Stop diseasing procrastination. It's not a problem, it's a behavior. It's not just a behavior, it's a tactic. It may be the right tactic for your situation.
If procrastination means that I have a deadline and instead of focusing on it with my mind and actions, I focus on something else, then I have procrastinated my way to a good living.
I learned when I was a kid that a good way to get myself to read a book is to wait until my Mom told me to clean my room. Then I would get an overwhelming urge to read. I have since given this a name: springboard procrastination.
I procrastinate on nearly everything, except, wierdly, chores my wife gives me. I tend to do those right away. I think because doing those chores helps me procrastinate better on my technical work.
My overriding professional strategy is not to do more than other people, but to make unique contributions. These take time to unfold in my mind, because all the obvious things have already been done.
It's a problem in the way it's understood by most people: not achieving anything of importance at all day after day, month after month. Nobody is saying that you should not have any distraction in your life.
I would argue that when it gets to being months, it's no longer procrastination. Maybe you actually just don't care about doing the thing? Maybe you're depressed?
> In the second episode of Mad Men, Roger Sterling walks into Don Draper's office and says, “I can never get used to the fact that most of the time it looks like you're doing nothing.”
glad I finally binged the show during one of my 'springboard' periods :)
Sounds like a U.S. thing too. Worshipping of rich people, who must be rich because they are virtuous (Weber) therefore if you copy their habits you can be virtuous too, become rich and go to paradise.
On my way to make 9 babies in order to become the next Elon Musk.
Of course people in other countries do this, but anecdotally it does seem to be more common in the US. I think it's something to do with the American dream.
I have lived in France and Germany and 95+% of the articles I have seen that follow this exact pattern to use as selling argument for $SomeTechnique$ the exact number of millions or billions someone made using $SomeTechnique$ were from the US.
Perhaps you don't pay attention. It striked me because I couldn't care less about the lives of billionaires. People laugh at the 9 years old girl who wants to become Madonna but that dream is no more irrealistic and is IMHO less stupid than becoming Elon Musk.
And no, I'm not gonna make 9 babies. If I have a child one day I want to do half of the parenting.
The spirit of capitalism comes from the US and has a religious background.
Nowadays, many countries have a strong US cultural influence, no shit.
I wish I was smart enough to make this up, but it all comes from this very famous book which summary I provided.
Maybe reading books is not your thing, but I find it interesting.
It’s strange. This has been an idea for a long time. 30 years ago we did this in elementary school for reading contests. So, yeah it is weird to call it the “Seinfeld Strategy”.
> I am burned out. And you may have noticed that I tend to quit things soon after doing them, like TV series, animated movies, book writing, broadway plays. I do feel very strongly in stopping the second I feel like I'm not excited anymore, whatever I'm doing.
I've found that the more I spend time on writing, the ideas that are being written about change in a way that generally coalesces into something better defined and of higher quality than just quickly writing down the initial form of the idea.
Forcing one's self to write, forces more in-depth thinking about the topic, which can lead to surprising and unexpected revelations (which I would refer to as quality writing).
One doesn't need to keep the journey, just publish the destination. The reader doesn't need the journey the writer took, but the writer sure does.
After 10 years of doing a thing every day you'll be better than someone who didn't. And what's more they're likely never going to catch up, unless you completely stop and they start using your method.
And even then it'll take years.
And you should think of this other person as the alternative you.
Nah, that's optimizing practice. Eventually you roll into whatever because it's old hat. Would you tell BB King playing every day he was optimizing for nothing?
Haha. You can and will hit a bad streak, it's inevitable. There is value in doing the thing.
Pretty soon all that practice adds up. YMMV. But like the article said it's gotta be action.
What is doesn't say is this is a way to build small wins. It only takes a small chain to create momentum.
The point of the strategy is that "bad" writing is better than the alternative of no writing at all. That's why the linked article specifically says that Seinfeld said nothing about the goal, only consistency.
This is interesting to me because Seinfeld is a stabilizer-rationalist in general temperament. (Even if he didn't invent it, the concept REALLY fits his style well)
He will generally tend to give you bell-curve advice based on stabilizing a routine.
Seinfeld likes Cheerios and Superman and the old stand-bys and so on. This is a bell-curve person who sees that curve, socially and behaviorally speaking, as finding sanity.
(IMO he is also likely terrified of displaying what he sees as a latent insanity. But that's just my opinion, for fun, etc.)
