Anxiety makes impossible for you to concentrate as it makes your attention to focus on the thread, like an herbivorous animal will stop eating for focusing on the lion.
It is an emotional block equivalent to pushing the brakes while the accelerator pedal. A car that could go to 200, will only go to 10. If you push harder, you break the car. If you know what procastination is,and know how not to block, you can at 200, and enjoy it!!
Anxiety is extremely useful for humans, this baby has none of it. Without the glass wall it will be a good idea that parents have it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSlrDi9So9w
Nowadays, the more relevant cause of anxiety is other humans, as we have exterminated most of the other predators, in circumstances like war. E.g Recently in Syria, you(or your family members) could die every single day, beheaded after being raped.
It in interesting that in the modern world, in peace, when most problems are not death threats, we increase the sensibility of anxiety making abstract things like not entering University, losing a job or a partner or just being humiliated while giving a speech or rejection, as "live threatening", causing procastination.
> we increase the sensibility of anxiety making abstract things like not entering University, losing a job or a partner or just being humiliated while giving a speech or rejection, as "live threatening", causing procastination.
Yes and no. We are social creatures. Being rejected or not recognized by our peers used to be life threatening and we are still wired that way. In some ways it is still life threatening.
There are many valid points in the summary but it seems to consider only procrastination caused by perfectionism, while it's just one of the causes. Procrastination is usually the result of difficulties in regulating emotions. When we face a task we don't want to do we feel an assortment of negative emotions—we may feel bored, resentful, frustrated, anxious or guilty. We put off the task to avoid these negative emotions.
Techiniques such as Unschedule are at best just hacks that are effective only in the short term. The only way to permanently beat procrastination is to persist on work you don't want to do until it becomes a habit. Along with the usual techniques of splitting a task into sub-tasks, removing distractions, starting immediately, etc., making yourself accountable goes a long way in crushing procrastination. Read more at https://procrushtinate.com/guide.html
The book states that procrastination is caused by anxiety, and I agree. Perfectionism is just one way to create anxiety. Frustration, boredom, frustration are others.
We put off the task to avoid these negative emotions IN THE FUTURE. The definition of anxiety is anticipating something bad in the future, so we can avoid it.
Techniques like the Unschedule work extremely well for me and other people. Other things that work well is splitting the task into sub-task, writing everything down, recording the intensity of what you do.
Persisting on working on something you don't want to do is extremely dangerous.
Thanks to Paulov conditioning you will be anchoring a bad experience to something you want to do. Linking a bad memory to work and reinforcing it with habit. Not good.
You can beat very weak procrastination with it. If the procrastination is serious(anxiety is great), you will be creating a strong trauma linked to work.
In fact you are probably referring to not crushing procrastination but reinforcing it increasing anxiety and going from avoidance(flight) to fight. This works(badly) and is the usual method of normal people for dealing with it, using deadlines(like frequent exams) as the tools that make them increase their anxiety.
A friend of mine had a very serious accident of his bike. He can't get on one without shaking and avoids them because of the trauma.
You will be doing the same thing with work, like the rat anticipating the electric shock, you will be anticipating the bad experience just by sitting down on your desk.
The anxiety those memories create will add procrastination to the already high level making impossible for you to work.
While you will be "in place", "at work", your thoughts will escape with fantasies evading work because the high levels of anxiety. Your productivity will be very bad.
Your linked page states that procrastination is voluntary, conscious, it is not.
Not procrastinating is in fact extremely easy, once you know how.
I can relate, but unfortunately have no real strategy for overcoming this. I've ended up leaving behind the things I used to care so much about, just to avoid the feelings. The feelings only became overwhelming after several months of forcing myself to work through procrastination.
Quite possibly the least helpful piece of advice I've seen around here. If you have concrete advice, then say it. Otherwise, you're just making baseless claims that don't help anybody.
I read this book in 2016 as I was trying to overcome a number of bad personal and professional habits and make other positive changes in my life. I highly recommend it.
I think there’s an argument to be made that your personality is made of habits. If you’re trying to change how you act or think in some domain of life, but you sometimes feel locked in a stalemate with your own mind, do consider taking a look at Fiore’s book.
If you’re familiar with Thinking: Fast and Slow, you could consider this book a how-to guide for using System 2 to change System 1 processes.
I finished the reading some months ago and highly recommend it as well. I had always been a fairly productive person on my work and academic activities, but always wanted to work on some more meaningful projects, and to build a company around some product ideas. My excuse used to be that I didn't have enough time. Suddenly I saw myself with plenty of free time and, to my surprise, I got stuck after a couple of months. I wasted almost two years trying to understand what was happening to me, because I had the time and didn't manage to make any progress that seemed compatible with the plenty of available time. I almost lost my Masters deadlines (finished it only 1 week before the deadline expired) and all those delays are costing a lot of money to the company I founded. But the book helped me to understand that I was feeling overwhelmed about the gigantic ideas and the unrealistic deadlines I was imposing to myself. I wasn't prepared to be my own boss, at all.
