. I'd advice you to defer
it and do something that's more interesting and more valuable while you can.

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zachallaun
The author postulates three character vignettes, each one based upon an
identified predictor of procrastination. There exists, however, a forth:

Zach stares at a blank document in Microsoft Word. His essay assignment on
municipal politics, due tomorrow, is mind-numbingly dull. He decides to take a
break, texts some friends, watches a show, and finds himself even less
motivated to write the paper than before. At 10PM, he finally dives in, but
the result is... well, it's great.

This forth case is strange, because it does not suffer from the generally
proposed downfalls of procrastination. This is because the author has ignored
an entire segment of procrastinators: Those that operate _better_ under an
impending deadline.

This is how I completed nearly every task in school thus far, and assignment
grades less than an A are few and far between despite the fact that I put in,
in many cases, a small fraction of the time it took my classmates to complete
this assignment. I operate this way because stress is my friend. My output
quality/time ratio is never greater than when I'm working with a looming
deadline.

My entire life I was told that procrastination is bad. Procrastination is bad.
Procrastination is bad. It's only recently that I've realized that
procrastination is actually one of the greatest contributors to my success.

~~~
tel
Though I'm very sympathetic to eustress as a wonderful motivator of good work,
it falls on its ass when you suddenly lose external deadlines. This occurs in
varying degrees depending on your life path, but almost always you're expected
to take more personal responsibility of your schedule in any challenging
(desirable) job.

So it's just worth noting that combining eustress/percolation with aggressive
personal goal-setting might be necessary to keep this sort of thing up.

~~~
jarek
I definitely agree with this. I bounced from deadline to deadline for seven
years in late high school and university. Addiction to deadline-driven
activity is now causing me tons of grief when it comes to anything not
required by an immediate deadline at work. Career development, outside-of-work
life planning, calling companies about that wrong bill...

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mnazim
I am one of the worst cases of procrastination you can ever find. I always
find something else to do instead of doing what I am supposed to do.

Personally, I have experienced that there is only one way to get things done:

1\. I try to minimize distractions(I say try because distractions will always
be there; there is not a way around most of the time).

2\. I make a (mental)TODO list, before going to sleep.

3\. And finally nothing beats getting of my butt and actually start working.

Just my thoughts.

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obsessive1
I often find the hardest part is actually starting whatever it is you're
putting off. After that, it's a lot easier to keep going (provided you don't
get distracted by interruptions).

My solution is to turn off all my IM clients, load up a different browser
without all the tabs I normally open, mute everything except the radio, and
force myself to start it. After that, I can usually work through and get it
finished.

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geuis
The quintessential problem: Its a long article, I'll read it later...

~~~
sliverstorm
No, the quintessential problem is: Cool, I'll try that next week...

~~~
radu_floricica
Or you could do what I did and impulse-order the book from Amazon. Now I'll
have to read it. (I've been working on my book impulse-buying for a while now.
Damn useful.)

------
mdaniel
I'm sorry if this is off-topic, but I have become amazingly addicted to
Readability's view of webpages.

On topic, switching to the Readability view increased my desire to read the
article, because I found it less mentally tiring. However, if I had homework
due in the upcoming days, I probably would have archived it into Readability,
because I doubt reading it would have presented a lot of immediate value.

------
ajays
I'm a terrible procrastinator too. Unfortunately, sometimes I work best under
pressure; so this feeds back into procrastination. But it doesn't always work
this way. Sometimes the task is so big that "under pressure" is not possible.

I've found that chopping up the task into bitesize bits always helps. I'll get
the little task done quickly; and then if I feel like it, I can keep going;
otherwise, I can get up and do something else, basking in the glow of having
accomplished the task I wanted to. After a few days of such repeated positive
experiences, I find that I can pick up steam and really accomplish a lot.

------
mdaniel
Interestingly enough, yesterday
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2183183>) there was a Show-HN for a
website designed to perform textual analysis and render the top few most-
relevant sentences:

<http://www.bookshrink.com/>

I tried it on this article, and it was neat, but I realized that part of the
reason this is so hard to skim is because of the information density in each
sentence.

Try bookshrink on it and you'll see what I mean after trying to read its
output.

------
solipsist
I have to say that most of us who are taking the time to read this are
probably procrastinating in the first place. Therefore it would have been
better to publish this article on a weekday when people are most susceptible
to procrastinating online. After all, those are the people this article is
targeted for.

------
mono
Accept Procrastination as a different way to do something!

There is a brilliant 4 minute movie about it all:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=37wR_TWdVy0)

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siddhant
Funny. The author wrote a _long_ article on how to avoid procrastination, when
the intended audience isn't going to go beyond the first paragraph.

How to beat procrastination? Set _noprocrast_ to _yes_.

~~~
nickzoic
Nah, I read the whole thing, which is funny, because I've got a lot to get
done this morning. Then I saw your comment, and figured I'd better reply. Oh,
hey, look, there's that bookshrink thing they mentioned, I wonder if that's
any good, I'll just check that out before I get started on this to-do list.
Hey, I wonder if I can get a better to-do list manager ...

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GHFigs
At the risk of becoming too meta, I'd like to ask anybody who is about to
bookmark this "for later" to consider what would happen (viz. procrastination)
if you didn't.

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bound008
I'll read it later...

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Mz
I cannot get through this and someone would like me to read it. Any hope of a
summary/tl;dr?

(Or is it as crappy as I think it is?)