To me--I can't get sustainable results that way. What's stable for me is irrational for Seinfeld, or for someone who finds this kind of technique sustainable.
For example, one of my favorite ways to not procrastinate a thing you are trying to do is to teach it. Guess what, class starts tomorrow and you don't know jack. Or to start at the end, connect with experts, and learn it backwards, eventually ending up at first principles.
This is not rational or bell curvy unless you redefine rational and bell curve based on a new context.
IMO if you aren't a routine-based person to begin with, these kinds of routine-based hacks, using chain metaphors and such, can be risky to your sense of well-being. First, they sound rational & make sense. And second, when they don't work--for whatever reason--they make you feel _special_ in the wrong way. Maybe more like "different" in that you feel really hopeless or dumb.
God, I broke the damn chain again! Sometimes it's enough to make you want to start googling up "chain-breaking ADHD" or something.
One of the most interesting questions I've found to determine the difference in subjects/suitable people for this kind of work is: "Do you sometimes feel like you are meant to live like a cat, passing days, weeks, maybe even months without making meaningful progress, then BOOM one day the big plan starts as if by itself, and you do something amazing?" If yes, then probably focusing on a don't-break-the-chain model is looking in the wrong place. But not to worry, there are gobs of ways to get where you need to go!
(Another crazy opinion of mine is that if you are an autodidact, depending on how autodidactic you are, you should probably not be learning by rote or routine-focused means.)
Still, I love that this particular model comes with a well-known personality attached to it, and for a variety of reasons I wish more productivity models were like that.
Lol sounds like we are similar people. I also enjoyed reading your massive profile.
BTW w.r.t. the OODA-loop I suppose you've made the connection with the chinese five element system? This is a general theory of digestion fwict, for example yoga has five stages of breathing, impro (by keith johnstone) has five stages of overcoming shame (unlocking creativity) etc.
There is also the overcoming cycle though, it's not just the generating relations!
The chinese five element system is made from the generating and overcoming relations (pentagram, pentagon, resp.) if the labels you put on this structure don't produce a nice "story" when you traverse along either cycle (such as with the five fingers or whatever) then it doesn't fit very well now does it?
Your labels are similar to the ones Keith uses in Impro, they have been very insightful on my own journey so I think you've probably helped lots of people with your model, if this hint can help you improve your model then that would be a positive.
One cool five that I've found is the ancient egyptian model of eloquence, may want to look into that.
> if the labels you put on this structure don't produce a nice "story"
Aha! I know this pattern. I've seen this kind of thinking form into a good fit for affinity groups which metabolize esoterica and sequence-relations really well. People who like to wear newsboy caps also seem to love this stuff for some reason.
Groups which google "pseudoscience {your-model-name}" as soon as something sounds even remotely like it's got a story behind it as opposed to mechanistic research--this is a different setup and IMO there are other patterns that get really good results. One of which is disconnecting from story and even sequence in some ways. Again just IMO.
Both. If you want an introduction to the topic framed objectively, you'll want to start with Linda Berens, David Keirsey, etc. They will use words like those. Linda taught me about this stuff, and my own coach connected me to Keirsey's work. See the upper-right quadrant in the table on this page:
Groups of people like you find in tech communities, for contrast, are usually found in that lower-left zone.
But also, they are words that I use for my own work because they fit really well and offer a lot of reliable leverage in context. So I am not using these to reference the work of those particular individuals so much as I'm using them because they fit and also because I like them. In fact Linda might tilt her head at my use of rationalist along with stabilizer, until she understands what I mean by that (social bell curve; this is connected to Jungian and post-Jungian theory as well).
The don’t break the chain thing is nice. I’ve used it a few times, but it can be very demotivational when you had a super long chain and you broke it. It’s very hard to get momentum again.
A solution to this might be to plan the breaks ahead of time, or shoot for chains in defined lengths (like 5 days in a row). This gives you time to rest without feeling guilty, and prevents having long chains that can let you down if broken.
If you time it right, you end up with weekdays for work and weekends for rest.
Same. Stuck at a “modest” diet & exercise habit daily for 8 months with great results. Then I stopped for a couple days and haven’t been able to “keep the chain” going again since.
From the article:
> While most people get demotivated and off–track after a bad performance, a bad workout, or simply a bad day at work, top performers settle right back into their pattern the next day.
I think that’s the key (which I’ve not mastered). With things like Alcoholics Anonymous, meditation practice, etc. they say “If you break the chain, then don’t beat yourself up, just start again”. But obviously if keeping up the streak is a big part of the motivation, then once it’s broken that’s going to demotivate.
