
Procrastination is not a time management problem, it is an emotion - whack
https://cognitiontoday.com/2019/05/you-procrastinate-because-of-emotions-not-laziness-regulate-them-to-stop-procrastinating/
======
beaker52
I've long known my procrastination is born out of anxieties centered around
the task or myself.

But I'm so kind to myself that I forgive myself for procrastinating before
I've even done it - a great example of the many ways/excuses to defeat most
anti-procrastination techniques I've come up with :)))

I even wonder how much my propensity toward picking up new hobbies (which
usually involves spending decent amounts of money aka "shopping") before
getting bored, selling everything (which I usually put off until I physically
can't accommodate more stuff) and repeating the process is actually just me
avoiding doing life stuff like saving for a house and being a responsible
adult.

I eat takeaway because I "don't have time" but then I don't actually get
things I need to do done AND find myself becoming more and more unhealthy.

I often get asked "what have you done today?" and it's quite frequent for me
to not really even know (or care to admit).

Interestingly, I went away on holiday the other week - when I arrived home,
before I even paused (shoes still on), I immediately started doing things I'd
been putting off for months, like I had an urge despite there being no more
time pressure than at any point in the past 12 months that I had regularly
ignored.

Procrastination, and being with it, is a large part of my life. I find it
incredibly interesting but if I could pay a large sum of money to take it away
in an instant, I'd hand over the cash immediately. (And thus, this is another
example of my aversion to difficult work)

~~~
cheerlessbog
Returning from the holiday meant you had avoided your usual procrastination
cues -couch, TV, phone, schedule.

The key to defeating your procrastination may be to progressively build up a
habit of doing work you prefer to avoid by setting up regular cues.

Eg to build a gym habit I set out my gym clothes each night. Then after a week
of that I began to put them on before getting in the car to work. Then after a
few days I drove past the gym in the way to work. Then went in for 1 minute
and so forth. I know this sounds absurd. With these tiny steps I built a habit
of the gym that is now 1 hour five times a week. Now I am building a habit of
keeping my kitchen clean with the same progression of micro cues. You could
imagine similar steps involving preparing your desk, later just sitting down
at it, and so forth,all with cues like your first coffee, or you finished
dinner etc. The formula is regular cue + micro progression to build a habit.
Eventually it is mentally easier to maintain the habit than to break it.

Another tip, if you absolutely do not want to fulfill the habit on a
particular cue, complete as many micro steps as you can, eg if I have an
injury I will still go into the gym for a shower and to change before work.

~~~
luigi23
I like Terry Crews attitude: “TREAT THE GYM LIKE A SPA.

Yes. It has to feel good. I tell people this a lot - go to the gym, and just
sit there, and read a magazine, and then go home. And do this every day.

Go to the gym, don't even work out. Just GO. Because the habit of going to the
gym is more important than the work out. Because it doesn't matter what you
do. You can have fun - but as long as you're having fun, you continue to do
it.”

I’m practicing the same - it’s mostly about the routine, habit, without aiming
lofty goals. That’s probably why most of the side projects fail -
overachieving and aiming perfection.

~~~
dominotw
why do we need habit if its already fun. Is fun not really motivation enough?

------
hashberry
Procrastination is an addiction because it offers relief from anxiety and
instant gratification. Also, being a chronic procrastinator and a skilled
developer is a deadly combination. I've been praised for my excellent work and
rewarded with raises and bonuses, even though I often procrastinate until the
very last minute.

Tip: to make your git logs look socially acceptable to co-workers and
management, don't commit at 3AM Monday morning, wait until 9AM.

~~~
toomanybeersies
Are you sure you don't have ADHD? Because that sounds a lot like what you're
describing.

ADHD is an addiction to procrastination in a sense. It could be that you
missed diagnoses at a young age due to being intelligent enough to cruise
through school and university with little effort, so your problem was never
picked up as you never suffered any serious negative effects from ADHD due to
your intelligence and ability to get tasks done quickly.