Although I haven't become a super productive person yet (lol), I started to think of strategies that suits my own style and I'm putting them on practice at small steps. It seems to be working.
Besides, the chapter regarding dealing with procrastinators is a must read for team managers in general.
Someone bought me this a a gift, I can't remember who. I read it and, although it has some interesting ideas, it felt like there was no enough content and it repeated the same points over and over to fill space.
I didn't like how it was written. This is the only self-help book I have read, so I don't know if it is following some conventions of the genre (is this a genre?).
Overall I liked some of the core ideas, but not reading the book.
These are really practical. There was a recent post about how J.K. Rowling pushed through the same forces and wrote her books. If only I would start on 10% of the great ideas that bumble around my head like flotsam.
You should never push against it. You will be fighting against yourself, if you push strong, so do your opponent.
Like with cancer, young people with cancer worsens much faster that old people, because cancer is stronger, your cells are stronger, because cancer if fighting against your own cells and body.
You should understand what creates anxiety, so you do not feel anxiety, so you do not procastinate.
My advice will be for you to take a notebook and start writing down what you feel and the thoughts that created those feelings.
More than understanding, it is a routine, we are used to think some way in a particular situation that makes us feeling some way, that loops again making us thinking, and feeling...
You have to change your routines, slowly, but without stopping and you will be able do materialize the great ideas you have in your mind.
The fear that the demands of you will rise after successfully finishing the current job is irrational. You will still have some autonomy to make an informed decision later. Don't fret about it now.
I've been in that position with bad management where finishing a project quickly would get you a look like, "Is that all you're going to do? I thought I figured out how to make you productive, but I guess I have to try again." With the wrong kind of management, finishing a project puts a cap on the credit you get from it, and finishing a project quickly can create an impression that you're getting nothing done. A three-week project is worth 50% more than a two-week project, a system that requires constant patching in production gives you a constant flow of achievement, etc. Good management with strong technical chops will remember the systems you built that are humming along problem-free. Good management with strong technical chops will not base their estimations of difficulty entirely on how long you take to build something and how much trouble it is afterwards. Good management will appreciate you not adding functionality of uncertain value to the codebase. Bad management can make engineers reluctant to wrap up work too quickly lest their work be perceived as lower quality than it should be, and engineers can always find ways to gild the lily if that's what management demands. Especially coming up towards review time, if you have no chance to add an extra line to your accomplishments after completing your current project, it is tempting to find a way to add an extra week to inflate your achievement —- if that's how your management thinks about it.
The opposite problem (with the same kind of bad management) happens when they ask you to incrementally add more and more functionality to a system, but because they keeping using the same label for each additional increment of work, they end up feeling that you took forever to complete a single simple project. The worst form of this is when they don't let you deploy the system. A few years back I spent the bulk of two quarters adding new capabilities to a system that was never used. (It was deployed in production, but for business reasons related to the customer it was built for, it was idle. Another maddening factor was that I was building on a codebase that had been half-completed by two developers who were writing Scala for the first time, but that's a different story.) Good management would apologize for wasting my time. Bad management blamed me despite their ongoing direction to continue the work. (When you hear someone say they want developers who are "entrepreneurial," that means you're supposed to go outside the process to talk to product teams, because management is going to get the business priorities wrong, and it's your ass on the line when they do.)
Bottom line, when you find a great manager, do your sanity a favor and stick with them as long as you can! There's enough wrong with you already without your manager compounding the problem.
If anyone is in Norway and is good with Java or C# I might be able to get you an interview somewhere that has good managers. Email should be in my profile.
Probably not. I didn't think an engineer here can expect cross 100k€ without either 1.) running his own consulting business well or 2.) having huge performance bonus and perform well or 3.) cross into management or sales.
Do you know many engineers in Norway who earn > 100k €? I was not able to figure out from your profile if you know Norway or not.
>Imagine the concrete goal and the rewards. Let it pull you towards it. Don't think about the long way till the goal, think about the way you've already behind yourself.
Procastination is created by anxiety emotion, if you want to get deeper it is easily explained in this animated movie:
https://archive.org/details/understandingstressesandstrains
Anxiety makes impossible for you to concentrate as it makes your attention to focus on the thread, like an herbivorous animal will stop eating for focusing on the lion.
It is an emotional block equivalent to pushing the brakes while the accelerator pedal. A car that could go to 200, will only go to 10. If you push harder, you break the car. If you know what procastination is,and know how not to block, you can at 200, and enjoy it!!
Anxiety is extremely useful for humans, this baby has none of it. Without the glass wall it will be a good idea that parents have it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSlrDi9So9w
Nowadays, the more relevant cause of anxiety is other humans, as we have exterminated most of the other predators, in circumstances like war. E.g Recently in Syria, you(or your family members) could die every single day, beheaded after being raped.
It in interesting that in the modern world, in peace, when most problems are not death threats, we increase the sensibility of anxiety making abstract things like not entering University, losing a job or a partner or just being humiliated while giving a speech or rejection, as "live threatening", causing procastination.