I've done the big red X and felt the pain of breaking the chain as well. Instead of that, I've started just listing the number of days of my latest chain on a whiteboard, and if I hit 30 days then I reset it to 0.
This helps me not feel bad when I miss a day, but still gives me the feeling of don't break the chain. I've been doing it for about 3 months and I'll see if it continues to works out :)
I've noticed that Duolingo is does something similar. They have a streak wager feature where you bet a few gems on how long you can keep a streak going, but four weeks is the maximum. After that the wager resets to zero and you start over, trying again for a perfect month.
There's also the Duolingo "streak freeze" - give yourself a couple of freeze tokens in reserve that you can use if you miss a day. Give yourself a way to earn streak freeze tokens again if you use one (eg maybe if you get 30 days in a row again). I'm currently on a 2000+ day streak on Duolingo, and while I've definitely missed days over those 5+ years, the streak freezes mean I've never missed more than a day in a row over that time. Gives an incentive to regroup and restart immediately if you do break the chain, rather than losing all motivation.
I've always thought 'don't break the chain' is a flawed technique. When you do something not because you want or have to do it, but for the sake of not breaking the chain, the first time you break the chain you'd realize that you can break it again by telling an excuse to yourself without much regret. Making excuses would become a habit, and you'd be back to square one.
Never miss twice is generally a good doctrine to follow.
Of course not breaking the chain demands a certain precondition, let not getting sick. Not neglecting minor chores daily, that they might some day take a week of your time. Things like that.
That given, its generally hard to break the chain. In fact it might become something like addiction after a while, a.k.a habit.
The idea in the article is a pretty well-worn one, which does work: make a visual record of your training or other beneficial activities, so you enjoy having a streak and don't want to break it. X's on a calendar.
The article itself though... It's a dubious link to Jerry Seinfeld at best, and the rest of it is pretty superficial. If you're not familiar with habits and streaks as a motivational tool, give it a read. Otherwise there's nothing novel or deep here. I'm being cruel now but it reads like the author wrote it because they wanted to keep a writing streak going.
What really resonates with me is not focusing on results. Reminds me of Ira Glass' take on creative work:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions.
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.
No worries — the posts are quite old, some from 15 years ago. It's interesting to see the projects that several people started as productivity tools. Not surprisingly, most appear to have fizzled.
I'm working through a jazz guitar course focused on bebop vocabulary and every day we're instructed to improvise for 15 minutes over a given set of chord changes we're studying.
The first couple of days it was novel, so it was easy to get motivated. By the 3rd or 4th day I began to feel like "I've explored everything that can be done with these changes; this is pointless." yet I pressed on.
Turned out that almost always I came up with something that surprises me.
I now focus on just doing it, regardless of how 'inspired' or motivated I feel.
Never really heard of this Seinfeld guy before, and indeed this is a common idea (the earliest attributable mention of this I remember was in Franklin's auto-biography, but surely it is way older than that). This advice (as many other advises do) always raises some concerns about survivorship bias, but I'm willing to ignore that, since the idea is fairly intuitive.
However, this tactic (really, it's a tactic, not a strategy) relies on the assumption, that you can identify the metric you want to "optimize", which I would claim is way more important on its own than any tactics for optimizing it.
I mean, do you really know what do you want to get better at? After all, Heinlein's "Specialization Is for Insects" quote sounds like the words to live by for many people (myself included). It is rare enough for a person to be completely sure about what he wants to do. In its strongest form (as in this blog post) it basically assumes you are already doing your dream job, which on its own is more like the end-goal for most of the "self-improvement advice" consumers. And even in its weaker form (like employed by Franklin) it is still only as useful as the metrics you were clever enough to chose, and perhaps the most prominent thing about Franklin's story was how pointless pursuing some of his chosen virtues (like orderliness) turned out to be.
I just started using TikTik, and it's not bad. It separates "todo" items from "habits". Maybe all todo apps have this feature or something like it, but this is my first time I've tracked my to-do list this way. For like 25 years I've just had a text file which grew longer and longer.
So, you add all your one-off todo items as normal, but you can also set up habits, which are things that you want to do regularly ("take a walk", "get some sun", etc.) They reappear in the todo list daily (or when you want) and keeps track of streaks. I even have a habit called, "get at least one todo done" which helps with my procrastination!