That's basically what happened to me. I'd be able to do an assignment that
would take people several days, in half a day. So I'd be able to procrastinate
and delay up to the last minute and still manage to pull through, usually not
with great grades, but I'd pass. I always thought I was lazy, and never
considered the fact that it could be a deeper neurological problem.

~~~
travisp
It’s true that this is consistent with ADHD, but it’s not nearly enough
information to diagnose because it’s also a common experience to many people
(really). ADHD is basically defined as the bottom of a bell curve in a number
of areas (depending on how you look at it, executive functions or behaviors)
that are normal to the human experience, just so extreme and frequent that
they are impairing to functioning in life. It is a real disorder, but it’s
challenging to understand and diagnose because it’s basically an extreme
version of experiences and troubles that most people have. Books and lectures
about procrastination are extremely popular for a reason. Procrastination, to
some extent, on work and school projects is almost a universal experience.
Apart from a few outliers, most people I know waited until the day or two
before to work on on week or month long assignments.

Please be careful about telling strangers they may have a mental disorder —
just like a false positive on a medical test, it can induce anxiety and cost a
lot of money to investigate.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Please be careful about telling strangers they may have a mental disorder —
> just like a false positive on a medical test, it can induce anxiety and cost
> a lot of money to investigate._

The flip side is that in some cases, such possibility can be relieving. For
me, the idea of having undiagnosed ADHD (which I plan on verifying soon) means
there may be a better solution to the problem available than endless talks
about pomodoros, bullet journals and getting one's shit together. In general,
given symptoms which aren't going to disappear on their own, it's probably
universally better if it turns out to be a medically recognized condition, as
it gives a way forward.

~~~
brookside
ADHD is a label, not a disease.

You can't really be diagnosed with symptom (although of course your money will
be cheerfully taken to do just this).

Attention and focus and other related ADHD-type issues are bell curve.

It can feel good, for sure, to externalize our weakness and failings into one
of these labels, like ADD. If that is helpful to get over the psychic weight
of past failures, then that is helpful and useful.

Taking stimulants definitely helps most people with ability to work and focus,
regardless of where they are on the attention-ability curve. There are also
drawbacks and side-effects, at least I have observed.

~~~
kls
It is pretty well understood that people with true ADD and ADHD have dopamine
deficiency and issues with dopamine regulation and re-uptake in the brain.
This has been highlighted in many studies. While I understand that there is an
epidemic of over-diagnosis of ADHD, it does not make it any less of a
legitimate medical condition in which the only treatment for it, is to
increase the usable dopamine in the brain. One of the tell tail signs of
ADD/HD is that the first time one with dopamine deficiency takes an
amphetamine or one of it's derivatives, they realize that they are completely
clear and it's like they come out of a fog in their brain, it's more profound
than just the feeling of I can get stuff done. Again that alone is not
effective as a single point to diagnose attention disorders but it is a strong
indicator that there could be a dopamine deficiency.

TLDR it is a true disorder, it is over-diagnosed but that does not make it any
less a chemical disorder of the brain.

------
dcsilver
I really feel I can make a helpful contribution on this topic. This article
correctly asserts that procrastination is an avoidance mechanism for tasks
that illicit an emotional response, but then tells you to figure out what that
is by yourself. Good luck with that. So the problem is only partly identified
to the reader. If this article at all interested or struck a chord with you
then I strongly recommend an old-school procrastination book called The Now
Habit by Niel Fiore to get a more complete explanation.

Like many commenters that chime in on these procrastination threads, I am a
_chronic_ procrastinator, and feel like it’s really held me back in life. I
was completely convinced of having undiagnosed adult ADHD for several years
(didn’t want to go onto stims, though) - until Fiore’s book threw a spanner in
the works and identified some reasonably serious unresolved psychological
issues from my childhood - the source of the emotional response identified in
this article. In my case it’s to do with putting impossibly high expectations
on myself, but there are other common examples explored in the book. I was
absolutely not expecting that and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s obvious
in retrospect, and now I’ve correctly identified the thought patterns that sit
just below the surface of conscious cognition I can catch myself in the act.
It’s helped enormously.

~~~
jplayer01
So have you largely managed to "fix" your chronic procrastination or is it
something you still deal with on a day-to-day basis?

~~~
dcsilver
I still deal with it, but being aware of how it works has made it a lot
easier.

------
maxxxxx
For me it's an anxiety thing. There are certain things I just can't get
started on although I clearly know that I can do them well and quickly. I also
know that not doing them often causes me a lot of pain but I still won't do
them. I don't understand it myself. It makes no sense.

~~~
RickS
I can deeply relate to this. There are things that I'll put off for a week,
sometimes for a sprint, and finally, in anguish, I'll do them and.... they
take like 2 hours and are twice as easy as I anticipated.

