

How to reduce procrastination - bd
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/don039t-delay/200809/3-tips-reduce-procrastination-today

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danhak
I'll save everybody the trouble of reading this article with a summary:

The key to stopping procrastination is not to procrastinate.

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jcl
And yet people are voting it up. It would be nice if HN's "vote up" and "save
for later" functions weren't conflated, although I suppose that would make the
interface more complex.

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jemmons
This might be the most criminally simplistic, naive thing I've read on HN this
month. Get started, suck it up, and know thyself. Wow. Thanks. I never thought
about doing something instead of not doing something. That's profound!

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bd
Yet it may be exactly the right advice. Sometimes you don't need to know more,
you just need some good spanking :).

If you noticed, the author is a professor specializing in studying
procrastination:

<http://www.carleton.ca/psychology/faculty/pychyl.html>

What he basically says: there are no cheap tricks. Most of the time you think
you have some wonderful method, it's just another way to procrastinate.

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danw
Psychology Today seems to be a fluffy 'self help' style resource than a
serious Psychology publication. Am I mistaken?

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cchooper
No, you summed it up perfectly. Psychology Today is a lifestyle magazine that
just happens to have 'Psychology' in the title.

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raamdev
I find the best solution to avoiding procrastination is to simply figure out
exactly what the next step is that you need to take to be one step closer to
being done. Once you've figured that out, picture yourself doing it and then
think about how you'll feel when the completed action is just a thing of the
past. Rinse and repeat.

We set ourselves up for procrastination by not thinking about the next step
and instead only thinking about the end result.

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dpapathanasiou
Yikes, not another procrastination article:
[http://www.google.com/search?q=procrastination+site:news.yco...](http://www.google.com/search?q=procrastination+site:news.ycombinator.com)

~~~
danw
Must be because news.yc is where we come to procrastinate instead of actually
doing things

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known
Create a TODO list

1\. Task name

2\. Estimated End-Date to complete that task