It's working out well. I tend to get distracted, so I really like checking off habits as I go through my day. And it keeps track of bad habits too, which I check off at the end of the day if I haven't eaten junk food or whatever.
The only real problem is it doesn't give a good overview of all the todos you've added, so it's sort of of sight, out of mind. Though I'm sure I just need to use it some more to get used to it.
The basic gist is to set a small manageable goal every day, and that you're just looking for progress. You don't second guess it, or agonize, you just do it. After you've done it, that's when you review your work with a critical eye for improvement.
I don't really think what Seinfeld talks about there is so much about procrastination, it's about improving at your craft. You can improve at your craft every day while still procrastinating on your important to do list.
That's similar to how I deal with writer's block: just write for five minutes without picking up my pen. It can be absolute drivel but it's at least raw material that can be edited (a much easier task) into a finished product.
Same thing for analysis paralysis while coding: just write something. Anything. I can refactor it or even throw it out later.
Stuck in a rut? Sick of scrolling through mediocre self-improvement articles with clickbait titles? Here’s one simple trick to break out of the slump and get moving again:
- Make and ship something in two hours.
- Make and ship something in a day.
- Make and ship something in a week.
If you’re still not ready to start your big project by this point, then make and ship something in a month.
I can't believe James Clear wouldnt fact check this. The "seinfeld" strategy has nothing to do with Jerry Seinfeld, he said it so himself... just some sort of internet myth. Strange to see this is James Clear blog.
The app "Everyday Habit Tracker" (desktop and mobile) offers a nice version of the don't break the chain mechanic.
It's not bad for exercise and physio or other things. I haven't tried it for writing...
There is even a "half-done" marker which doesn't give you points but doesn't break the streak (e.g. when you were prevented to do something due to force majeure).
> year after year, he performs, creates, and entertains at an incredibly high standard.
That's a strange way of saying "had one incredible show 20+ years ago and never did anything worth watching again". Comedians in Cars was so boring (and doesn't require the strategy above). The standup ive seen him do since the show ended was pretty mediocre too.
I'm not sure what you want here.
Comedians in Cars was a success by any measure. It ran well beyond the point where they had any more good comedians to talk to. But along the way they had some of the greatest Comedians of the 20th century share their thoughts on life, the entertainment industry and comedy.
The sitting President of the United States even appeared on the show.
For what it's worth a lot of the world doesn't really understand Seinfeld, but either was I don't think the creators over either show are losing any sleep over the fact that not everyone loves them.
I liked Comedians in Cars (and Seinfeld, of course), and enjoyed seeing him perform live about 7-8 years ago. However, like you, the idea that he is "remarkably consistent," along with the sentence you quoted, simply doesn't ring true. It's a phony setup about a phony anecdote for a phony article about a boring concept to (potentially) create a personal habit.
Seinfeld is the King's Fool - the most ancient form of comedy. Feudal kings would keep a fool in their court to mock those who came before the king - a subtle form of power politics. Here is this insolent fool, who I will allow to mock you, with impunity. Now, laugh!
If the Fool were to start mocking the King himself, well, that Fool would not be long for this world. In today's system, that's been altered - the Fool just doesn't get their contract renewed. There was a brief period where Fools were able to break free and mock all those about them (see George Carlin) but that was quickly shut down, and now the Fools we still see know what subjects not to tackle... with a few exceptions, I suppose. Independent media and alternative venues, etc.
Correction: Carlin was no fool, he was a foole. At least that's what he listed under "occupation". At one point he was America's fastest rising young foole.
Try Ukraine... the military industrial complex... the financialization of the economy... global trade policy and the Rust Belt... I mean, you can be edgy about social issues, I guess, but not about who owns Netflix and what their agenda is.
Here's someone on the Vietnam War for comparison... But it's hardly a 'current event'
This sorta thing works if your procrastinating isn’t coming from some deeper issue, but if you’re stuck in some childhood trauma that’s preventing growth no amount of life hacking is gonna overcome it. You need to approach the issue directly.
I personally believe that a large amount of 21st century issues are caused by “ghosts” that our grandparents brought to life during the world wars that have haunted them ever since and they’ve passed that onto their children who passed it onto us.
There is real research into “genetic trauma” from Jewish Holocaust survivors, but I think everyone who went through the war likely passed on a significant amount of pain, which is only now being addressed with the advent of less stigmatism around mental health. Hopefully our children will be better off.
Trauma is tough. For the toughest problems, partial solutions can often deliver great value.