And you get finished and have this moment of disbelief like... why on earth
did I just torture myself for a week over this? For nothing..

~~~
mntmoss
I've gradually unlearned the anxiety-driven procrastination habits that I
picked up in school but it's taken almost as long as the time I spent in the
system:

* I now focus on developing my own feedback mechanisms rather than worry about assigned/external ones. If you have a large enough number of "required to succeed" and "instant fail if this occurs" signals, you can know roughly how well you are doing without anyone to guide you.

* I focus on work as a cycle, rather than tasks to be cleared out. The converse of the procrastinating is the idea that if you rush around _enough_ , you will open up time for something else, something better, but what that something is, is a big ??? The cyclical approach keeps me more grounded in hammering out a few hours of work on a regular basis, which is more sustainable.

* I look for opportunities to use my "activated" levels of energy to chase after a thread of a problem. I often don't know how long anything takes, but what I do know is that I'm doing more if I periodically throw myself at the work and solve the things I can solve and use the rest to develop more feedback(if I failed: okay, why?) - and doing this cyclically makes it sustainable.

I still have periods where my work energy is low, but the causes are typically
more obvious: stress is up, I found a new game that captured my attentiom,
etc.

~~~
cheerlessbog
What solved procrastination for me (I described in more detail above) is to do
the tiniest step. If that seems too large, do something tinier.

For example say I have a presentation to prep for. For whatever reason, I'm
procrastinating - maybe because it's boring or in nervous about delivering it.
So I do a small step, perhaps, open my laptop, create a presentation and the
title slide. Then it's ok to do something else, but often I will find myself
continuing.

(If that's intimidating the step could simply be to sit down and open the
laptop.)

If I don't continue that's OK, I don't get frustrated, I take a break
(something bounded like coffee, walk, get groceries - not start reading
reddit...) then again do a tiny step, perhaps draft one more slide.

Again I often find myself continuing, one tiny step at a time. It's easy to
commit to something they just takes 60 seconds. Again if I don't continue I
take a little break and so on. Again when I take a break I don't judge myself.

This system has been a revelation for me and I no longer procrastinate until
the point of stress. I have also found it helpful to deal with with lack of
motivation due to depression. I don't feel able to empty the dishwasher, well
I can at least do one cup.

Keys are \- establish a regular cue that already exists, either an existing
habit or something else regular such as kids leaving for school

\- do some tiny step

\- if that's intimidating make it tinier. There is always tinier!

\- if you find yourself continuing, go with it

\- otherwise take a break, without judging yourself. Return immediately you
feel ready to make a tiny step. Sooner is better than less tiny

\- next tiny step

------
vborovikov
There are three tricks I've found work best to stop procrastinating.

1\. Ovsiankina effect. The effect states that an interrupted task, even
without incentive, values as a "quasi-need". It creates intrusive thoughts,
aimed at taking up the task again. [1]

2\. Structured procrastination. [2]

3\. Concentrating on the steps to complete the task, not your feelings and
emotions about completing it. Action vs. state orientation. [3][4]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovsiankina_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovsiankina_effect)

[2]
[http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/](http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/)

[3]
[https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_1668041](https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_1668041)

[4]
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jopy.12140](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jopy.12140)

------
jacobedawson
I found Nassim Nicholas Taleb's take on procrastination in Antifragile
interesting - he likens procrastination to a natural defense: "Few understand
that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of
themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological
or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it
is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the
Procrustean bed of modernity."

He goes on to make the point that he use procrastination as a filter for his
writing - if he feels strong resistance to writing a certain section he leaves
it out as a service to his readers - why should they read something that he
himself didn't particularly want to write? Instead of fighting procrastination
as though it is an illness, maybe we should learn to understand it's utility:

"Psychologists and economists who study ‘irrationality’ do not realize that
humans may have an instinct to procrastinate only when no life is in danger. I
do not procrastinate when I see a lion in my bedroom or fire in my neighbor’s
library. I do not procrastinate after a severe injury. I do so with unnatural
duties and procedures."

~~~
nisa
Yeah, I'm still alive - but the amount of late-fees, insane interest rates and
chronic struggle to have a flat and something to eat each months that could be
solved with _a lot less money and pain_ if I hadn't procrastinated on solving
these problems earlier is not exactly nice also. Also procrastinating going to
the dentist cost me... What I want to say: It's a nice quip at society - but
utterly useless for the chronic procrastinator.

