
Ask HN: If (procrastinating) then read else next in HN - ninjamayo
A lot of people including myself suffer from procrastination. So I saw this https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liquidti.me today and I was thinking that is nicely designed and all that, and it might work for some but I know it won&#x27;t work for me. I really, really know that because I know how my brain works. Well sort of. But let me talk about something that I finally noticed in myself in recent months. I always loved learning and getting courses on Udemy, Coursera, you name it. It&#x27;s so much fun if you can work on something that has structure and someone else is pushing you to focus on. So even though I often procrastinate, I found myself always committing 100% of my time and effort on courses and learning material. That could be me but made me think that maybe other people work like that too. I really enjoy the process and can&#x27;t wait to build the projects or complete the assignments. I just manage to go through the courses and don&#x27;t see them as side projects.<p>To cut a long story short I had this idea that maybe if we had our projects broken down by someone else and developed a detailed roadmap almost like a course it would potentially be easier for us to just get busy doing rather than busy procrastinating. A simple example would be to develop a chat bot. There was a very detailed article just yesterday on that which covered every single step necessary to build your own. One would only have to follow this blog post and then add on it the service it offers to have a successful bot. What if we took this approach a bit further and created a course around it with finer steps, timelines, achievements, etc. What if we had categories of different projects where we go and look for something that is similar to what we want to do? Even if we can achieve 70%, 60% of our side project build by following something else its still a lot better than 0% or my usual 20%.<p>Some initial thoughts here so don&#x27;t bash.
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GregBuchholz
I'll jump in to emphasize the notion. I've recently decided to try and pick up
3D modeling using FreeCAD, and I thought I'd try my hand at watching some
tutorials on YouTube. Well I lucked into a great beginners series:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_9HwDkwxllq5lFGkYBIH9g](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_9HwDkwxllq5lFGkYBIH9g)

...and it was like a ritual, where every night I followed along with a 30-60
minute tutorial. I got a lot further and faster than if I had just been
fumbling around by myself semi-aimlessly trying to learn the program (and 3D
modeling at the same time). And I think a lot of it had to do with the
structure of doing a small dose of rote learning on a regular basis. No
planning, or thinking about what to learn, just doing the lesson at a nice
slow pace. I now find myself wanting to see the rest of his tutorials
translated into English:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1ajADhkNhcffhuQ9sZp9bg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1ajADhkNhcffhuQ9sZp9bg)

