
Self-forgiveness for procrastinating can reduce future procrastination (2010) [pdf] - bookofjoe
https://law.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/Pretend-Paper.pdf
======
RickS
Apt timing. I was just revisiting a voice not from after Christmas vacation
where I noticed the same thing in myself.

I "take vacation" all the time, in that I'm fucking off from some kind of work
for a couple days straight. Why do some feel different than others? Because of
whether I feel like I'm "allowed" to be doing it.

The core healing property of a vacation, at least for me, seems to be a
vacation from the shame of feeling like I'm misallocating my time, rather than
a vacation from any particular task. This also explains why deep work can feel
so nourishing despite being very unlike what we'd normally think of as
"vacation".

Glad to see this topic get some play on HN. Really curious about other
people's experiences and solutions here.

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jey
> Halfway between the first and second midterm, participants were asked, ‘‘Do
> you think your procrastinating affected how well you did on this exam?” on a
> three-point scale, where 0 = not at all and 3 = definitely. Interestingly,
> although procrastination is a self-regulatory failure and thus, by
> definition, is a transgression against the self, 14 participants did not
> believe this to be so, answering ‘‘not at all” on this item. Consequently,
> we eliminated these participants leaving a final sample of 119 participants
> (70 female, 49 male) whose age ranged from 17 to 56 years (M = 20.50, SD =
> 5.17).

How is this elimination justified? This seems entirely unsound.

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waitforawhile
I've had my fair share of run-ins with procrastination, this premise has
worked for me back when I considered procrastination to be 'wrong' (forgiving
yourself implies you did something wrong) and so forgiving yourself absolves
you of the guilt you feel. I tend to now approach procrastination as something
I need to do and let myself indulge for a while, then chose to stop. My theory
being; now that its ok to do, its easier to stop because I'm not caught up in
the guilt spiral.

A vague analogy might be: you can stop yourself breathing at will, you've
likely never felt guilty for taking a breath. Now imagine feeling guilty for
breathing because you thought it was wrong, you'd likely continue whilst you
were caught up feeling guilty about it and that would build with each new
breath.

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afarrell
I have found this to be true. One big cause of procrastination is a to escape
from mental discomfort. Part of the way to get through that is to build
tolerance to discomfort using CBT/stoicism tequeniques.

But also finding ways to release discomfort-causing thoughts help too.

~~~
ficklepickle
I'm working for a startup right now that is doing CBT without a therapist. It
will really lower barriers to treatment for a lot of people.

The mental health revolution can't come soon enough for me.

~~~
ionised
CBT without a therapist already exists (at least in the UK) and I was referred
myself.

I'd be interested in hearing how yours differs, because my personal experience
was that therapy without the human element was borderline useless.

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TheSpiceIsLife
Procrastination keep coming up here, and elsewhere, and I keep thinking:

Look, I regularly work 10 hour days five days a week and a 6 hour Saturday. If
something needs to ship, I'm here till it ships. I voluntarily agreed to all
this, and keep agreeing to it.

If I get home and sit in front of a screen and read HN and watch old Star Trek
episodes, who cares?

I could be doing more? My only regret is I wished I'd worked more?

~~~
youeseh
We often work very hard when someone else is depending on us but let ourselves
down when we set our own goals.

Many of us have goals around personal projects and errands that we keep
putting off since the due dates are arbitrary.

Working a six day week certainly makes for less available time to get other
things done.

~~~
jjw1414
Very astute comment about external motivation versus internal motivation. The
fact that someone else is depending on me will spur me to push through a task,
particularly if it is for someone close to me (e.g. my daughter). However, in
a small percentage of cases for work clients, I can experience mental
resistance, almost like a internal rebellion, that will cause me to
procrastinate. Happens even if the client is very nice and I like them, which
makes me feel all the more guilty. Luckily, it is not the norm, or I would be
out of a job pretty quickly.

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pmoriarty
By coincidence, I've been watching dozens of videos on procrastination today,
and this one is by far the best one:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhFQA998WiA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhFQA998WiA)

It's by Dr. Tim Pychyl, a professor of psychology who in this video goes in to
research on why people procrastinate and gives helpful suggestions on how to
procrastinate less. It's an hour-long presentation, and is chock full of
worthwhile content, unlike a ton of other videos out there which are full of
fluff and basic suggestions everyone's heard a million times. Highly
recommended.

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jaequery
I found that the best way of curing procrastination was to have a partner or a
group of people you can report to and keep tabs on your tasks.

I even tested this theory by hiring a virtual assistant to do just that and it
worked for me. But with all things said, YMMV.

~~~
elektor
There's a startup that lets you pair up with another user to keep each other
accountable via video chat. I used it a few times and was pretty productive.

[https://www.focusmate.com/](https://www.focusmate.com/)

~~~
jaequery
This is why I love HN. I’m definitely gonna try that out thanks!

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jjw1414
I'm curious about why the filename for the PDF is "Pretend-Paper.pdf"? I
double-checked and it is published in the peer-reviewed journal, "Personality
and Individual Differences".

Aside: I'm also curious about whether statements/questions like, "I'm curious
about..." require a question mark after them.

~~~
groovy2shoes
> I'm curious about why the filename for the PDF is "Pretend-Paper.pdf"?

I've googled the paper and the authors, and I've scoured the UTexas Law site,
and turned up nothing. So, my best guess: perhaps it's wordplay: pretend <
Latin _pre-_ "before" \+ _tendo_ "I stretch out; I reach for; I pitch; I
offer" vs. foregive (now a homophone of forgive but originally having a
slightly different meaning[1]). Thus "pretend paper" ≡ "foregive paper" ~
"forgive paper". It's a stretch, but it's all I can come up with...

[1]: _fore-_ having a sense of "forward; before" whereas _for-_ , being
related to the "fro" in "to and fro", originally having a since of "away
from". Now that "for" and "fore" are homophones, the two are conflated, but
not for the first time in history: there were once three prefixes, which
would've been _fore-_ , _for-_ , and _fro-_ today had the latter two not
already merged before the Anglo-Saxons even began writing. They corresponded
to Latin _pre-_ , _per-_ , and _pro-_ , respectively. Now there's one prefix,
variously spelled, with various senses, however sometimes the senses are
distinguished in writing by one spelling or another.

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HiroshiSan
Happy to see Tim on the list of co-authors, he has a wonderful talk on
procrastination: [https://youtu.be/mhFQA998WiA](https://youtu.be/mhFQA998WiA)

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erikpukinskis
Opened this in a tab for later.

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peterarmstrong
Obligatory link, via pmarca archive:

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