~~~
mjburgess
I think "procrastination" means a different thing when you're able to write a
large number of books, etc.

At that point you're not a procrastinator, just a productive person who
doesn't like to do particular things.

------
anonymfus
It seems like proper title would be "Procrastination is not time management
problem. It is emotion regulation problem" (no articles to fit into 80
characters limit).

Currently submission title is "Procrastination is not a time management
problem. It is an emotion".

~~~
titanomachy
Or: Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Incidentally, if I'm to believe the video linked recently on HN -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCAGc-
rkIfo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCAGc-rkIfo) \- so is ADHD.

------
xt00
Some things that have helped procrastination for me are 2 things:

1) think about something to look forward to regarding the particular task —
for example maybe just simply writing the email saying that it’s done is the
only thing I can look forward to, the current thing is super annoying to do,
or the food I’ll eat afterward.

2) second thing I do is when I sense that I’m not going to make progress on
the thing, I just stop working on the thing and schedule it for later.. trying
to do something for hours and not actually doing it is actually fairly
stressful and wastes a bunch of time and emotionally you feel annoyed about it
as well. This sounds like procrastination but I mean within a context where I
actually attempt to do the thing at each scheduled time rather than sit there
and play on your phone on top of your math book while you are supposed to be
studying. I just say welp math ain’t happening right now. Schedule for later
when I’ll be mentally prepared.

I have definitely pretty much always thought procrastination is super
emotional. Certain things you don’t want to do so you put it off. Once there
is very little time left you know that you have forced yourself into a limited
engagement on a thing you want to minimize your involvement with so you have
made a reasonable decision to avoid dealing with something that could annoy
you for an extended time.

~~~
chrshawkes
So true to the second point. I've discovered that recognizing when to give it
a break is a hugely important skill to have and one that that took me a long
time to develop as a software engineer/entrepreneur.

------
MrP
I was "cured" of my procrastination when I "discovered" the best way to not
having things I hate to do in my to do list was to do the things.

It sounds silly because it is. Just do it now.

~~~
hvidgaard
This is beautiful. If you have a thing that takes some manageable effort, and
that is important enough to do. Do it at the first time you to not have
anything more important to do. It is nothing else but a different mindset. It
sounds easy, because it is once you get going.

~~~
TeMPOraL
What you both describe sounds like a switch flipping in the brain. It's the
holy grail of those struggling with procrastination - and the unsolved part is
coercing the brain to flip that switch, to internalize that realization. I
envy those who've done that by accident.

~~~
MrP
You're absolutely right, it's like a switch flipping in the brain.

Maybe a way to get there, or to try to explain it in a different way would be:
You have to hate "having the item in your todo list" more than "doing the
task".

I know I do. It's annoying to "carry" that todo item in my head all the time,
with its danger of forgetting it, or the need to note it down somewhere, then
remember to check the somewhere... So I know I'l feel liberated when I do it.

Yes, on the face of it this applies much better to "pay that bill" than to
"write a book". But you'd be surprised. Soon you won't think of yourself as a
procrastinator, you'll feel like someone who takes charge and does stuff. You
know what people like that do, apart from the small stuff? The big stuff.

Good luck!

~~~
TeMPOraL
Did try that very early on (spoiler alert: it didn't work), and it's curious
what mechanism my brain developed to neuter this trick.

One, in line with what GTD book teaches, writing down a task is very
liberating experience - indeed, the act of writing a task down feels almost
like doing it, so it drains the pressure to actually do it. Two, once the
mental weight of a full todo list reaches a certain stage, I instinctively shy
away from looking at it. The degree to which this happens subconsciously is
probably worth a paper in a psychology journal; I'll instinctively stop
opening my TODO files, my Org Agenda, and if I write the tasks down physically
(e.g. on whiteboard), after a while my eyes will just gloss over it and
essentially ignore its presence in the room.

To combat this, I started cycling through TODO stores - every other month or
three I jump between .org files, bullet journal, issue tracker tickets,
whiteboard, notebook, paper calendar, electronic calendar. The "freshness
factor" seems to be working somewhat, but I still can sometimes go two days
before realizing I have an organizer open on my desk with tasks already late.