Becoming more successful as a result of alleviating procrastination, might be solving a symptom of a more general problem. But it will still be gratifying, and take back some of the power of the general problem.
To have a big success early on and then coast off and build off that success. And huge syndication royalties. No one even cares about his standup anymore. Plenty of people do what he did and try to be consistent and get nowhere in life. major survivorship bias. The entertainment industry has more failures than anything.
If you want to be successful you have to be really good. being consistent and not procrastinating is not enough.
Seinfeld is arguably the greatest sitcom, and also arguably the greatest television show of all time. If creating arguably the best thing of a thing is not success then what is?
The truth is, he hasn't written (or at least presented) that much new material in his standup act in the decades after he finished the TV show. And that's OK, as a millionaire, I'd probably achieve far less than he has since the show (it's not not just standup he's been doing). But in an article praising his productive habbits, this strikes as a bit ironic.
In HBO's Talking Funny [1] (from 2011) there's a discussion (around 1:00–2:00), where it's pretty clear how his habbit of replacing old material in the act is far more infrequent and little-by-little compared to the other comedians around the table, who generally throw away their entire hour almost every year after a special.
For years I spent a lot of time working on things that I thought were important but that nobody else seemed to really care about. There was no success involved in doing this. Procrastination was irrelevant. There's no correlation between working hard and 'success' in terms of revenue generation. As far as Seinfeld, he was pretty tepid and his work didn't threaten the corporate heirarchy and so he was 'successful'. Has he ever done anything memorable? People are still watching George Carlin. Seinfeld will be forgotten in a few years. He just found a niche that the corporatocracy liked.
Now, the whole thing I was so interested in 20 years ago is really taking off. I feel rather vindicated, so I guess that's success? I never really felt that 'success' had much to do with revenue generation.
{edit: the fundamental nature of comedy can be seen in the old 'the emperor wears no clothes' routine. Seinfeld would never dream of doing that routine - that's why he made so much money. The Emperor likes that kind of comedy...}
Yes, his sitcom influenced a generation of TV and was one of the most highly rated and watched shows of all time. It introduced a number of phrases that are still part of the common lingo. He was at the forefront of the "observational" style humor.
You don't have to "threaten the corporate hierarchy" to be funny, you just have to be funny. I love Carlin too, and Bill Hicks and a lot of other comedians that are known for criticizing the establishment. They're funny too, but that's not the only way to be funny. Comedy is about being funny, not just being edgy.
This is through rose-coloured glasses because I was at the right age for Seinfeld to be televised during my defining youth period - where music, movies, TV shows, etc. are remembered fondly forever.
I've recently watched a few Seinfeld episodes again, after a long Seinfeld-hiatus and a lot of TV experience throughout that time, and Seinfeld as a TV show holds up magnificently today. The density and weaving of the story-arcs is unbelievably clever, but also consistently unbelievably clever through so many episodes.
Seinfeld makes most other TV shows seem boringly linear, even 20-odd years later.
Rick and Morty is competitive with Seinfeld on density of story-arc, and that's saying something.
(all of this is subjective, and, as I disclaimed above, through my rose-coloured glasses memory of Seinfeld)
Well said. I appreciate the disruptive, philosophical, or societal-norm breaking comedians - but Jerry stuck to his bit and executes it well. I also really appreciated his respect for the art of comedy after watching his 'comedians in cars getting coffee' series. I imagine the Seinfeld show will stream into perpetuity. I still watch it occasionally and laugh despite being able to quote every line.
Well, most people remember who Seinfeld is and millions of people still quote the show, so reality disagrees with you on what is and is not forgettable, but go on raging against the machine, I guess.
Forgettable in the same way that The Wizard of Oz or Citizen Kane is forgettable.
That's to say: only to the extent that you don't even understand how it shaped so much else.
People today don't even know when they're using expressions from these (we're not in Kansas anymore, not that there's anything wrong with that), when they've not even seen the original material.
If procrastination means that I have a deadline and instead of focusing on it with my mind and actions, I focus on something else, then I have procrastinated my way to a good living.
I learned when I was a kid that a good way to get myself to read a book is to wait until my Mom told me to clean my room. Then I would get an overwhelming urge to read. I have since given this a name: springboard procrastination.
I procrastinate on nearly everything, except, wierdly, chores my wife gives me. I tend to do those right away. I think because doing those chores helps me procrastinate better on my technical work.
My overriding professional strategy is not to do more than other people, but to make unique contributions. These take time to unfold in my mind, because all the obvious things have already been done.