------
abhi3
The fact that Chronic procrastination = Likely ADHD i.e. an inherent
neurological issue, needs to be propagated more widely so people can stop
feeling guilty about it and not treat it like some emotional/moral/work ethic
failure.

~~~
monodeldiablo
I think the guilt itself exacerbates procrastination. Perversely, I only
stopped procrastinating once I stopped beating myself up about it.

Now, I tell myself that some problems just need to marinate, or that I have
some other need that I'm not addressing. I use procrastination as a signal
that something else is wrong. It's been very helpful.

~~~
jolfdb
Instead of punishing yourself for not doing something, take a moment to
appreciate yourself when you do something.

When I go to the gym, I used get annoyed at myself for not doing enough work.
I didn't even go often enough in the first place. Now I say that any day I go
is a good gym day, and I feel only good thoughts about going and exercising,
and when I am not exercising I occasionally remember that if I do go I'll feel
good, and that's motivating.

------
pelagic_sky
I procrastinate because the task has no real personal value to me.

~~~
taneq
I've done this in the past, but I find it's infinitely more painful to me when
I genuinely care about getting the task done and I _still_ can't make myself
get a start on it.

------
ravenstine
I find myself procrastinating the most when I know what what I'm doing will
likely be interrupted, even if it's hours down the line. For instance, even if
I can work on a certain thing for 3 hours, when I get word that I'm _probably_
going to have to work on something else for the rest of the day, chances are
I'll take those 3 hours less seriously because I know that, when I come back
to the task the following day, I'll have to mentally start over. Even if I
consciously try to push through it, the back of my mind keeps shouting "What's
the point?"

~~~
jolfdb
Yes yes yes. The treatment for this is to split your work into smaller tasks
so you feel you can hit a milestone before the interruption.

------
m12k
My favorite tool/trick against procrastination is pomodoro technique: Work 25
minutes continuously with no interruptions, then take 5 minutes to relax/do
other things, e.g. answer texts - then rinse and repeat. Do this 6-8 times and
you'll have done more than most people do in a full work day. When I first
heard of it I was very skeptical of it, because I know that as a programmer I
need hours of uninterrupted focus, so purposely interrupting myself every 25
mins seemed counterproductive. But it turns out, most of us get micro-
interruptions all the time, and they're much easier to ignore if you know that
in at most 25 mins, you'll have 5 mins to deal with them. That way you don't
create 5 mins of interruption, you batch the already existing interruptions
together and timebox them. And 5 mins isn't enough to get you out of 'the
zone' as long as you keep the breaks mentally 'light' \- and going for a
little walk really is healthier than just sitting all the time.

And now for the real kicker: I found that I always procrastinate the most in
the beginning of a project, where everything is vague and there's not yet a
list of nicely broken down tasks to execute. And that makes sense cf. the
whole 'procrastination is emotional' perspective that the article talks about,
because completing tasks gives you a dopamine kick as a reward, but with no
easy tasks in sight at the start of a project, it just feels like wandering
the desert. It feels unpleasant and unsatisfying to grapple with that
vagueness and trying to fit that 'too large' problem into your head so it can
be broken down into bite size tasks. So you put it off until guilt or panic
about a looming deadline becomes bigger than the pain of doing the work - it's
the classic 'put off homework until the day before it's due' from school.

A situation like this is where pomodoro technique really shines - I may not
have small easy tasks to give me periodic dopamine kicks, but every 25 mins, I
still get one for having completed a pomodoro without letting myself get
distracted. And I even get to celebrate with a little break. Or to put this in
other terms, at the beginning of a project, you cannot measure or reward
results like you would prefer (because results are still a ways off - it takes
too long to break down the initial vagueness, you don't even know what a
result looks like or how hard it is to achieve yet), so you should measure and
reward effort instead. And each pomodoro becomes a measure of effort that you
can reward. It really does work for me - I often stop doing them later in the
project, when I have a nice list of tasks to execute, and I don't do them at
all for small easy projects. But whenever I realize that I dread some task or
I begin to procrastinate, I pull out the pomodoros and soldier through that
way.

------
linux_devil
"Maybe whatever fresh-faced grad student built this on their summer internship
flubbed the feature engineering, modeling autorespond as a library of
independent phrases rather than a library of choices."

Whats wrong with a fersh-faced grad student trying to build a new feature if
at all he/she is trying to do so?

------
christefano
Website is giving an error 500. Perhaps this is a popular article?

Fortunately it's in the Wayback Machine:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190522001001/https://cognition...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190522001001/https://cognitiontoday.com/2019/05/you-
procrastinate-because-of-emotions-not-laziness-regulate-them-to-stop-
procrastinating/)

------
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Same Gentle had an interesting observation about procrastination:

[https://samgentle.com/posts/2016-09-16-what-
changes](https://samgentle.com/posts/2016-09-16-what-changes)

follow up: [https://samgentle.com/posts/2019-01-29-the-leverage-
instinct](https://samgentle.com/posts/2019-01-29-the-leverage-instinct)

------
ivanhoe
What is a laziness then? Does it even exists as "just being lazy", or it's all
a spectrum of anxiety issues?

------
wallace_f
>when people believe that their bad mood is unchangeable, they do not engage
in frivolous procrastination or acting on other impulses to engage in other
activities

This is so simple, but also so enlightening.

Unfortunately for me, it means removing most of the instant gratification from
my life, such as video games, social media (incl. HN), etc.

------
thisisit
I remember something similar being discussed earlier:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17878716](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17878716)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19482238](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19482238)

~~~
tyler109
thx for sharing

------
inlined
I’m grumpy about the aside that some medical conditions cause procrastination
yet refusal to list them. They don’t need to diagnose readers to just list
common issues for which the DSM lists procrastination. That might encourage
more sympathy when we see others procrastinating.

~~~
inlined
A quick search would suggest that ADHD would call this a sign and
procrastination can be a side effect in major (clinical) depression, bipolar
disorder, monotropism, Aspergers spectrum disorders, and non-categorized
issues with shame and low self-esteem (at least that one is covered in the
article).

------
decasteve
On top of the suggestions in the article, a good diet and a regular routine of
intense exercise helps me. If I have a consistent balance of diet, exercise,
sleep, meditation, and some alone/solitude time in nature, I am most
productive and unlikely to procrastinate.

------
agumonkey
This is why I love production work (food, manufacturing), no analysis
paralysis ever.

------
tjkrusinski
You can say procrastination is the result of the core belief that one is not
capable or will not perform the given task well, or once you do that thing,
what will you have to worry about then?

~~~
friedman23
Personally, I don't procrastinate on things I believe will pose a challenge. I
procrastinate on the easy but tedious things.

~~~
Swizec
Personally I procrastinate on almost everything that doesn’t either shoot up
the dopamines immediately or make the panic monster go away

~~~
jcims
I always wondered why the panic monster was so great at marshalling
concentration, and so bad at defending against the wave of shame that comes
once the task is complete and you wonder why you waited so long (again!!)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Panic monster is a tricky beast to use. In the early university years, looming
deadlines could make me superproductive, though at an emotional cost. But
after few years of using this, my mind became increasingly resistant, and now
the deadline trick doesn't work anymore.

------
bougiefever
I like the list of things you can do to combat procrastination. It's all good
to understand what drives it, but even better to know tactics that work to
help you overcome it.

------
tempodox
One could also argue that procrastination _is_ time management (vs a time
management problem). Just not the one with the best reputation.

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menacingly
This is a good article, but is it not simply finding a more polite (and
perhaps, for the sake of publishing, novel) way to say procrastination is
caused by insufficient will?

"People procrastinate or avoid aversive tasks to improve their short-term mood
at the cost of long-term goals."

This description is true, but is it not also true for virtually every case
where you would typically use the term "willpower"?

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atian
Procrastination is against energy expenditure. Energy expenditure is
degenerative in nature.

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byteface
a useful tool for people that might be in here...
[http://www.stayfocusd.com/](http://www.stayfocusd.com/)

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juskrey
It is a filter against rotting in chronic/toxic/boring things. Too bad people
are trying to kill this instinct and rape themselves instead of using it to
their own benefit.

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dunstad
Is that really the only way you could think of to describe this? Sexual
assault is a horrible thing to go through, and I can't imagine it's a lot of
fun to happen upon the idea in unexpected places like this. You could easily
just replace it with fuck.

~~~
dredmorbius
The term's meaning has evolved over time, and the origin of "seize, carry off
by force, abduct" remains a useful, if decidedly minority, concept:

[https://www.etymonline.com/word/rape](https://www.etymonline.com/word/rape)

